Just as quickly as the name “Kimbo Slice” was vaulted into the consciousness of sports fans, the buzz surrounding the underground fighting legend dropped faster than the stock of Citigroup. It was said all along by people “in the know” that Slice was a fraud. He quickly proved that no less than a few fights into his professional MMA career, losing to Seth Petruzelli in 14 seconds. Well in case you were wondering what Kimbo’s been up to lately, he was in the Bahamas and gave an interview to his hometown newspaper. In that article, Kimbo partially blames the loss to Petruzelli on Ken Shamrock backing out of the fight at the last minute. Slice also says that he wants to move to boxing, essentially because MMA’s too hard:
“Boxing is one dimensional while there are a lot of dimensions in MMA. I don’t think it would be a hard transition from MMA to stand-up boxing because of my fighting style.
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“Not taking anything away from boxing preparation, MMA training is extremely hard,” said Ferguson. “When you consider martial arts training, you have to prepare for kicks to the head and legs, and opponents wanting to grapple and throwing you to the ground, pounding you with their knees and hands, whereas in boxing you just have to be prepared to weave and bob although the training can be just as intense.”
Kimbo also added that another reason he prefers boxing to MMA is because the former allows someone to fight as frequently as they would like, whereas MMA requires six weeks in between bouts. Responding to Slice’s primary reason for changing sports, I think this is as strong of an indication as any that mixed martial arts is much more difficult than boxing. Boxing has the past, the tradition, the history, and likely won’t soon be losing it. What MMA helps determine is who is the best overall fighter in a ring where almost anything goes. Clearly Kimbo couldn’t keep up; he hadn’t been trained to.
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