(This piece appeared in 8CountNews on March 16th, 2009)

by Mark Lorenzana

I’ve been in marketing for almost five years now and as an advertising copywriter it’s my job to write copy that helps sell products. Now it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in my profession, you need to know how to hype up your product so that customers wouldn’t think twice about digging into their pockets and shelling out their hard-earned cash to make that all-important purchase.

In the fight game, marketing is an important tool to get fans into the stadiums, arenas, and closed circuits. Also to get them to purchase the pay-per-views. If you don’t promote the fighters, if you don’t endorse the fights and events, people won’t buy tickets and nobody gets paid.

However, marketing can only do so much. If a product does not live up to its standards, no amount of publicity will be enough to sell it.

The same can be said for fighters, especially in Mixed Martial Arts. Take Kevin Ferguson, or more popularly known as Kimbo Slice, for instance.

Kimbo earned his notoriety as an Internet underground street fighter a few years ago. By sheer word-of-mouth, he became an Internet sensation. Kimbo eventually worked his way into Mixed Martial Arts, and was even trained by retired MMA fighter Bas Rutten. In Kimbo’s street fight videos, he relied primarily on his fists, knocking out, bloodying, and bludgeoning his opponents into submission, thereby building up his fearsome reputation.

In Kimbo’s first legitimate MMA fight, he went up against retired boxer Ray Mercer in Cage Fury Fighting Championship 5. Kimbo submitted Mercer in the first round via Guillotine Choke, displaying a versatility

nobody thought he had. In his next three fights (all for the defunct Elite XC) he won by submission, knockout, and TKO against Bo Cantrell, Tank Abbott, and James Thompson respectively.

By then, Kimbo was already earning several thousands of dollars per fight as Elite XC’s poster boy. His fan base was also starting to grow. But so were his critics.

Not a few MMA experts pointed out that Kimbo has been fed a steady diet of tomato cans inside the cage. In other words, Kimbo slice was still largely an unproven Internet star, his victories notwithstanding: Rey Mercer looked shot, Tank Abbott was old and out of shape, and Kimbo’s TKO victory over James Thompson can be legitimately argued as a premature stoppage. Still, the Kimbo hype machine was in full swing, and a lot of people were buying it.

Kimbo’s last fight in Elite XC (and his last fight so far in his MMA career) was against Seth Petruzelli. The fight happened in October of last year. Kimbo was originally slated to face Ken Shamrock but the latter pulled out of the fight when he was cut above the left eye during warm-up. Petruzelli took the fight one hour before the event began. Kimbo only agreed to fight Petruzelli after receiving a raise in pay.

Despite being outweighed by almost 30 pounds, Petruzelli defeated Kimbo via TKO 14 seconds into the fight. Petruzelli caught Kimbo with a short jab to the face and Kimbo dropped to the floor and got pounded out. The visibly disoriented Kimbo held on to the referee’s legs, trying to take him down while Petruzelli ran around the cage in celebration.

By the end of October 2008, EliteXC was forced to file for bankruptcy. Many in the mixed martial arts community attribute EliteXC’s failure due to Kimbo’s loss to Petruzelli.

In an interview a couple of days after the fight, Petruzelli admitted that the Elite XC promoters offered him cash incentives to dissuade him from using certain fighting techniques against Kimbo: “The promoters kinda hinted to me and they gave me the money to stand and throw with him, they didn’t want me to take him down. Let’s just put it that way. It was worth my while to try and stand up (and) punch him.”

It remains to be seen whether Kimbo Slice can pick up the pieces of his MMA career, a career that was prematurely cut short by a last-second replacement that he outweighed by 30 pounds. It remains to be seen whether another promotional MMA outfit will express interest in him and pick him up. Perhaps the Kimbo Slice and Elite XC debacle should be a lesson to everyone in the MMA scene.

It’s safe to say, however, that in the fight game, in the hurt business, a fighter is only as good as his last fight. And no amount of marketing will change that; no amount of hype will prove otherwise.