Are You One of Kimbo’s Bimbos?
Published by on June 8th, 2008 in Operation Cleanup

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By Charles Jay

I am convinced that the fans who constituted the resurgence in mixed martial arts were attracted for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it had an aura of legitimacy that, at least on the surface, was lacking in another combat sport – boxing.

Now there are more boxing figures moving into the game. Gary Shaw, as you know by now, is the man who is essentially behind the operations of Elite XC. Jay Larkin, who oversaw sports, specifically boxing, at Showtime, still heads up the shell that is the International Fight League. Art Pellulo, a Philadelphia-based promoter whose past has been explored by this reporter and others, is now planning to put on shows. He’s got Kim Couture on his initial program.

Listen, I don’t hate these guys, and I’m not saying they’re evil, but I spent quite a bit of time working in boxing and I know what the basic operational philosophy is. Without trying to sound too purist, the attitude I have found in MMA is one where the ball continues to be moved a little closer to the goal line, so to speak. Well, there’s some “yardage” that is about to be lost. Don’t get me wrong; some of the guys who come into this thing will like the sport and will generally add to the atmosphere. But there are others who have not, and will not, be a friend to the real MMA fan.

A while back, I wrote a piece that appeared on FoxSports.com that focused on the insurgence of mixed martial arts in the hearts and minds, not only of a new, younger audience, but those audiences that already existed for boxing and were “up for grabs,” if you will, not unlike independent voters might be in an election.

In talking to people in preparation for writing the story, even those with a connection to boxing, what I got was a basic sentiment that there was a problem in boxing feeding fans what IT wanted, not what the fans wanted, and that MMA was thus far serving as good counter-programming to the kind of “agendas,” both on the part of the promoters and the powers-that-be, that had a tendency to alienate fans. For example, when discussing the way the UFC operated, Tim Graham, who was then a writer for the Buffalo News, said, “They basically control their product, and they can put on the very best matchups possible and give the fans what they want on a very structured basis. So from a business standpoint, it’s everything boxing isn’t.”

Some time before that, I wrote a story on Boxing Insider about what I diagnosed the main problems with boxing to be. Part of it was the self-absorbed approach of pushing fighters who had no real market value, to the point where the engineering of a record was more important to them than pleasing the audience. In fact, the customer was, in effect, being asked to pay the freight for developing the “commodity.” That resulted in a substandard product that less and less people really wanted to buy, and it went from there.

That’s not the most fan-friendly marketing logic.

The influence of these entities is inevitable, and in fact this has already begun to permeate the MMA industry. No more glaring example exists than the exploitation of the MMA fan with the so-called “phenomenon” of Kevin Ferguson, otherwise known as Kimbo Slice. With the Kimbos of the world, the sport moves in a different direction. And “Kimbo’s Bimbos” – fans who are falling for his “greatness” hook, line and stinker – are the fans who are going to be addressed more and more in the future. They tend to be moved less by great skill and great competition and more by spectacle, even if it is less than legitimate. That means you may be seeing a different product – a lesser product – as time progresses.

I don’t want to pick on Kimbo specifically, but he is in fact the poster child for what my message is about. It’s not so much Slice/Ferguson himself, but the shift in philosophy he represents, that I have a problem with. In the world of boxing, promoters have often been known to deal in illusion. If and when Kimbo gets blown out, presumably by a real fighter, you have to believe the opportunists around him will manufacture another “star” out of whole cloth to take his place.

As things go down that slippery slope, will you be there to slide with it?