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To anyone who has been paying attention to this season of "The Ultimate Fighter" reality show on SpikeTV, it should have come as no surprise that street fighting legend Kimbo Slice lost his first fight on Wednesday, when he succumbed to a second-round TKO at the hands of the more experienced, more well-rounded Roy Nelson.
The real surprise was that Nelson, a former IFL heavyweight champion, looked so unbelievably crappy en route to the win. In a season already littered with problems – ranging from Quinton "Rampage" Jackson's sudden retirement to Slice's near-monopoly on airtime despite his lack of skills – poor performances inside the cage may turn out to be what really sinks "the biggest ever" season of the UFC's popular show.
And frankly, this too should come as no surprise. Longtime viewers of "The Ultimate Fighter" still remember season two, an installment of the show so jaw-droppingly horrific that it scared producers away from heavyweights entirely until this season.
After "TUF 2" turned out bad fight after bad fight and ultimately failed to produce a single heavyweight contender for the UFC, it was thought the company would take steps to insure that the same did not happen this year.
On the surface, the UFC did its due diligence to try to make improvements. This season, like the last, all competitors were required to have a professional MMA record. The company brought in a crop of veterans like Nelson, Wes Sims and Scott Junk; some former NFL players like Marcus Jones, Wes Shivers and Brendan Schaub; and then dropped the bomb when they included Slice as a last-minute surprise.
It sounded like a recipe for success and outside the cage things have been pretty entertaining so far. But three fights into the season, the action in the Octagon has been almost unwatchable.
Aside from the gratuitous gore, Jon Madsen's episode one win over Abe Wagner was one-sided and stagnant. In episode two, James McSweeney defeated Shivers in one of the worst fights the show has ever seen, a battle where both competitors looked so winded they spent large portions of the second round just staring at each other and wheezing.
Episode three was supposed to bring the heat. Episode three was supposed to be the "biggest fight in 'TUF' history." The other contestants said the match-up was good enough for pay-per-view and the network spent all week hyping it.
Then Slice and Nelson laid an egg.
I mean, if a brawler like Slice and a former champ like Nelson can't deliver an entertaining bout, that is a bad, bad omen for the future.
The UFC will no doubt figure a way to get Slice back into the competition, because the lion's share of the show has centered around the bearded Internet star thus far. Other guys like Junk, Matt Mitrione and Mike Wessel have been rarely seen or heard from during the first trio of hour-long episodes. Cast members like Justin Wren and Wagner have basically only gotten their faces on screen while talking to or about Slice.
Among other things, they've talked about Kimbo's beard, Kimbo's hair, Kimbo's hat, Kimbo's gunshot wounds, Kimbo's celebrity and Kimbo's total lack of any skills on the mat. Oddly, the only person on the show with the guts to even hint that Slice might not fare so well in competition against actual, professional mixed martial artists has been the street fighter himself.
"I'm not a mixed martial artist, I'm a fighter," Slice quipped early on this season. "I can't even spell jiu-jitsu, but I want to know it."
And he's your star. No wonder the show has been a clunker so far. Don't worry, I'm sure making an excuse to get Kimbo back into the cage will solve everything.
Chad Dundas is a daily contributor to The Sporting News' blog The Rumble and writes a weekly MMA column for CraveOnline. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
