Late last evening the news began to spread that EliteXC was filing for bankruptcy protection and closing the doors to their 100K a month rental offices in California. Finger pointing started shortly after the Kimbo fight and today it elevated to a new level. With former executive TJ Thompson now blasting the leadership of the company, it’s clear that if his allegations are even remotely true, EliteXC seemed screwed from the get-go.

Somewhere Dana White has a massive hard-on right now. He made it clear early on that EliteXC was not ready to run with the UFC, pointing out that their stable of fighters were second-class for the most part and nowhere near the caliber of HIS fighters. Of course, it’s seems prophetic when he commented just a few weeks ago that Kimbo Slice “may be the baddest guy at the BBQ, but he’s not the baddest guy in MMA by any stretch”.

It appears that the ship that was once EliteXC has went down almost as quickly (just 22 months in business) as their proclaimed captain (Kimbo was knocked out in 14 seconds). It will be interesting to see where many of the fighters under EliteXC contracts wind up once the smoke clears.

UFC President Dana White has always maintained that Kimbo “may be the baddest guy at the BBQ but he’s not the baddest MMA fighter by any stretch”. Dana’s words have proved to be prophetic as the “baddest guy at the BBQ” got his ass dropped by a guy that quit MMA to open up a Smoothie King franchise.

After refusing to touch gloves after the bell for the first round, Kimbo charged the young Petruzelli trying to dominate early. Just a few seconds into this attack he was dropped when while trying to block a kick, caught with a vicious right from Petruzelli that sent the big man down for the count. Seth landed at least a dozen more blows to the beached whale (Kimbo) before the fight was called by referee Troy Waugh.

While digging around Kimbo’s camp looking for answers to help explain this devastating loss we were able to uncover perhaps a key clue. In an exclusive interview, Kimbo’s training partner had this to say:

“Kimbo didn’t want to grapple with anyone capable of really working him hard. So I took it easy on him, you know, basically letting him whoop my ass every time. The tables were turned the day before the fight because just like Charley Murphy got tired and finally whipped Rick James’ ass, I had to do the same to Kimbo. Someone had to put that fool in his place and it just happened to be me. Frankly, I’m glad he got beat.”

While we weren’t able to name the training partner we did get a rare photo of the two sparring -

So it’s pretty clear to us that while Kimbo can beat the hell of a practice dummy and most any dude at the BBQ, there’s obviously a big ass glass jaw behind that big ass beard of his.