Brock Lesnar Returns to UFC: The Defining Moments of His MMA Career to Date
Brock Lesnar is a large man, in multiple ways.
Granted, none of his other largenesses happen without his physical largeness, but even so, he looms over both pro wrestling and MMA as a bona fide superstar.
In the case of the latter, you can see how big of a deal he is by the way the UFC scrambled to clear a spot for him on their capstone UFC 200 card like a restaurant manager faced with Leonardo DiCaprio strolling in off the street.
By all accounts, the July 9 clash with Mark Hunt is a one-off situation. Lesnar remains under contract with WWE and doesn't appear poised, at age 38, to make a full-blown return to MMA, which he left in 2011 after two straight losses and a serious intestinal disease.
It doesn't matter, though. The big guy with the big sword tattoo is returning, and that's big. To help you prepare for the big moment, here's a look back at the defining moments of his MMA career to date.
A Convincing Debut
1 of 10Lesnar doesn't seem like the type to do things halfway. So when he decided to take his talents to the MMA cage back in 2007, it made sense that he wanted to make a big splash.
He ended up signing with Dynamite!! USA, a promotion controlled by FEG, the parent company of the K-1 kickboxing organization. Not the biggest of shows, but you couldn't say the same about his opponent. Hong-Man Choi made a name for himself in MMA by facing heavyweights from Fedor Emelianenko to, uh, Jose Canseco. Oh, and he's also 7'2" tall.
But a licensing issue kept Choi off the card. In swept Min-Soo Kim, an international judo competitor who entered the fight with a sparkling 2-5 pro record in MMA. Pretty sweet.
All you can do in life is beat the opponent put in front of you. So that's what Lesnar did. In seconds, he had scored a takedown, and seconds later was pounding Kim's head. Kim's guard hung from Lesnar like a tattered ball gown as Lesnar worked to full mount.
Kim tapped to strikes just 69 seconds after the opening bell. It wasn't a whole lot of seconds later, one assumes, that the true big show came calling.
Falling off the Horse Against Frank Mir
2 of 10It's hard to find an analog for Lesnar's UFC debut. It was galvanizing. He brought a legion of pro wrestling fans with him, not to mention torrents of hype from those who thought he'd romp to the title and those who believed and/or hoped he'd be de-pantsed the moment the punches became real.
Score one for the doubters at UFC 81, where Lesnar debuted against Frank Mir on Feb. 2, 2008.
To the surprise of no one, Lesnar attempted to bull rush the former heavyweight champ, hitting a takedown right off the bat. But he may have become a little overzealous with his ensuing ground shots, as everyone's favorite ref, Mr. Steve Mazzagatti, stopped and restarted the action because of what he thought were illegal shots to the back of Mir's head.
That was the opening Mir needed. Lesnar again attempted the bull rush, but this time Mir got the better result. Lesnar tried to stand up through Mir's guard and in so doing exposed his knee. Mir, a jiu-jitsu black belt, knows what to do with an exposed knee. He wrapped it up and Lesnar tapped. The big guy was 0-1 as a UFC fighter.
Heath Herring Somersaults
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The punch that launched 1,000 GIFs also served as the first real highlight—good highlight, anyway—of Lesnar's MMA career.
It also may have established Lesnar as something other than a bald-faced novelty act in the eyes of UFC fans.
A Lesnar right hand sent Herring tumbling backward and downward like Jack and his pail. Herring even broke his crown in the process, if an orbital bone qualifies as a technical portion of the crown.
He didn't even get the knockout over Herring. He did, however, cruise to a decision win and his first UFC victory.
Perhaps most important, though, was the fact that Lesnar was able to generate enough power to literally knock his opponent head over heels, and did so without resorting to a massive overhand kill shot. This punch made him a threat to any heavyweight in MMA.
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Holy Crap...He Won the Title
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Sometimes MMA isn't complicated. This was one of those times.
Randy Couture was the defending heavyweight champ, but he was also 45 years old. Coming into UFC 91 in November 2008, he hadn't competed in more than a year.
As The Natural and Lesnar opened, Couture's ring rust—and Lesnar's respect for the wily veteran—caused a fairly slow and stalemated first round. It didn't take long to turn it up a notch.
Lesnar dropped Couture with one of those big right hands in the second round. Several hammerfists later, Lesnar had the belt around his waist.
Simple as that. Lesnar was bigger and stronger that night.
“There was some big-a-- ham hocks coming at you,” Couture said after the fight, per MMA Junkie. “It’s hard to get out of the way of those. That’s just a big son of a b---c, that’s all there is to it.”
Yep.
UFC 100
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Easily the defining moment of this list of defining moments.
Seven years later, UFC 100 is still the top-selling pay-per-view broadcast in UFC history, with 1.6 million buys. That didn't have everything to do with Lesnar, given that the card also included Georges St-Pierre defending his welterweight title, not to mention exciting talents like Michael Bisping and some guy named Jon Jones. But Lesnar was the main-event, and this was the apex of his needle-moving.
It also saw Lesnar gain revenge against Mir, equalizing what was then his only pro loss by hamburgering Mir's mug about halfway through the second round. The win was Lesnar's first title defense, and it ran his pro MMA record to 4-1.
A heel inside and out, Lesnar eschewed post-fight social mores by screaming some how-you-like-me-nows into Mir's rearranged face before doing the same for the camera lens. During the latter, he literally foamed at the mouth as he barked, the booing of the crowd making it even harder to make him out.
It kept going when Lesnar jumped on the mic with broadcaster Joe Rogan. The champ told the crowd that Mir had a "horseshoe up his a--," according to Steve Cofield of Yahoo Sports, and that he "pulled it out of him and ... beat him over the head with it."
"I'm going to drink a Coors Light; that's right, a Coors," Lesnar continued. "Bud Light don't pay me nothing."
As you may recall, Bud Light was and is a major UFC sponsor. That probably explains the blue-labeled prop and sheepish apologies at the news conference later that night.
But the impression and point were made. Lesnar was good for business, but to get there, you might have to choke down a lot of Coors Light.
A Grim Diagnosis
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It wasn't a huge deal, relatively speaking, when Lesnar pulled out of his title defense with Shane Carwin in late 2009. The champ cited a case of mononucleosis as the culprit.
But as it turned out, mono was only the beginning.
That disease was precipitated by a weakened immune system, which was in turn precipitated by a serious case of diverticulitis, which had caused a perforation in his intestines that caused fecal material to leak into his abdominal cavity.
Yikes.
After Canadian doctors were unable to diagnose the disease, Lesnar, in excruciating pain, sat shotgun as his wife drove him across the border, where doctors identified the source of the problem.
"My wife saved my life," Lesnar said, according to Loretta Hunt of Sherdog. "She got me out of there and drove 100 miles an hour to get me to Bismarck, North Dakota, to Medcenter One, got me with Dr. Berger and his staff at Medcenter One, and that doctor there saved my career and my life.”
Lesnar avoided surgery (for the moment) and later defeated Carwin in a bout rescheduled for summer 2010.
The Title's Gone
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The bully doesn't like to be bullied.
Lesnar, with the freight-train takedowns and the big ham hocks and so forth, is your classic MMA bully. And he got a snootful of his own medicine against Cain Velasquez in October 2010 at UFC 121.
That whole "Lesnar doesn't like to be hit" thing started in this fight, when a Velasquez punch combination sent the champ reeling across the cage Heath Herring-style. Ground strikes ensued, as did a first-round TKO for the winner and new UFC heavyweight champion.
Colon Surgery
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Six months after he lost his title belt, Lesnar's diverticulitis flared back up. This time, surgery couldn't be put off, and UFC President Dana White said doctors removed about a foot of Lesnar's colon, per Damon Martin of MMAWeekly.com.
The operation cost Lesnar and his fans a date with Junior dos Santos, against whom Lesnar coached on the 13th season of The Ultimate Fighter. But it didn't cost him his career. Lesnar initially pledged to return by early 2012, according to Mike Chiappetta of MMAFighting.com. Turned out he would come back even sooner than that.
A Sad New Year's Eve
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On December 30, 2011, Alistair Overeem dropped and dispatched Lesnar to hand the big man his second consecutive loss.
It was a body kick that did the most damage, and it was almost surreal to watch someone like Lesnar—who has always styled himself as a video game villain who found his way out of the screen—grimace in unadulterated pain.
Only six months after his surgery, how could observers not think "diverticulitis" immediately after that appeared on Lesnar's face?
Lesnar thought it, too. A career that once seemed without a ceiling was brought low, and Lesnar called it quits in the Octagon after the fight.
“I’ve had a really difficult couple of years with my disease,” Lesnar said in the cage after the fight, according to Brian Knapp of Sherdog. “I’m going to officially say that tonight is the last night you will see me in the Octagon."
Return to UFC
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In March 2015, Lesnar announced he had re-signed with the WWE, and that he would never return to MMA as a result.
Someone said something once about saying never. You never say it. That's the saying. Lesnar could have heeded that advice.
In any case, as you know, Lesnar announced a one-off return to the cage for UFC 200. There, he'll face knockout artist Mark Hunt. If there's anyone who can prove or disprove that whole Brock-doesn't-like-to-get-hit thing, it's Hunt, who may be the hardest hitter in the entire sport.
Sure, the payday was certainly a big draw, but according to Lesnar associate Paul Heyman, who spoke to Brian Campbell of ESPN.com, the desire for real competition is a factor, too:
"I think he regretted the fact that he missed a chance to compete at perfect health. It's the one decision in his life he ever was second-guessing and therefore, for his own mindset, I think this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to him because he gets to go back and do something at an age when so few do it.
"
UFC 200 will probably be a bookend for a career that peaked at UFC 100. What kind of punctuation mark it provides will be an open question—until July 9.
Scott Harris writes about MMA for Bleacher Report. For more, follow Scott on Twitter.
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