Brock Lesnar’s UFC 200 opponent has been revealed on ESPN, and the announcement does not disappoint one bit. The WWE superstar will face off against the Super Samoan Mark Hunt, a 300-pound wrecking ball with concrete for fists who holds wins in the UFC over Frank Mir, Bigfoot Silva, Roy Nelson, and Ben Rothwell. Before that, Hunt was a regular favorite in the Japanese fight promotion PRIDE, and he also has a kickboxing record of 30-13 and won the K-1 World Grand Prix Tournament in 2001.
As for why Hunt got the fight, Lesnar revealed it was the UFC’s choice, and he was happy to accept.
“I never turned down a fight,” he said during the interview with ESPN. “If Dana White called me and said you have opponent XYZ, who do you want? He never gave me those options. ‘This is the guy we want you to face’, I said great, that’s what I’m going to do.”
BREAKING: Brock Lesnar announces he will face Mark Hunt in his return to the Octagon at @UFC 200. pic.twitter.com/EpoimdjNjC
— ESPN (@espn) June 6, 2016
“It wasn’t nobody else’s idea,” Lesnar insisted. “Dana didn’t pick up the phone because somebody said ‘We need to fill a spot.’ It didn’t happen like that. I picked up the phone. It was me. It’s been three months ago, it’s taken some time for things to play out. But I just said ‘What are the chances of having Brock Lesnar on the card for UFC 200?’ And we got together.”
“Obviously I’m still under contract with the WWE,” he continued. “You just go in and sit down and have a big boy conversation with the boss. Vince McMahaon. And it’s simple. It’s big business. It’s billionaire business, and I’m big business, so why the hell wouldn’t anyone want Brock Lesnar?”
Mark Hunt is known as one of the hardest hitters in the sport, but his ground game has always been his weakness. This sets the fight between Lesnar and Hunt as a classic wrestler vs. striker bout, where Lesnar would do best to try and take Hunt down and beat him on the canvas rather than trade punches on the feet.
Lesnar is an NCAA Division I Heavyweight Wrestling Champion and went 106-5 over his collegiate wrestling career, but that was back in 2000. Does he still have the skills to defeat Hunt, who has been actively improving his takedown defense since Lesnar moved on into the world of sports entertainment? Lesnar called himself the “modern day Bo Jackson” on ESPN due to his fighting in both WWE and UFC, but he’ll have to back that up with a good showing against Hunt before anyone will take that sort of talk seriously.
