Fighters Only

Issue 123

December 2014

We’re only joking, UFC veteran and YouTube street fighting legend Kimbo Slice hasn’t really hit rock bottom, it was just a play on words. You see, his services were obtained for the video to a song called Rock Bottom by unsigned New York rap metal band Xombie.

Some might classify that as scraping the barrel a bit on account of the group having less than 3,000 Facebook ‘likes’, but not us. No, sir. Because Kimbo’s got options. For a guy who could still earn mega bucks by putting on a pair of gloves and walking into a cage or ring, taking some extra paper for fight scenes in a New York warehouse as extras pretend to get riled up by an underground MMA league must seem like easy money. And Kimbo is all about the paper. If that means starring in a low-budget video, so be it. But if you think his career is circling the drain you’re welcome to tell him to his face.

For those who want to know what happens to the Bahamian brawler, he beats up several fellows before laying into a guy who was lured to the event via the eyes of a pretty girl from a limousine window.

She then knees the promoter in the balls, all hell breaks loose and she runs off with the sap who just got creamed in true Kimbo-nator style.

$10,866

In 2012 Kimbo Slice’s pals in New York ‘hood metal’ band Xombie raised $10,866 on Kickstarter for a US tour.

Deep promoter will continue Japan's New Year's Eve MMA tradition

The boss of minor Japanese promotion Deep has stepped into the breach to maintain the Japanese mixed martial arts custom of holding a special fight-based extravaganza every December 31st.

Shigeru Saeki told Tokyo Sports he will continue the tradition, much loved both in Japan and abroad, at the famous Saitama Super Arena. He intends to invite involvement from the country’s other leading organizations, Pancrase and Shooto. It will be called Deep Dream Impact 2014, although the Dream brand no longer maintains a roster.

Since 2003 either the high-profile Pride, K-1, Dream, Antonio Inoki, or a combination of the above have hosted a large-scale MMA fight card on the date, sometimes with kickboxing or pro wrestling included. This year is the first time a smaller company will shoulder the burden.

Europe: Learn 15th-century wrestling on 21st-century YouTube

If you want to learn 15th-century wrestling techniques you’re in luck (and you’re probably either a combat geek, or an MMA hipster). Someone who may or may not have a time machine has put instructional videos for 15 of them on YouTube.

The moves and their counters are performed as they were described by German fencing, dagger-fighting and grappling master Andre Liegniczer (called Andres Lignitzer in the videos) in one of his unarmed-combat manuals, which date back to the 1400s.

Featured are older-than-old-school European versions of things like judo’s osoto gari and even the mad guillotine suplex like Cat Zingano twice hit on Amanda Nunes at UFC 178. Plenty of the moves are not only still applicable today but remain effective at the highest level. Pretty impressive for a 500-year-old guy who didn’t get so much as a look-in on the mats of a NCAA Division I college or Jackson’s MMA.