(Yeah, that’s a sword. Just another day for Bas.)

Kimbo Slice‘s trainer and respected elder statesman of MMA Bas Rutten has posted a message to his website evaluating Slice’s performance on Saturday night and addressing some of the more controversial moments of the bout. As usual, Rutten offers a fair perspective even as a staunch Kimbo ally, but perhaps most interesting is this P.S. at the end of his remarks:

P.S. 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.

There you have it. Even Rutten believes that the fight should have been stopped. His reasoning that the “thumbs up” prevented it is a little shaky. I wonder, which trapped arm was Kimbo using to give that thumbs up? Might it not have been a better idea to use said arm for defending his face?

Regardless, Rutten makes several good points about Kimbo’s evolution as a fighter, and doesn’t shy away from pointing out the numerous mistakes he made in the fight, particularly once he got tired.

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.

This, too, is a fair point. Anyone who’s done any type of competitive fighting can tell you that it’s very difficult to train for the way the adrenaline rush can sap your energy, and it’s possible that this is a mark of Kimbo’s inexperience. Of course, if we’re going to argue that he should get some slack for being inexperienced, it’s hard not to then conclude that he had no place fighting in the main event of a card as monumental as this one.

Rutten also promises that Kimbo will learn from these mistakes for his next time out:

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.

The question is, who will that different animal be fighting? Gary Shaw doesn’t want to match him up against Brett Rogers for some reason, which is odd considering that before this weekend Shaw’s son Jared said that the winner of the Rogers-Murphy bout would likely enter the “Kimbo Slice sweepstakes”.

Guess that means the sweepstakes is still ongoing. All I know is, if Butterbean wins I am going to be sooooo pissed.

(Props: Five Ounces of Pain)