FanHouse James Thompson

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.

EliteXC brought mixed martial arts to the masses by televising five fights on CBS Saturday night. But while the show was a ratings success, many MMA fans have criticized it.

Some fans say the fights were stopped too early. Some fans say the main event between Kimbo Slice and James Thompson was more freak show than fight. Some fans say the quality of the action was inferior to the quality of fights that UFC puts out.

So was the EliteXC show good for the sport? I interviewed EliteXC Live Events President Gary Shaw on Monday, and that was my first question.

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."