The old fight game analogy — you’re standing on a corner and there’s a basketball game going on over there, a baseball game over here, a tennis match there, and over across the way there’s a fight…which do you watch? — is of course rigged. Everybody will watch a spontaneous street fight, in the same way they will gawk at accidents on the highway. The spell of daily life is fractured by something as drastic as a fight. It’s just that simple. In split seconds we are drawn to disaster, not deft ball handling.
In some ways, that’s the crude understanding of Bellator’s latest bit of matchmaking, pairing the erstwhile back alley brawler Kimbo Slice with his doppelgänger, Dada 5000 (real name Dhafir Harris).