“I showed it to them and they were going crazy. “I remember I came back to my dorm and I had the footage and I’m telling my roommates, ‘Like, dude, I just came from this fight,’ ” Lauzon said. Lauzon drove back to Wentworth after the fight clutching his version of the legendary fight (he can’t find the tape today). Slice’s exploits were said to be financed by a porn producer for whom he served as bodyguard, in hopes of compiling a Kimbo Slice fight DVD for retailing. Gannon fight was rights to the video, which leaked almost immediately and caused Boston Police to sanction Gannon for his participation. It’s telling that the big prize promised to the winner of Slice vs. That wasn’t what sold Slice, though, particularly at a time producers were making substantial money selling DVDs of untrained bums fighting in the streets. He was widely liked in the fight community for his charitable streak, affection for his kids, and conversational manner. “It’s like going over to your friend’s that has a big Rottweiler or a pet tiger, and they’re like, ‘Oh, no, it’s cool relax, just hop in the elevator with us,’ ” Santos said.īut when Slice stepped into the national spotlight as an MMA fighter unparalleled in his ability to draw big television ratings, fans would come to learn he was hardly some unrefined brute. Though a fighter himself, Santos said he felt uneasy the entire time. Santos remembers picking up the menacing Slice and his crew at a hotel to transport them to the gym. Santos’ father, then stationed in Afghanistan, phoned his son to ask about it after his roommate said he’d heard it went down in a basement in Boston. “He thought it was going to be like every weekend, every third week, would be a crazy fight,” Santos said. One new pupil happened to be at the gym, and soon was wondering what he’d gotten himself into. The pending fight was a closely guarded secret to all but the most connected from the local fight community, and many, including Lauzon, found out only hours before. At the time, the Massachusetts State Athletic Commission was informally supervising MMA fights, so Rhode Island seemed a less risky spot. Local fighter Mat Santos agreed to host the fight at his gym after his one-time pupil Gannon reached out. “It was very informal rules,” Lauzon added with a laugh. “And all of a sudden Kimbo’s guys start rushing like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ The rules said nothing against grappling, but they looked at it as it was supposed to be just boxing. “Kimbo kind of went for a takedown a little bit and Gannon grabbed his neck, and at that point Gannon, he’s really not choking him, but he’s kind of holding him,” Lauzon said. It quickly became clear the raw, muscle-bound Slice was not well prepared for grappling.
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“It’s almost like seeing like a movie hero, like Jean-Claude Van Damme from ‘Kickboxer,’ and then he’s a real life person, he’s right there,” Lauzon said.
UFC veteran Joe Lauzon, then a student at Wentworth Institute of Technology, was filming the fight that night.
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The fight unfolded in a manner foreign to Slice, as Gannon was accustomed to taking a punch and knew how to clinch, unlike many of the street toughs Slice KO’d in Miami in viral Internet videos that sparked his fame.Īfter 13 grueling minutes - which saw Gannon land many body shots and Slice bloodying Gannon’s face, leaving a gruesome hematoma - Slice fell to the mat in exhaustion with a spent Gannon leaning on him, peppering him with shots.
Slice, real name Kevin Ferguson, was to battle Sean “The Cannon” Gannon, a Boston cop with experience on the local boxing and MMA circuit. The invincible aura around Kimbo Slice, the Miami street fighter-turned-MMA star who died of heart failure last week at age 42, was punctured for the first time in 2004 in a nondescript, third-floor private gym in Cranston, R.I.
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