Latest James Thompson Stories

To watch mixed martial arts now, to witness the slick productions, screaming fans and dynamic fighters, it's hard to believe how far and how fast the sport has come in a single decade.

"If you would've come to me in 1999, and said there's going to be this new sport emerging, and by 2009 it's going to be where it is right now, I would have told you that would be an extremely unlikely and impressive achievement," said Robert Thompson, a noted pop culture expert and professor of Television and Popular Culture at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

As metaphors go, the one that describes the state of MMA as the '00s began is almost too perfect to believe. Because as the calendar turned the page to the year 2000, the sport lay injured and ignored in a Louisiana hospital bed, a victim of its own hand.

James Thompson is best known to American MMA fans for having his ear blown up on national television in an ugly loss to Kimbo Slice last year. As he prepares to fight Alistair Overeem in Japan on Sunday morning, his cauliflower ear looks good, and he says he feels great and is ready to fight Overeem. Unfortunately for Thompson, Overeem is likely to bust him up a lot worse than Kimbo did.

Alistair Overeem hasn't fought for Strikeforce since winning its heavyweight championship two years ago. But after winning an easy fight over the weekend, he'll fight again after just a week off, stepping into the cage to take on James "The Collosus" Thompson at Dream 12 on Sunday.

Dream has not yet announced the fight, but a source with knowledge of the situation tells FanHouse that it will take place on the card, which is noteworthy as the first time the Japanese Dream promotion will use a cage instead of a ring.

James Thompson, the guy last seen having his ear explode on national television when he fought Kimbo Slice, returned to the cage this weekend to take on the former hockey player Steve Bosse in Montreal. It did not go well.

Now that Kimbo Slice has been exposed as a fraud and EliteXC has gone out of business, we can all look back and chuckle at the way promoter Gary Shaw tried to build Kimbo up. I just came across this video, which appears to come from around the time of Kimbo's May 31 fight against James Thompson:



"Kimbo Slice is not a star, he's a superstar," Shaw said. "When you get to see him, you touch him, feel him, smell him, know him, you know he's a superstar. He has that certain something that certain athletes have that others don't, that Tiger Woods has, that Michael Jordan has, those are the athletes that Kimbo is. He's a tremendous athlete, he's a complex person, he can fight, he's up for the challenges. He's truly a superstar."

After Kimbo Slice defeated James Thompson in the first mixed martial arts show in prime time network television history, fellow heavyweight Brett Rogers took the podium at the post-fight press conference and called Slice's performance "garbage" and "unacceptable."

If that was Rogers' attempt to hype himself up as the next opponent for Kimbo, it worked. Slice appeared on Dan Le Batard's radio show today and said he'll fight Rogers next, "probably in October."

A lot of people think James Thompson got screwed in his loss to Kimbo Slice Saturday night, and now Thompson himself is making clear that he agrees.

In an interview with Five Ounces of Pain, Thompson acknowledges that he was "rocked" by a combination from Kimbo in the third round, but he says he thinks referee Dan Miragliotta stopped the fight too quickly without giving Thompson a chance to recover. He also says he thinks Miragliotta was too quick to stand the fighters up when Thompson had Slice in side control in the second round, and that he thinks Miragliotta would have stopped the fight late in the second if Kimbo had been giving unanswered elbows to Thompson, rather than vice versa.

However, while some people have said that Kimbo tapped out when Thompson had him in a guillotine choke in the first round, Thompson says Kimbo didn't tap, and that he was shocked when he heard that some people were suggesting otherwise. So that portion of the conspiracy theory can now be put to bed once and for all.

Overall, Thompson is fairly reasonable in his assessment of the fight. I think that, all things considered, Miragliotta's refereeing gave Slice a bit of an advantage, but I don't think there was any fix, and Thompson never alleges that there is. Thompson does, however, say he wants a rematch, and I think he should get one.

Bas Rutten is a legendary figure in mixed martial arts, a former UFC champion, and currently the trainer for Kimbo Slice.

Because of his affiliation with Kimbo, everyone wants to know what Rutten thinks about Kimbo's victory over James Thompson on Saturday night. Rutten answers with a post on his official web site, and although he mostly defends Kimbo, he says something shocking at the end: He actually thinks referee Dan Miragliotta should have stopped the fight and awarded it to Thompson late in the second round. Rutten writes:

People ask me if the fight should have been stopped at the end in the second round, I say YES because those are the rules, it should have been stopped because Kimbo didn't do anything to improve his situation. But I think what made the ref NOT do it was the fact that Kimbo was giving his thumbs up the whole time to let the referee know that he was OK.
This was the refs decission, not Kimbo's.

So Rutten believes Thompson should have been awarded the victory late in the second round. I disagree.

Although I think referee Dan Miragliotta was a little quick to stop it, I do not believe that Saturday night's Kimbo Slice vs. James Thompson fight was fixed. But a lot of people do believe that, and I think it's fair to give their side of the story. This video is the best case I've seen so far:

So why do I believe the EliteXC fight was legit?

Mixed martial arts referee Dan Miragliotta was harshly criticized by CBS announcer Gus Johnson on Saturday night for stopping the Kimbo Slice vs. James Thompson fight.

Since then he's been more than harshly criticized -- some MMA bloggers have even suggested that the fight was fixed.

In an interview with Cokin and Cofield on ESPN Radio in Las Vegas, Miragliotta defended his decision. Saying the criticism of the stoppage comes from "13-year-old kids on the web that never fought a day in their life," Miragliotta said his reason for stopping the fight was simple:

"Why I stopped the fight was the uppercut-cross-hook-uppercut combination that knocked him on his ass -- well, not on his ass, but it knocked him into the fence. I looked into his eyes. I saw the blank stare, I knew he was out of it, I stopped the fight, and when I grabbed him to tell him the fight was over he still thought he was fighting Kimbo. He tried to take a swing at me and didn't realize where he was at."

Although we don't yet know the full ratings for the first-ever prime time mixed martial arts show on network television, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer reports that some preliminary data is in, and it's good news for EliteXC and CBS:

The half-hours in the 18-49 demo were 1.4, 1.6, 2.1 and 2.4. The first hour was nothing impressive but the second hour was the highest rated in the demo on television for any show. The level of growth was spectacular. This is only from 9-11 p.m. so we don't know how the last 50 minutes did but at least in the demo it handily beat the NHL playoffs.

The 18-49 demographic is the one most coveted by advertisers, so in measuring whether this event was a success or failure for CBS, the 18-49 demographic matters more than the total audience. Presumably, if that demographic steadily grew through the first two hours of the show, it would have continued to grow for the Kimbo Slice-James Thompson main event, which means that assuming Meltzer's numbers are right, EliteXC and CBS can legitimately claim that their show was a success.

The problem, though, is that just because the first showing was a success, that doesn't mean future shows will be. Now that the novelty has worn off, will viewers return for another show?

Notes from FanHouse in Newark.

The reaction to Elite XC's inaugural show on CBS has been mixed to negative and after spending the night cageside, I can't argue with that. The stoppages in each of the last two fights was much to quick and the controversy about an uncalled tapout by Kimbo Slice looms as an issue that Elite and CBS will have to deal with to confirm the legitimacy of what they're putting forth.

As you can see in the above picture of James Thompson, the stoppage didn't come completely out of nowhere. His ear is in awful shape. I don't think the context of the fight to that point called for a stoppage but Slice's punches and strikes were doing damage. Thompson's, on the other hand, weren't. He was on top and throwing elbows but, from my spot 10-15 feet away, they weren't doing much to hurt Slice. If Thompson weren't fatigued and/or hurting, I think he would have ended the fight during that moment in the second round but he couldn't muster the necessary might.

As you'll see after the jump, Slice looked better after the fight. Not the best picture, I apologize for my photo skills, but he didn't have a scratch on him.