While Brock Lesnar’s retirement from MMA and re-signing with the WWE seemed to come out of the blue, you better believe there was crazy action behind the scenes. Brock and the WWE had been enmeshed in pre-negotiation headbutting for months, with Lesnar using every opportunity to rub the UFC’s Lesnarmania in Vince McMahon’s face and extract every last cent out of the sports entertainment company.
When Vince made an offer Brock couldn’t refuse, he still called UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta who sounded perfectly willing to not just match it but double it. Here’s Brock talking to the Associated Press:
“Lorenzo said to me, ‘Can we sharpen our pencil? Can we double it'” Lesnar said. “I said, ‘It’s not about that. I’m calling you to tell you where my heart is, and it’s not about the money.’
“And then in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘Well, yeah, it is about the money, but I don’t have to beat myself up for it.’ To prepare for another MMA fight, we’re talking 16, 18 weeks of pure hell, and then the cage door shuts and it’s on.”
Compare that to the WWE, where he just has to keep his beef on at the gym, show up at occasional RAW tapings and PPVs, and do what he’s done well since 2000. With MMA, he would have had to suck at a whole slew of martial arts to close up massive holes in his game, all the while worrying that one of them would open him up to an ass whupping of epic proportions.
And it turns out that Lesnar just wasn’t feeling as indestructible as he used to after that bout with diverticulitis.
“When you’re sick for two or three years and you don’t know what’s going on, all of a sudden I went from the baddest man on the planet, to vulnerable,” Lesnar said. “It’s reality. My whole life I’ve been this superhuman freak that just kills people, a savage beast. I wasn’t that guy anymore. … Of course my confidence was totally jaded on my last three fights. Whose wouldn’t be? Is Anderson Silva the same guy he was (after breaking his leg)?
“I’ve been a barbarian my whole life. I’m just a smarter barbarian now. Evolution, you know?”
…
“I tried to picture myself coming down to the cage, and it was like a bad dream,” Lesnar said. “It just wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right.”
It’s too bad that Lesnar’s last experiences in the cage were brutal beatings at the hands of Cain Velasquez and Alistair Overeem. They underscored the fact that Brock would never be the best in the world at heavyweight, which is what a competitive superfreak like Lesnar needs in order to not be a miserable bastard (or at least less of a miserable bastard than he would be otherwise).
He could have fought Frank Mir again at Madison Square Garden and made millions. He could have fought guys like Mirko Crocop and Josh Barnett or been Big Nog’s retirement fight in Brazil. So many exciting and interesting options that would have kept him away from the killers in the top five and earned everyone tons of money and publicity. Instead he’ll finish his career in the WWE working to try and get guys like Roman Reigns over. As a fan of both pro wrestling and mixed martial arts, I feel like fans got the short end of this stick on this one.
(Via: Associated Press)
