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As an MMA Sponsor and Super-Fan, Christopher "Big Black" Boykin Did Work

After a first-round knockout in the first-ever fight broadcast on primetime network TV, the late Big Black was in the cage.
Photo by Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC

Reality TV is awful. Except for Rob & Big.

Three seasons of the MTV program chronicled the odd couple relationship of Rob Dyrdek, a 135-pound Ohioan street-skating celeb, and Christopher "Big Black" Boykin, a 350-pound teddy bear plucked from the obscurity to fend off rent-a-cops while Dyrdek turned park benches into splinters. If The Hills harnessed the fictional-factual conventions of reality TV to create a bleached battlefield, Rob & Big flipped them to build a comedic playground, a Jackass without malevolence and drug problems and crushed testicles. I lost track of the duo (and television in general) during the Fantasy Factory days, sometime after their relationship first became strained, but Rob & Big still deserves credit for subverting a tired format in the name of innocent fun. Everyone knows reality TV is fake. Might as well set a Guinness record for eating doughnuts and bananas, buy an ornery mini-horse, and put Boykin in a thong on stage at a strip club.

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Time turns all pop culture into nostalgia, and you're almost deaf to its resonance once it finally resonates. "Do work," the phrase Boykin coined through the show, is a phrase with once-in-a-generation staying power. Personally, I can draw a straight line between watching Rob & Big a decade ago, bringing home an English bulldog, and getting UFC Hall of Famer Don Frye to talk to me instead of telling me to go fuck myself and pound sand up my ass.

Boykin passed away on Tuesday morning at age 45, the result of a heart attack according to his manager. If the MMA community seems to have a particular soft spot for Boykin, that's because he was an enormous fight fan, and he left a mark on martial arts that went beyond the time he and Dyrdek sparred at a karate studio, and wondered aloud whether a gi big enough for Boykin existed or if he'd have to use bed sheets instead.

Rob & Big's time on the air coincided with the late 2000s MMA boom, and along with the duo being a regular sight when the camera panned to the crowd, Boykin's double-B shirts hung from the backs of various MMA fighters. Boykin took a special liking to Brett Rogers, a haymaker-thrower from Chicago who would have fit in with Dyrdek's security detail, and he became one of the most recognizable fighters to wear his clothes. When Rogers knocked out Jon Murphy in the first round of the first fight on the first-ever full-fledged MMA broadcast on network, EliteXC: Primetime, Boykin even made an appearance in the cage afterward, putting his double-B chain around Rogers' neck and playing to the camera. Boykin was one of Rogers's major backers during his ascent from tire shop employee to heavyweight title contender, picking him to beat Fedor Emelianenko while watching figure skating and doing bicep curls. (Unfortunately, since flaming out after fighting Emelianenko, Rogers's life has gone off the rails.)

After EliteXC's demise, Boykin was a Strikeforce booster through and through. Maybe that was simple opportunism because that's where Rogers was fighting and because, unlike the UFC, Strikeforce didn't tax sponsors. But maybe that's a telling detail, a hint that he liked mixed martial arts as an enterprise. Thinking about the overhyped heap of shit that was Mayweather-Pacquiao, one of the lamest parts was the parade of A-listers who took in those particular 12 rounds because of the social scene and the pageantry in Vegas. Boykin might have been the exact opposite: his enthusiasm for fighting brought him to Nashville for the infamous Strikeforce brawl, and month after month of his Twitter timeline is filled with fight predictions and commentary across the fistic genres. The last tweets he ever sent were about the upcoming super-bout between "Canelo" Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin.

The late 2000s get more distant every day, and Christopher "Big Black" Boykin was about as peripheral a figure as you can get, but it's worth remembering that he financed fighters' dreams and cheered for them along the way. In helping others do work, Black Big did work.