The Lesnar Factor: Death Of Martial Arts Or Evolution Of Fighting?

Before UFC 91, I vehemently criticized the match making, regularly questioning why the UFC would put Lesnar, a fighter with only a few fights under his belt, in for a championship bout against a legend of MMA.

In the end, Lesnar won by sheer size advantage, and I hated him for it. I thought, "How could people validate this star of 'fake wrestling' as being a real fighter?" Well, I think that now I understand Dana White's motive in drawing in business via the villain-factor, but more importantly I understand how Brock Lesnar has actually helped MMA.

In the beginning, I discredited the guy a lot for being nothing but a brute that has little skill and so forth. The truth of the matter is that if you compare Lesnar's MMA experience with many of the UFC fighters, it's minimal.

The truth is that if you consider whether or not Lesnar deserved the title shot for the UFC heavyweight championship, he didn't. The important question to ask, then, is why hasn't he been beaten up?

After much contemplation since Lesnar's UFC debut, I now realize something: people hate Lesnar for the same reason many Gracie students regularly discredit Eddie Bravo.

Granted Bravo has built an underground empire based on skill and that is slowly growing in popularity, the reason for its dislike is often the same as the frequent dislike of Lesnar: he throws a kink into things. On the whole, Lesnar really shouldn't be much of a threat, but there he looms.....

If one of the tenets of martial arts is technique over size, and if Dana White is correct in saying that the UFC has the best fighters in the world (with which I agree), where lies the real weakness?

If the classic martial arts philosophy says that it shows you how to handle a bigger opponent by utilizing technique over skill, shouldn't Couture, Herring and Mir have each man-handled Lesnar?

Mir got completely lucky catching him in a submission, Couture gave him the toughest fight to date but was overwhelmed by his size, and Herring lasted to a decision after merely surviving the bout, and to date Lesnar hasn't been handled by some of the more skilled technicians in the UFC. Granted he has a long way to go, he still hasn't been beaten other than by luck by Mir.

Mir bragged that his skill was superior to Lesnar's and that out of 100 fights that he would beat Lesnar 99 times. In the first fight, it's true that Mir's skill served him in victory by landing a knee bar--a very lucky submission on Mir's part. Nobody can deny that he was getting beat up before he landed the submission, and it's true that Mir deserves credit in landing the submission.

What people haven't brought up a lot is that this is probably one of the most basic BJJ 101 submissions taught. Sure, Mir brought it up in mockery towards Lesnar, but he didn't mention how lucky he was to land it.

Yes, it happened, and Mir capitalized greatly off of it. But now that Lesnar knows about it and has grown his skill, I'm willing to bet he won't make many of those novice mistakes any longer, which he at least proved to some degree in UFC 100.

In determining why many MMA fans often hate Lesnar, let's look at a very simplified history of the UFC. As I see it, this has been the evolution of fighting in MMA since the UFC:

Everyone up until the 90s thought Boxing, Kickboxing and Karate were the best forms of fighting. The grapplers/wrestlers did away with that and not necessarily proved that Jiu Jitsu and Wrestling are better fighting styles but the best to exploit other more static styles that stick to mere strikes.

Then a lot of the fighters learned to wrestle and grapple, and they took the gi away and thus took the grip advantage away and neutralized the game a bit. Then it became how much of both stand up and ground phase you knew.

Now, though, you put this huge mass of a man in the heavy weight division that really can only wrestle, and nobody has truly dominated him to date. Yes, he needs more fights, but he's a complex puzzle in a way. A guy who's 265 lbs after cutting weight and can move like a light weight in many respects, so the conundrum of Lesnar has yet to be dispelled.

In the beginning of the UFC, the grapplers proved to be more skilled and were able to dominate the UFC. But even in UFC 3 when Royce Gracie fought Kimo, Kimo took Gracie's back at one point.

Had he even the slightest knowledge of submissions, Gracie very well would have been finished since he was so overpowered and exhausted in that match. After that fight, nobody could deny that brute force slipped through the cracks.

But Lesnar is a different beast. Instead of slipping through the cracks to have force dominate technique, Mir was the one who got lucky.

So now they've disproved the traditional martial arts again in that if an opponent that is just a bit too big to take down (like Couture couldn't take him down) and just a bit too strong to overpower (nobody has truly stood toe-to-toe with him), he might not be very beatable.

A lot of folks, including myself, responded by saying, "Just wait until someone his size gets in there with him," though I now realize that such a tactic is one of force and not technique.

By mixing wrestlers in with kick boxers and so forth, a dog from every town came to the UFC looking to win. From competition comes adaptation, and now we have Lesnar, who to many fans is nothing more than a temporary obstacle for the other, more skilled fighters, but for many fighters he is a force to be reckoned with.

So now we have to ask, has martial arts, in a way, evolved beyond its own philosophy?