Kimbo Slice Unleashed

Here’s an article that appeared in the Miami Herald the day of the Mercer fight. It talks about Kimbo growing up, Palmetto Highschool, poverty, and his rise to fame.

Street Fighting Legend Kimbo Slice Unleashed
By DAN LE BATARD

ATLANTIC CITY — He is a very new kind of famous.

“Ain’t you that bad mother [expletive] who knocks fools out on the Internet?” the small woman says when Kimbo Slice lumbers out of the casino and into the afternoon heat.

Slice smiles, revealing a mouth filled with gold teeth. He is big and black and bald and bearded, and he is comfortable with this enormous climb he has made, from homeless to famous. He extends his huge money-making hands, gnarled and scarred as they are from all the beatings they’ve administered in backyards and back alleys all over the toughest parts of Miami. The tattoo etched on his left forearm reads, “No Fear.”

The woman’s tiny hand disappears inside of his as Kimbo bows his head slightly and says, “Yes, ma’am,” about as polite and gentle as a man this savage can ever be.

Yes, ma’am.

He is indeed that bad mother [expletive] knocking fools out on the Internet.

And he finally has arrived, climbing out from the darkness and into the light.

Tonight, this product of Miami’s most brutal poverty and The YouTube Generation will be stripped down to nothing but his courage and fight bare-fisted against former heavyweight boxing champion Ray Mercer, who is 46 and hanging on to what little is left. It will be a cruel and bloody and primitive affair available on pay-per view, so maybe it goes without saying that it is widely popular and will be held in a cage. Kimbo shrugs his massive muscled shoulders.

“Fun,” he calls this.

Lennox Lewis said Mercer delivered the hardest punches Lewis had ever endured, and that was with gloves that had four ounces of padding. Mercer himself says, “I knock people out with gloves on, so you can imagine what I’m going to do without gloves.” Kimbo, 33, smiles that gold smile upon hearing this from the man he calls “Papa Ray.”

“Fun,” he calls it again.

THE BADDEST OF ALL

Kimbo’s fists have made him money for a long time now, near dumpsters and in boatyards and in all that violent footage you can find on shaky hand-held cameras all over the Internet. Entourages keep bringing their biggest bouncers and bodyguards and convicts to fight him, hoping to prove that their guy is the baddest man in all of Miami, but all they leave with is a more deformed friend.

Kimbo is sculpted, skilled, raw and seemingly oblivious to pain. He let one huge shirtless dude take free unprotected shots at his face with fists and elbows before turning the muscle-head’s face into grotesque and bloody ground beef. It will be interesting to see what he can do against a trained professional instead of some street thug. Mercer — a 1988 gold medalist — is old and broken and not in very good shape, but he is more scientific about fighting than anyone Kimbo has ever faced. But Mercer’s own kids have warned their father with, “Dad, that Kimbo guy you are fighting is a beast.”

“My dream was to thump Mike Tyson,” Kimbo says. “He was a little rude and unsophisticated, but he birthed me.”

Kimbo’s tale? It is something out of the movies. Think 1978’s Every Which Way But Loose, except with a real tough guy and real pain and real blood, not the cinematic Clint Eastwood’s Philo Beddoe and his ridiculous chimp. Think Mr. T from Rocky III, back when he was considered a mohawked menace and not a 1980s cartoon and pitied fool. Kimbo Slice is very real, in every way. An evolution of our technology, of our dark side, of our movie fantasies (without the makeup or the made up). Bloody. Raw. Scary. An evolution, into something more primitive.

Kimbo Slice, a Miami Palmetto High graduate whose real name is Kevin Ferguson, has been fighting his way through our scarred streets since he was 13, when he beat up a 26-year-old in a brawl over a bicycle and started to grow his mysterious legend of menace.

More recently, he has been packaged for our perusal, his savage street fights released strategically in calculated droplets over the Internet by his handlers and usually “going viral” with kids who can`t get enough of the raw brutality. Kimbo does not own a computer, but understands its power and reach. His aura has grown in a way that makes it difficult now to find willing street fighters, even as his friends go after the broke and hungry convicts leaving jail.

SUBURBAN HERO

Kimbo appeals with great success to the dark side of Internet voyeurs in a way that is fascinating. The same way young white teenagers help pay for the hip-hop industry, Kimbo’s popularity grows in the suburbs, where kids can left-click themselves on a journey to something completely foreign. Kimbo goes out of his way to be a kind gentleman, repeating again and again that he doesn’t think himself better or more important than anybody just because he is now a celebrity, but he doesn’t have much in common with a lot of the people who have made him a phenomenon. Told that a lot of his popularity comes from the suburbs, Kimbo says, “When they cry, somebody puts a pacifier in their mouth. I’ve always had to pacify myself.”

He says he has never been in prison, just in a holding cell a few times. Asked about his desperate past and possible illegalities, he says politely, “Let dead dogs lie. Please leave it alone.” He filled out applications to work at Wal-Mart and Winn-Dixie and Kentucky Fried Chicken, but nobody hired him, even though he tried to change his appearance and personality for potential employers.

“Didn’t change to be accepted,” he says. “Changed to eat.”

The worst period? When he lived for two months out of a broken-down truck with shattered windows and four different tires. He remembers that pain, and brings it with him into the cage.

“Home was wherever I parked,” he says. “Almost got towed once. Had to jump out of the truck and tell the guy I was living inside.”

‘STILL GOT THE SCARS’

His mother worked two jobs and did the best she could but had to move to New York when Kimbo was 18 after Hurricane Andrew destroyed their Perrine home. Kimbo remembers hiding in the bathtub during the storm with his sister and brother and mother, trying to hold a mattress against a shattered window as the roof came off. He remembers that pain, and brings it into the cage with him.

“Still got the scars,” he says, pulling up his sleeve to reveal an enormous biceps and all the skin the glass shredded. “The only thing left after that was survival. Everything else was destroyed. All hopes, all dreams. College got put to the side. We lost everything. Hard. Hard as hell. My entire life has been a fight. Getting into a cage is easy.”

Tomorrow’s fans, 18 to 34, have embraced the mixed-martial arts because it appeals to short attention spans, is more dangerous than boxing and pits styles and answers questions. Judo vs. wrestling? Kickboxing vs. karate? And, tonight, available for purchase at cagefuryfighting.com, former boxing champion vs. street thug in a brawl that is more legal and sanctioned than the ones that made Kimbo famous — though barely. Nick Lembo, council to the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board, asked himself the question out loud at this week’s news conference: “Why is this sanctioned?” He introduced Kimbo simply as “somebody from the Internet.”

An interesting thing, that news conference. The sport’s marketing, not unlike the sport itself, is a little primitive. Mixed martial arts are more popular with kids than hockey and soccer and boxing in the United States, people paying for a voyeuristic view, but it is still trying to find its footing in the mainstream. So Thursday’s news conference had 1,000 chairs in the Xanadu Showroom of the stuck-in-the-1980s Trump Taj Majal, and only 68 of those seats were filled, most of them by the fighters on today’s undercard. Two TV cameras. One photographer. And the promoters still sounded nervous speaking in front of the tiny crowd.

OVERTAKING BOXING

The news conference consisted of all of one question. How many fans do they expect tonight along the boardwalk? Seven thousand at least. Plus 175,000 pay-per-views. Kimbo gets $50,000 for appearing, $80,000 if he wins by knockout — plus a percentage of the pay-per-view take. But he remembers his homelessness enough that, while walking back to his room with the ocean view, he bends over to pick up a quarter he finds near the slots.

In the back of the news conference, a promoter who has made his living in boxing articulated the feelings of boxing snobs by laughing at how small the whole thing felt. But what Gandhi once said about nonviolence, you can apply to this kind of violence, too: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Boxing is laughing now, during the fight. Soon, boxing will lose.

“Ain’t got too much to say,” Kimbo said at the news conference. “Come Saturday, somebody is going to get knocked the [expletive] out.”

He left then, on his way to a photo shoot with Maxim Magazine in a banquet room of an old hotel. Once there, he was asked to take off his shirt to pose with all those muscles and menace. There was a fruit and cheese plate and bottled water available for his posse. The music was changed to something from the street after asking them.

“The streets made me,” Kimbo kept saying. Then he pounded on his massive back with one hand and said, “I’ve got Miami right here with me.”

On the walk over to his Maxim obligation, high up in a hotel, Kimbo and all the members of his posse stopped at once to stare at something as if it were art. A pretty girl? An accident? No, to the untrained eye — to an outsider in this foreign world — it was just an empty pool. It had dirty puddles of water in it strewn with empty beer cans and other trash.

Kimbo, on his way to a photo shoot with a national magazine, articulated what they were all thinking.

“Man,” he said, “that would be a great place for a fight.”