The Question: Does Kimbo Slice vs. Ken Shamrock Make a Mockery of MMA?

Last fall, Scott Coker surprised just about everybody by announcing that Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar would face off in a headlining Bellator event. 

Two aging UFC veterans, long past their best days, fighting in a main event? It didn't make sense—at least to hardcore MMA fans. They said it was an embarrassment to the sport of mixed martial arts and set the sport back years.

But then the fight happened, and millions tuned in to watch. It was an absolutely terrible bout, but it was also the highest-rated MMA fight on cable TV in 2014. Coker was on to something.

So it should not have surprised a single soul on earth when Coker dipped back into his bucket full o' spectacles and dusted off two fighters even older than Ortiz and Bonnar: Kimbo Slice and Ken Shamrock.

Reaction to the fight announcement was swift, and it was vicious. But was it correct? To judge if Coker is still working feverishly on making a mockery of mixed martial arts, Jonathan Snowden and Jeremy Botter—Bleacher Report's very own Captain Kirk and Spock—get together for another edition of The Question. 

Jonathan: Ken Shamrock, one of the breakout stars of the original UFC way back in 1993, is 51-years-old.

In a different world, he'd be basking in a well-earned retirement, the spoils of war funding a leisurely life allowing plenty of time for reflecting on the sport he helped found being celebrated far and wide.

Instead, he finds himself struggling to put food on the table, his accomplishments minimized, his place in history hanging by a very slim thread. As a young man, he turned to fighting in order to escape poverty and feed his demons. In his dotage, he's doing the same.

Ken Shamrock, ancient for an athlete by any conceivable standard, is fighting this year for Bellator.

That was not a misprint. Read it again. Ken Shamrock will fight this year. On national television. For the world's second-biggest mixed martial arts promotion. Against Kimbo Slice.

Yes, that Kimbo Slice.

Many will be outraged by this. Maybe I should be too. But you know what, Jeremy? I can't bring myself to fake it. I am in love with this fight. I want this fight to have my babies. I want to make a scrapbook celebrating this fight and show it to the old women at church.

This fight makes me happy. Should I be ashamed?

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Jeremy: No, you should not be ashamed. At least, I don't think so. But maybe you and I need to turn in our MMA Purists Club membership cards on our way out of town or something.

I told people last year, back when Scott Coker announced that Tito Ortiz would be facing Stephan Bonnar in the Bellator cage, that there was a method to the madness. MMA fans on message boards and Twitter were very upset. They told us how it was a farce and a mockery of the sport, how it would begin a downward spiral that Bellator could not recover from.

Turns out they're all living in a bubble. But we knew that. With Ortiz versus Bonnar, Coker reached millions of casual fans who could not care less that the combined age of both participants was 186 years old. They knew who both fighters were, and they wanted to see them fight. They didn't care if it was a good fight or a brilliant technical match or any of this other crap the hardcore fans fawn over. They tuned in to see names.

And when they tuned in, they got to see Will Brooks and Michael Chandler and King Mo and Joe Schilling. The formula was established on that night: put together a main event that will draw in viewers, no matter how ridiculous, and then stack your undercard with developing talent.

That's exactly what happened here. Kimbo and Ken, well, they're really old. But judging from the reaction to the announcement from casual sports fans here at Bleacher Report and beyond, I'd say Coker has another winning main event on his hands.

Jonathan: It's easy to forget that Kimbo and Ken, even though they aren't elite fighters, are stars on a level beyond most current MMA competitors. Sure, MMA has evolved spectacularly in the cage. But it's done so in front of a shrinking and increasingly niche audience.

Shamrock and Slice were headliners in MMA's glory days, when the sport was still a curiosity to many mainstream fans willing to take a walk on the wild side. Shamrock's third fight with Tito Ortiz attracted 5.7 million viewers to SPIKE TV. More than 6.5 million people tuned in to see Kimbo make James Thompson's ear go boom on CBS.

The two also starred in iconic seasons of The Ultimate Fighter. Shamrock was a coach during the third season, managing to turn Tito Ortiz from villain to hero with his tone deaf and brain dead coaching style. Slice was the centerpiece of the show's 10th season, drawing more than 5 million fans for his fight with Roy Nelson in the third episode.

I guess what I'm trying to say, Jeremy, is that these guys are kind of a big deal. A handful of fans, and no doubt many members of the media, are going to wail and complain about the matchup. But you know what? They're all going to watch anyway.

JANE KALINOWSKY/Associated Press

Jeremy: They are. All of the fans who complain about Slice and Shamrock being an embarrassment for the sport will watch. And I'll make a prediction: This will be the most watched MMA fight on any kind of television broadcast this year. And yes, that includes FOX, pay-per-view and cable.

At the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters for Bellator. They are attempting to present a product that is vastly different from what the UFC offers because that's what they have to do. They can't go out there and try to be the UFC; the UFC has that locked down.

And the thing Bjorn Rebney never learned, and the thing that Coker has always known, is that people don't tune into mixed martial arts for sport. They never have, and they never will. That's why Rebney is off the grid and Coker is steering his promotion in a completely different direction.

And all of the fans who moan and complain about how fights such as Slice versus Shamrock are hurting the integrity of the sport need to understand that the sport never had any integrity in the first place. The only thing that matters now, just as the only thing that mattered back when Shamrock escaped the Garden of Eden and began his fighting career, is money.

Eyeballs bring advertising dollars, and so Coker wants eyeballs. That means creating something different. It means a spectacle. You know how Dana White always says that if a fight breaks out on a street corner anywhere in the world, everybody will stop to watch? That's a bunch of crap. But if you're cruising down the highway and you see a car crash, you're going to slow down and look.

That's what Slice versus Shamrock is: a car crash. And we'll all stop and look. We all will.