Friday, October 2 1:10 pm PT: CompuStrike, one of the two major number-crunching entities in MMA -- the other, FightMetric, supplies the factoids spewed out by Mike Goldberg during UFC telecasts -- released stats on Wednesday’s Kimbo Slice vs. Roy Nelson bout. And Slice fans will need to be very selective about what they pay attention to.
Numerically, the fight was competitive on the feet, with Slice landing 31% of his strikes to Nelson’s 29%. On the floor, it was like occupying France, with Nelson landing 67 strikes to Slice’s zero.
This was the best-case scenario for the UFC’s Slice push: with his limited skills, anyone in the house had a shot against him. If you’re going to lose, better to lose to someone with Nelson’s reputation and put up an effort. Half the time, at least.
Friday, October 2 1:03 pm PT: Few had a better seat for Roy Nelson’s performance against Kimbo Slice than Team Rampage assistant coach Hector Ramirez.
Ramirez joined the Savage Dog Show on Friday for his weekly recap of “The Ultimate Fighter,” where he discussed the future of Kimbo and some things viewers may have missed on Spike TV’s broadcast.
Friday, October 2 9:10 am PT: Proof of some justice in the world: for at least fifteen minutes Wednesday night, more Americans thought it would be more entertaining to watch a mixed martial arts contest than the tired, canned-ham patter of Jay Leno. Spike TV’s “Ultimate Fighter” -- for rock dwellers, the site of a Kimbo Slice bout against Roy Nelson -- drew a high of 6.1 million viewers during the fight quarter; Leno drew a piddling 5.9 million. As if we even care.
Slice was unable to break his own personal-best record, as roughly 7.2 million viewers watched him burst the ear of James Thompson during a 2008 CBS telecast.
A sad but true fact: personalities will always sell more than accomplishments. Something about Slice makes people want to see him fight. Winning doesn’t seem to matter much. Good work if you can get it.
Friday, October 2 12:00 am PT: Making more media rounds Wednesday and Thursday was “Ultimate Fighter” winner Roy Nelson, who did a very commendable job of making Kimbo Slice look like a white belt on the mat. (And so far as we know, he is.) So why does he sound slightly bitter about the whole thing?
The problem, according to Roy, is that his win was contrasted against the stacked deck that was the UFC’s favoritism over Slice. “First round was 44 punches to the face, and then Herb Dean doesn’t know how to ref, but we’ve seen that before,” he told USA Today. “And then the next round was 22 punches. You could even see me yelling at Herb Dean, ‘Come on, ref.’…But the thing is, there’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of money…So I think it was more that Herb Dean was afraid to lose his job, because there's a lot of people with a lot of money that can have a lot of influence with his career.”
Insinuating the referee was colluding with management to keep Slice on the winning track is a heavy statement to put over Dean. If anything, you’d think that rationale would prompt him to stop the fight more quickly: Slice’s odds against Nelson were never good and promoters could feed the “premature stoppage” angle to viewers to keep Slice’s popularity from gassing out.
But that’s only if you’re into conspiracy theories. I’m not, but Nelson clearly likes to indulge.
