Why is the UFC burying Brock Lesnar?
Written by Malakai the Big Samoan | Saturday, April 05 2008
Brock Lesnar with the IWGP championship
Since football season is over and playing "Monday Morning Quarterback" isn't a viable option until next fall lets play a new game. We'll call it "fantasy MMA promoter". So you're the promoter and you pay a lot of money to sign a new fighter. This fighter already has achieved superstar status in another sport and as a result is likely better known by the public than your most popular fighters. The public is interested in his transition to his new sport and with good reason--the fighter in question is huge, well conditioned and has cultivated a reputation as a "tough guy".
We're talking, of course, about Brock Lesnar but humor me for a moment and play along: so this "new fighter" also happens to bring to the Octagon perhaps the best amateur wrestling pedigree in the sport. He's been training for almost two years to learn his new craft including submission defense and working on striking with former heavyweight contender, Scott LeDoux. He's got a long way to go to fully implement these new skills but his size, strength and unsurpassed wrestling background already makes him a formidable opponent.
More importantly, he's a money magnet. He obviously already knows how to promote a fight due to his tenure in the WWE, has the potential to bring a new group of fans into the sport and demonstrates his worth by the "buzz" he generates by his signing alone. Every indication is that he's already one of the fighters who's appearance on a PPV event will translate into more publicity, more PPV buys, and more money.
Sum total--you've got an amazing talent with limitless upside potential. He's still raw and learning his craft, but with a properly managed career he could become a marquee superstar and dominant heavyweight MMA fighter. With a fan base interested in seeing him fight and watching him progress in his new vocation you've got not only a potentially dominant champion (not to mention a potential champion in your weakest weight class) with mainstream crossover appeal, but a veritable license to print money as he moves up in class.
So if you're a MMA promoter, how do you promote this fighter to help him develop in his new sport, gain popularity with the fans, and make the most money? With a fighter like Brock Lesnar, its pretty simple really--you bring him along slowly, being careful to put him against opponents that he matches up well with. That way you let him build on his skills while becoming a more complete fighter. The idea is to keep him looking as dominant as possible while he improves. When he's ready, you introduce him into the championship mix and if you've done your job right he'll be competitive--if not dominant. More importantly, you preserve his mystique and bank alot of money along the way. It's pretty much common sense, really.
Unless you're the UFC, which instead did everything they could to bury Brock Lesnar before he'd even entered the Octagon. From the outset, it often appeared that the UFC was more interested in "teaching Lesnar a lesson" of some sort. Considering that Zuffa invested a ton of money to sign him, it is downright irrational that they seemed to go out of their way to undermine the value of their own investment. The mis-promotion of Lesnar began with UFC matchmaker Joe Silva's choice of Frank Mir for his first opponent. Silva has been criticized in the past for poor stylistic matchups that sometimes border on the bizarre. The UFC went with a storyline justification that Lesnar "insisted" on the toughest opponent possible, but that was simply a smokescreen.
With Frank Mir, Lesnar was matched against an opponent that would make him look bad regardless of the outcome. The casual fan sees Mir as something of a "shot fighter" who's recent focus has been more on the broadcast booth than the Octagon. Even a more balanced assessment of Mir concedes that he hasn't been the same fighter since a 2004 motorcycle accident. Exacerbating his physical challenges has been an apparent lack of focus and dedication, evident in a couple of fights where he was in less than top shape and fought listlessly in a losing cause. To this casual fan--the precise type of new audience Lesnar's fight would attract--a victory over Mir was no real accomplishment.
The knowledgeable MMA aficionado knew otherwise. All you needed to do was watch the tape of Lesnar's debut MMA bout against Min Soo Kim to see that Mir was clearly a horrible matchup. Brock's gameplan at this point in his career is obvious, though highly effective against most opponents. With takedowns that border on the indefensible, he wants to get you down and pound you into submission or unconsciousness. Despite Mir's issues with focus and conditioning in recent years, even his harshest critics credit his Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu skills and his encyclopedic knowledge of submissions. Adding to the bad matchup for Lesnar is the fact that Mir fights from his back better than any heavyweight in the sport.
While the mainstream MMA public expected Lesnar to dominate Mir, the experts knew it was an almost impossible matchup bordering on a "trap". Lesnar would try to get Mir down, mount him and start a ground and pound assault. This would play right into to Mir's strengths and exploit Lesnar's weaknesses and inexperience in submission defense. To Mir's credit, he showed a lot of toughness in surviving a brutal initial assault before the inevitable happened: he found an undefended limb and submitted his opponent.
If the matchup against the worst possible opponent for Lesnar wasn't bad enough, the UFC's promotional strategy was also bizarre and appeared designed to call into question Lesnar's credibility as a legitimate athlete. His record as an amateur wrestling borders on the ungodly and is essentially all you need to know to ascertain his athletic legitimacy: 4 time All American, 2 time Big Ten Champion, 2000 NCAA heavyweight champion and a career collegiate record of 106-5. He also did the unthinkable in trying to walk on to the Minnesota Vikings, despite not having played football since junior high school, and all most pulled it off. The Vikings were impressed enough with his work ethic to offer him a contract to play for the (now defunct) NFL Europe. Having the balls to even *try* to walk on with an NFL team is almost unheard of, but to almost pull it off with a target on your back as not only a "walk on" but a famous pro wrestler is downright absurd.
Instead, the UFC focused on Lesnar's career as a professional wrestler and framed the matchup with Mir as a fight between a "fake" wrestler and a "real" MMA fighter. This was emphasized at every turn, with the ringside area on fight night filled with pro wrestlers including The Undertaker (Mark Calaway) and Kurt Angle, who both played major parts in Lesnar's WWE storylines. It was as if the UFC wanted to remind viewers that Lesnar would "lose to these guys when Vince McMahon told him to". When Bruce Buffer introduced him his amazing amateur credentials weren't even mentioned. Instead he was introduced as "Former WWE champion" Brock Lesnar.
To be fair, the promotional tactic worked as the Lesnar headlined UFC 81 exceeded Zuffa expectations for PPV buys. It was a shortsighted strategy, however, as it was predicated on damaging Lesnar's credibility as a legit athlete. While those of us here at THE SAVAGE SCIENCE have the utmost respect for the real dedication and athleticism needed to succeed in pro wrestling, its not a secret that many in the general public don't share these views dismissing it as "fake". It Lesnar's case, its completely disingenuous. Even if you have a mindset that is completely dismissive of pro wrestling you can't ignore his long list of impressive athletic accomplishments in other sports. The "bury Lesnar and pro wrestling" strategy might have made some sense had Lesnar's appearance been a one-off arrangement with the WWE, but not for a fighter who's success you've invested a considerable amount of money in.
Making matters worse, for the UFC or any other MMA organization to get all sanctimonious about pro wrestling is a profound example of hypocrisy and denial. Pro wrestling begat MMA, certainly in Japan and a good case can be made for the US as well. Back in the infancy of the UFC the only people that paid attention to the product were bloodthirsty degenerates and pro wrestling fans. Lesnar's problem wasn't that he came from a pro wrestling background, rather that he was a superstar in pro wrestling--in the US at least he's almost certainly the biggest name pro wrestler to involve himself with MMA. He's far from the first, however. I specifically remember a fighter who's career began as a pro wrestler. His name was "Mr. Wrestling" Vince Torelli and despite showing a lot of promise in worked matches he soon transitioned into "shoot" wrestling matches in Japan and later the UFC. Don't remember Torelli? You probably remember him by the name "Ken Shamrock". He took essentially the same path to the UFC that Lesnar did, only Lesnar had more success as a pro wrestler. Aside from Lesnar and Shamrock there's any number of MMA fighters that have been involved in pro wrestling in some capacity including Don Frye, Josh Barnett, Kevin Randleman, Mark Coleman and too many Japanese fighters to name. For the UFC to call into question Lesnar's background when the entire lineage of the sport traces back to pro wrestling is not unlike the great scene in the classic film Casablanca where Claude Rains closes down Rick's Place after "discovering" that gambling is going on there--and simultaneously collecting his own gambling winnings. It's an amusing bit of hypocrisy, but not the action of an organization seeking to enhance the legitimacy of MMA.
Lesnar's career could very likely work out fine despite Zuffa's promotional bungling. His next matchup is against Mark "The Hammer" Coleman, a real tough guy getting to the end of his career as a fighter. Since Coleman is an similar type of fighter only older, slower and arguably not as skilled, its a good matchup for Lesnar. It's by no means a "lock", as Coleman is cut from the same mold as Don Frye making him about as hard nosed of a competitor as you'll find in MMA. For Lesnar, however, its almost a "must win". With a UFC record of 0-1, many casual fans already see him as a bust. At this point in his career he should be an up-and-coming heavyweight monster, not a question mark with his career riding on a single fight.
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