Kimbo vs. Dada 5000? As bad as advertised

Now that it’s over, there are two questions you need to ask yourself regarding the bout between Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson and Dhafir “Dada 5000” Harris at Bellator 149 on Friday night.

The first question is whether it was the worst fight you’ve ever seen, or merely one of the worst fights you’ve ever seen. Me, I’m inclined to think it was the latter, but not by much. To paraphrase Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, if it ain’t the worst, it’ll do until the worst gets here.

It was godawful, is what it was. It was a three-round race to the bottom, a fight that Slice (6-2 MMA, 2-0 BMMA) won by virtue of getting slightly less exhausted. Officially, it goes down as a TKO, even though 5000 (2-1 MMA, 0-1 BMMA) –  I’m still unsure how to format his name, though something tells me it won’t matter much longer – was knocked down not by a punch but by gravity, a force he had grown too frail to resist:

If this “world street championship” fight at Houston’s Toyota Center had taken place in your backyard, you would have turned the sprinklers on. If it had taken place on an actual street, both men would have been fined for littering.

But your answer to the first question doesn’t matter so much. Since I doubt anyone will argue that this fight was good or even not terrible, what we’re talking about here is a matter of degrees.

It’s the second question that really matters, and that question is this: As you sat there watching this horrendous fight on Spike, were you enjoying yourself?

You wouldn’t think so, right? I mean, if you stood outside a movie theater as a film ended and the audience filed out, and if all you heard were people talking about how bad it was, you’d make the reasonable assumption that these people had not been having any fun.

But what if they’d bought their tickets knowing it would be bad? What if, in a way, that’s what they were counting on?

Let’s put the question another way: Of the two main attractions at Bellator 149, which one delivered more of what you came to see? Was it the one where the two former backyard brawlers demonstrated the enormous chasm that exists between tough guy street fighters and actual professionals? Or was it Royce Gracie’s first-round TKO over Ken Shamrock, which took a third as long to reach a conclusion that is somehow half as fun to discuss the morning after?

This question, whether we might have truly enjoyed hate-watching this bad fight, is the one that matters for Bellator and Spike. Both parties have a lot riding on the answer. They didn’t necessarily need you to come away feeling impressed by what you saw. What they really needed was for you to feel entertained.

And, honestly, was that not a form of entertainment? Especially when you consider how we so often watch this sport in the year 2016, with our smartphones in hand and one eye glued to social media, there is a bizarre pleasure in staring at the abyss together.

If you’d watched this fight alone, you probably would have hated it, and in a way that was no fun at all. But nobody watches fights alone anymore. I watched it while actually, physically alone on my couch, and still, as I watched Twitter light up with hilarious commiseration, I felt like I was among friends. We were all watching something bad, and we were doing it on purpose.

Maybe we can complain that it was bad in a way we didn’t expect, or that it was bad for longer than we thought it would be, but I’m not sure we can say that we didn’t get what we wanted in some awful way.

I’m also not sure we can say that we wouldn’t do it again, if given the chance. Maybe not literally, in terms of a rematch, but at this point bouts between fighters we know well enough to expect very little from are pretty much Bellator’s best bet. Never does it attract more interest than when it combines name-brand appeal with our dependable love of combat-sport schadenfreude.

As a formula for ratings, admit it, that one works. And when you’re in the business of getting eyeballs on TV screens, how much do you really care about why it works? How much do you even care about anything other than if and when you can do it again?

For additional coverage of Bellator 149, check out the MMA Events section of the site.