He also didn’t close his guard a few times and he should have done that. In round two he had James in a guillotine choke but didn’t close his guard, that was too bad because Thompson escaped exactly how I showed Kimbo that you should escape when your opponent doesn’t close his guard, but you learn from your mistakes so that won’t happen again either.

He had Thompson in trouble the first and the second round with his punches but he got a little bit too “hungry” and kept on hitting which means that he planted his feet and that means that your opponent can go for a takedown, and that happened too. But here I go again, you learn from your mistakes and that won’t happen again.

So I have to say that I am very happy with this fight and his performance and that this fight made him WAY stronger for next time. When you get caught in training by something, whether it’s a submission or strike, you learn from that, but there is nothing like learning it the hard way in a fight.
And than be fortunate that you STILL win the fight by referee stoppage is just the best.
He finished with hitting Thompson with a four punch combination with the last one of those being a hard right upper cut. Thompson staggered back and the referee stopped the fight. Was it too soon? I thought it would be great to see a few more shots just so that he was down for real. But I guess the referee had the two or three times that Thompson was hurt in the earlier rounds in his head, plus than he also got hit on his cauliflower ear that busted open and he had a different look in his eyes.

All the things that went wrong or he didn’t do, we DID train for, but like I said, training and fighting are two different things. I know him and when he sees the mistakes that he made and realizes that he probably would have won the fight when he would have closed his guard in round number two so that Thompson couldn’t have had escaped his guillotine choke, he’s not going to be happy and is going to make sure it won’t happen again, the same counts for the few little other mistakes he made, he will see them himself, and never make them again.

They say “fatigue makes cowards out of man”, well, that wasn’t the case with Kimbo, he kept on fighting, his technique got less because of it and people will now judge him on that, but that’s OK, he will be a different kind of animal next time.

All and all it was a great night of fights, I think that everybody who tuned in kept watching, at least a high percentage and that the evening was a success. It had great ratings and from what I understand CBS is really happy.