Of course I have been asked now already many times what I thought about Kimbo?s fight and performance.
First let me start by saying: ?It was his 4th fight?.
The fight was hyped up so big that Kimbo needed a perfect performance to live up to the hype. Thompson had the chance of his life time so he trained insanely hard. People expect him to go down but they forgot that he stopped Don Frey and Hidehiko Yoshida, he has a suspect jaw, but he came in to fight!
I think this fight is going to be very good for Kimbo in the future. When you start fighting and competing and you never went the distance in a fight you never know what ?getting really tired? means.
Ask any fighter on the planet if they fought more than 1 round when they fought their first couple of fights, how they felt. They will tell you that they thought they were in great shape but got tired really fast.
In training you can do pretty much anything to bring your heart rate up. Focus mitts, Thai pads, takedowns, running hills, explosive weight training etc. but NOTHING compares to getting tired in a fight, it?s just a whole different ball game.
But once you know this and experienced it one time, you know what to expect in the future.
That?s why I think that this fight was great for Kimbo, he really had to dig deep and boy did he do that. He was so tired at the end of round it was crazy, but he went out in round three and just started throwing bombs again, that says a lot to me about his will power, trust me, it has been tested here!
All the things that went wrong or he didn?t do, we DID train for, but like I said, training and fighting are two different things. I know him and when he sees the mistakes that he made and realizes that he probably would have won the fight when he would have closed his guard in round number two so that Thompson couldn?t have had escaped his guillotine choke, he?s not going to be happy and is going to make sure it won?t happen again, the same counts for the few little other mistakes he made, he will see them himself, and never make them again.
They say ?fatigue makes cowards out of man?, well, that wasn?t the case with Kimbo, he kept on fighting, his technique got less because of it and people will now judge him on that, but that?s OK, he will be a different kind of animal next time.
All and all it was a great night of fights, I think that everybody who tuned in kept watching, at least a high percentage and that the evening was a success. It had great ratings and from what I understand CBS is really happy.
And one more time to finish this story, although Kimbo was the main event and everybody see him as a main event so expect this ?perfect fighter?, this was only his fourth fight, he will tell you, and everybody else, that he?s still a little guy trying to learn the game. For somebody who did this only three times before, I say it was a great performance
