Thoughts on Slice vs. Alexander

When Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson (3-1 MMA) makes his long anticipated UFC debut against lightheavyweight veteran Houston Alexander (9-4-0-1 MMA, 2-3 UFC), he’ll be looking to answer a lot of questions. But Houston Alexander is far from the right guy to pose those questions.

That’s not to say that Houston can’t knocked Kimbo Slice into next week, but he’s hardly the most coordinated and technically proficient striker, and the question isn’t whether Kimbo can be knocked out (we already know the answer to that he can be stopped with a solid punch, thanks to Seth Petruzelli). The biggest question, at least for now, is whether his technical striking is proficient enough to keep him alive against a fighter who knows where to put the punches, and who knows how to be elusive.

What Kimbo needs to solidify the perception of him as a top striker is not a fight with a guy who’s going to brawl with him, but someone who’s going to force Kimbo to move his head, to place his hands and to work a variety of strikes from a handful of angles.

Alexander can use angles and can deliver punishment from the clinch (just ask Keith Jardine), but the reality is, he’s not the guy who can elude other big punchers. Alexander is a slightly more technical, more agile version of Kimbo Slice, but we don’t need to see Kimbo tested against a nearly mirror image version of himself, he needs to face someone who can gameplan.

The first guy to land a heavy punch is going to come out on top of this fight. Both are stoppable fighters with the power to leave opponents out cold. This is going to be a massively entertaining fight, but if people really see this as the fight that is going to tell us whether Kimbo is for real, then they need to take a look at the matchup, which doesn’t really look to test Kimbo as much as it looks to capitalize on his potential selling power.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But it does need to be seen as what it is.

The UFC is doing the same thing that the Shaws did, with a marginal increase in the level of honesty. After debunking Kimbo and, in the process, realizing that his selling power has hardly diminished at all, is now going to work hard to legitimize him as a powerful brawler capable of destroying solid fighters with the well known power in his hands.

Houston Alexander is a pretty notable name in the UFC, despite not being one of the top tier fighters, and the expectation is that Alexander will give Kimbo a chance to show off the power in his hands that we couldn’t see the full extent of in the fight with a grappler like Nelson. It may also be the first step to a drop in weight, though that is highly speculative on my part. While it’s great, in theory, to say that if Kimbo could drop a little of his top-heaviness, he could be a solid 205er, especially given his power. Also, it helps him to avoid a division with a lot of bigger fighters who, frankly, are both more technical and hit harder than Kimbo does (that being the heavyweight division, where many of the up-and-comers are bigger bombers than Kimbo).

While there are a lot of technical strikers at 205, they are largely avoidable, while the sheer number of heavyweights who would be willing to bang with Kimbo (and potentially capable of knocking him out, often purely on the basis of being bigger and stronger) makes that division something to be wary of.

We’ll see how the Alexander fight unfolds and that will dictate a lot of how Kimbo is treated from here on out. That said, it’s going to be hard for Kimbo to really be called legitimate after a single bout with an opponent who’s going to offer a lot of opportunities for Kimbo to finish, as opposed to someone who might force Kimbo to take the technical aspect of his standup to the next level, or really demonstrate some solid clinch and takedown defense.