MMA Legend and current trainer to Kimbo Slice, Bas Rutten, lends some well needed perspective on Kimbo Slice's performance against James Thompson with the following post from his personal website:

Of course I have been asked now already many times what I thought about Kimbo’s fight and performance.

First let me start by saying: “It was his 4th fight”.

The fight was hyped up so big that Kimbo needed a perfect performance to live up to the hype. Thompson had the chance of his life time so he trained insanely hard. People expect him to go down but they forgot that he stopped Don Frey and Hidehiko Yoshida, he has a suspect jaw, but he came in to fight!

I think this fight is going to be very good for Kimbo in the future. When you start fighting and competing and you never went the distance in a fight you never know what “getting really tired” means.

Ask any fighter on the planet if they fought more than 1 round when they fought their first couple of fights, how they felt. They will tell you that they thought they were in great shape but got tired really fast.

In training you can do pretty much anything to bring your heart rate up. Focus mitts, Thai pads, takedowns, running hills, explosive weight training etc. but NOTHING compares to getting tired in a fight, it’s just a whole different ball game.
But once you know this and experienced it one time, you know what to expect in the future.
That’s why I think that this fight was great for Kimbo, he really had to dig deep and boy did he do that. He was so tired at the end of round it was crazy, but he went out in round three and just started throwing bombs again, that says a lot to me about his will power, trust me, it has been tested here!

Did he make mistakes? Of course, but than again, everybody makes mistakes plus he’s training MMA for only a year. I think that he had a few really good escapes from the bottom. Of course I wanted him to buck up, explode and escape the last one and a half minute of round number two, but he didn’t.
He DID give his “thumbs up” sign to the referee telling him he was OK and that the short elbows didn’t hurt him. Still, he should have escaped but he told me later that he was saving energy for the third round and because he thought the elbows didn’t have any effect anyway, he chose that moment.
I told him that it wasn’t good to do because the ref can stop the fight PLUS what if you get cut? So that won’t happen again.