'Dark Side' Skips Kimbo Fight Fixing Allegations

01/09/2025 09:46 AM

VICE's first 'Dark Side of the Cage' episode focuses on street fighter turned MMA athlete Kimbo Slice, but doesn't reckon with 'Standgate' and fight fixing accusations that took down a promotion.

Allegations of fight fixing abound in the world of combat sports. You're still seeing them today, mostly in the world of Influencer boxing where guys like Jake Paul are regularly accused of paying their opponents to lose. But a recent airing of 'Dark Side of the Cage' focused on backyard brawler turned MMA fighter Kimbo Slice brings us back to one of the biggest fight fixing allegations the young sport of MMA has ever seen.

'Dark Side of the Cage' covered a lot of Slice's career, but didn't touch on everything. They detailed Kimbo bouncing at strip clubs and meeting his old highschool buddy Mike Imber. They skimmed over Imber hiring Kimbo as a limousine driver and bodyguard for his Reality Kings porn company, which resulted in Kimbo's (non-performing) appearances in series like MilfHunter, MoneyTalks, C**fiesta, and 8th Street Latinas.

Slice's backyard brawl videos would spread from the Reality Kings website, turning him into an internet phenomena.

'Dark Side of the Cage' mentions that Slice was often dismissed by haters and naysayers, but it doesn't really capture the level of scorn that many fans had towards him and his MMA career, especially in the early days with EliteXC. Slice was largely viewed by the MMA community as a freakshow fighter whose career was being carefully manipulated by EliteXC boss Gary Shaw and his rapper son $kala into something more legitimate than it was.

The 19 second win over Bo Cantrell? It's clear Cantrell took a dive, but the 'why' is less clear. Was it because fighting Kimbo under the big lights spooked him? Or was there another reason? The Tank Abbott fight laid the blueprint for the sandbagging we see from Jake Paul today: find an over the hill name to feed to the guy you're building up. And as we've seen with Jake Paul, that works shockingly well.

But as 'Dark Side of the Cage' showed, things went very wrong on the second go round. Aged legend Ken Shamrock pulled out of his fight with Kimbo at the last-second with a cut above the eye. Accusations were thrown around that Shamrock was angry over the size of Slice's purse and had been refused a last minute pay bump, leading to the suspicious injury.

But the real controversy came with replacement fighter Seth Petruzelli, who was an average Florida mid-carder plucked from an undercard fight to replace Shamrock. He would end up knocking out Kimbo in just 14 seconds, and reactive fans watching had similar feelings of denial as you're seeing from Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson: there's no way Kimbo just lost like that. There must be a fix.

But if there was a fix, it was in the other direction. The morning after his big win, Petruzelli claimed in a radio interview that promoters asked him to stand with Slice and not take him down and exploit his weakness on the ground.

"The promoters kinda hinted to me and they gave me the money to stand and throw with him," Petruzelli said. "They didn't want me to take him down. Let's just put it that way. It was worth my while to try and stand up punch him."

Thus 'Standgate' was born. Here was evidence directly from a fighter's mouth that EliteXC had told him to fight in a way that was advantageous to Kimbo Slice. In a video clip that went viral at the time and still surfaces to this day, UFC president Dana White declared "That's f—ing illegal!"

You really had to be there in 2008 to understand what a bombshell this incident was. EliteXC had a network broadcast deal with CBS that was generating good ratings and momentum for the company. But with Slice losing in the way he did and the ensuing scandals surrounding not just the Shamrock withdrawal but Petruzelli being told to keep it standing, EliteXC promptly collapsed into bankruptcy.

19 days after EliteXC's final card and a few days after they officially shut down, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation ruled that "there was no legal sufficiency to the claimed violation 548.058 [Sham or collusive contest prohibited]. and therefore no need to move forward with a full investigation."

As 'Dark Side of the Cage' noted, Petruzelli was offered a $20,000 knockout bonus. Anything else was just hearsay.

But that hearsay was enough to push Kimbo Slice to continue training in MMA. A year later he would appear on the 10th season of The Ultimate Fighter, where he'd get taken down and TKO'd by eventual tournament winner Roy Nelson. That quest for legitimacy through the UFC came directly from a desire to erase the dark blemish left on his career by the Shamrock / Petruzelli fight.

While he didn't quite achieve what he set out to accomplish in MMA, he certainly showed an impressive amount of grit and determination right to the end, all while being one of the most genuine and kind-hearted stars in the sport.