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Over the course of a lifetime, the list of things you thought you'd never see, but inevitably do, grows ever longer.
And now, one more entry: watching a guy's ear explode, for real, live, in prime time, in bloody high definition, on a normally staid, steadfastly middle-of-the-road American television network.
So yes, Kimbo Slice night on CBS lived up to most of the hopes and fears.
The hope that bringing mixed martial arts to the network of Andy Rooney would generate enormous amounts of hype?
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Check. Slice, aka Kevin Ferguson, graced magazine covers, was a subject of great interest to the conventional sports press, and surely drew a large number of the curious to a place where they'd never been before.
The fear from mixed martial arts purists that a sport still battling to establish its legitimacy might be drawn back towards its grotty, "human cockfighting" origins?
Check. The dancing girls, the fireworks, the ridiculous pro-wrestling style stage entrances, Slice's obvious lack of skills and a couple of extremely dubious stoppages (including that of the main event) certainly did nothing to advance the cause.
The hope that, as the very excitable announcer Gus Johnson promised early in the proceedings, "There will be blood!"?
Check. Buckets of it, climaxing when the grotesque cauliflower ear sported by Slice's opponent, James (The Colossus) Thompson, popped like a party balloon.
The fear that we're all going to hell in a handbasket?
Well, it might be a little late for that, given that anything shocking about Saturday's proceedings had far more to do with the context than the actual content. Look around. It's everywhere.
(And for the sake of perspective, remember that they used to show boxing on the networks three nights a week. Benny (Kid) Paret died in front of a live television audience. So did Davey Moore. So did Duk Koo Kim.)
What was fascinating about Saturday's show (which otherwise was pretty much what anyone who has watched MMA would expect — a moderately interesting card featuring a cast of second-raters) was listening to Johnson and company try to construct a conventional sports hero narrative around someone who would terrify most Americans were he to show up at their front door unannounced.
For those who don't know by now, Slice is a legitimate tough guy, a bouncer and bodyguard who was homeless for a spell, and who is employed most notably by purveyors of internet pornography (a fact they somehow failed to mention during the broadcast). He made his fighting reputation not in a ring or an octagon or a cage, but in Miami backyards and parking lots, those savage bare knuckle street fights preserved for posterity and distributed via YouTube.
The trip from there to mainstream benediction by CBS happened remarkably quickly (Slice had been involved in only three "legitimate" bouts), and required the construction of a contemporary Horatio Alger myth.
"Not that long ago, this man was homeless," Johnson told the audience. "Bathing in the ocean…using the bathroom wherever he was." (A bit too much information there)…
"They asked him, "Why do you fight?'
"'I fight for the money,'" he said.
(In an interview earlier in the week, Johnson went farther, making reference to the shaky U.S. economy, to the foreclosures and job losses, and painted Slice as a representative of the beleaguered American working class.)
Once upon a time, they tried to soften and racially neutralize Mike Tyson's image by telling the story of his kindly aged white mentor/trainer, about how he raised pigeons, about how outside the ring he was smarter and gentler than anyone would have imagined.
With Slice, they're not bothering with anything like that. He's not nicer and gentler than anyone would imagine. But there's a good reason for it.
The problem was that on Saturday, he didn't really deliver the goods. Matched against an opponent chosen specifically because he had a history of being knocked out in spectacular fashion, Slice struggled mightily. He was hopeless when taken to the ground. He was completely out of gas by the third round, when Thompson's glass ear let him down. Temporarily stunned, Thompson absorbed some hard shots from Slice, and then the referee leaped in just as fast as he could to preserve the desired ending.
But how do you re-invent the character called Kimbo Slice when in the end he looked more relieved and shaken than triumphant, more intimidated than intimidating, out of place under the big spotlight, miscast, almost a sympathetic figure? Better get to work on that script.
