Kimbo Slice on Dada 5000 beef: I've been waiting to 'beat this motherf-----'s ass'

Don't expect Kimbo Slice, the mixed martial artist who has humbly worked on his craft at American Top Team, to show up for his Bellator 149 fight.

Expect, instead, a return to his street fighting roots when Slice meets Dhafir Harris, a.k.a. Dada 5000, at Houston's Toyota Center on Feb. 19.

"I am going to f--- this n------ up," a fired-up Slice told MMAFighting.com on Wednesday. "Don't get me wrong, I'm open to all possibilities in an MMA fight including submissions and anything else that comes up. But the true fight fans appreciate a real fight, and this is two n------ from the same neighborhood who have a beef to settle. I'm going to knock his ass out and he's going to wake up and not know what hit him."

While many fans may have responded with a "who?" when Dada 5000 was announced as his opponent Friday, Slice is ready to fill in the details, saying he was a hanger-on with his crew who's been using his brief brush with Kimbo to get his 15 minutes of fame.

"This is a guy who, when I making my transition from YouTube to MMA, and I was fighting Ray Mercer on pay-per-view, this was a guy from our neighborhood who we knew," the Miami native said. "And we brought him in as sort of a bodyguard for that event, and he was around for a little while. He was never a part of our inner circle."

But things went south between the two during Slice's initial rise to fame, during which he headlined the first-ever live network television MMA card in 2008.

"So when I started to break big, all of a sudden he starts doing interviews disrespecting me," Slice said. "He grew out a beard like mine, he did everything, he was basically using his little bit of notoriety to try to make a name for himself. But he would never show up where we were, even though we lived in the same hood."

Slice knows full well this isn't a fight for the purists. He's 41 years old and his win over Ken Shamrock in June was his first fight in five years. Dada 5000, who gained a measure of attention in the Netflix documentary "Dawg Fight," is 2-0 and hasn't fought a sanctioned bout since 2011.

But with a ticket on-sale date of Saturday for the Spike-broadcast card, Slice doesn't believe criticism will keep the fans from tuning in.

"I've been waiting for years to beat this motherf------'s ass," Slice said. "This one is about going back to my roots. People can relate to that."