Whatever Brock Lesnar is doing, he has a knack for doing it on the biggest stage possible, with an emphasis on the dramatic.
Fittingly, with his challenge of UFC legend Randy Couture for the organization’s heavyweight championship Saturday night, the 2-1 Lesnar faces a living legend who seems perfectly cast as a spoiler to his rise, someone perfectly geared toward upsetting the momentum of a decidedly fast-moving freight train.
Coming off as a pick-em with bookmakers, Lesnar and Couture pose some interesting questions for each other, and the biggest fight of the year.
Lesnar says he’s still taking notes coming off his dominant decision over Heath Herring in August and his preparations leave no stone unturned coming into his championship challenge.
“I learned a lot to relax and control a fight,” said Lesnar on a Nov. 6 media conference call. “Coming off the Herring fight -- we must have watched that fight over 100 times -- we looked for other things I can do to stay busy and dominant. Whether or not (Couture) has weaknesses, he doesn’t have a lot of them, but we’ve got to put him in positions to make him weak. We really had a good camp, and I had a lot of good guys that simulated Randy. Whatever comes out of this fight, I’ll know I did the right thing.”
After losing to Mir on a kneebar in his UFC debut, Lesnar’s brief-yet-explosive showing suggested a fighter with a boatload of potential. Taking Mir to the mat at will, he opened with a furious onslaught, hammering the former UFC heavyweight titleholder with blows before falling victim to the fight-ending submission.
Against Herring, there were no problems whatsoever. Lesnar consistently took the veteran down and controlled him, clearly cognizant of his positioning at all times and stuffing every possible attempt by Herring to escape or submit him. And with the amount of punishment he doled out in the 15-minute thumping, Lesnar showed decent conditioning.
Against Couture, however, that kind of benchmark can prove fruitless. The three-time UFC heavyweight champ has made a career out of grinding people down through superior wrestling and a taxing brand of clinches, takedowns and control. But with Lesnar -- who cuts weight to make 265 -- coming in some 50 pounds heavier, Couture, an outstanding college wrestler who served as an Olympic alternate four times, may have found the one guy who can toss him on his back in the opening moments of the bout. That’s if Lesnar’s lack of experience in MMA doesn’t become a factor before his freakish size and strength does.
While Lesnar has just three fights under his belt, his eye-popping athleticism -- witness the shocking speed with which he pounced on Herring after dropping him in the opening moments of their bout -- suggests a new kind of fighter that might be best served with developmental fights. But when you’re fighting Couture this early in your career, cracks in the still-developing armor could be exploited. Nonetheless, Lesnar insists he is at “100 percent” of his potential coming into the bout.
“I have to push around 230 pounds, and Randy has to push around 275 pounds,” he said. “There’s one thing for me that I understand very well. Randy’s fought big guys, but they don’t know how to wrestle and there’s a difference. Randy knows that too. The bigger guys that Randy has fought, Tim (Sylvia) and Gonzaga, they aren’t half the athlete I am as a wrestler or as a fighter, I don’t think.”
While most casual fans know Lesnar from his pro wrestling exploits, he has become a crossover star precisely because of that misunderstanding of his credentials. What has made him effective thus far is the fact that he was an NCAA heavyweight champion in 2000. Near the end of the Herring bout, some in-cage antics of Lesnar celebrating while his opponent struggled to survive the final seconds drew a lot of attention from fans, with mixed reactions. Whether it’s showmanship or bad sportsmanship, Lesnar remains pretty hard to ignore for anyone watching him fight.
“That was just my feelings, my emotions coming out,” Lesnar said of his actions during the Herring fight. “I was very excited to win that fight, and there were some things said from the Herring camp prior to the fight and it was me getting the last word in and putting the nail in the coffin. I’m a sportsman. I’ve always been a sportsman. That comes down to fans wanting to see good fights and just entertainment. They want entertainment. I have the utmost respect for Randy and I did for the guy I previously fought, but Randy has something that I dearly want and from day one fighting with this company, I want to be the heavyweight champion.”
Lesnar isn’t concerned that he’s getting Couture too soon, that perhaps some more fights would help him round out his game.
“In my mind, before I fought with (Mir), I wanted to come in and fight two or three fights and win those fights and hopefully get a title shot,” Lesnar said. “This has been a blessing in disguise. I wouldn’t even consider Randy as an underdog. He’s a tough son of a bitch. Randy wasn’t an underdog against Gonzaga, nor was he an underdog against Tim Sylvia. I never thought that he was in any of those fights. Randy’s a world-class athlete regardless of his age.”
Couture has been here before. Well established as the UFC’s poster boy killer, he has knocked off Vitor Belfort, Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell when all three were on unbeaten runs that suggested an older fighter was outmatched. In his last UFC bout, an August 2007 stoppage of Gabriel Gonzaga, Couture took out the Brazilian with a hard-nosed display of clinching and rough-and-rumble dirty boxing before finishing off the exhausted Gonzaga, who in his previous bout had scored a huge knockout of Mirko Filipovic. After giving away some 25 pounds in that bout, Couture faces a guy Saturday that will be 50 pounds larger come fight time. For the veteran, it’s the same story all over again.
“I’ve watched the footage that’s out there for Brock, and obviously his most recent endeavor in the Octagon was Heath Herring and I see the differences and see the improvement,” Couture said. “I have a pretty good idea technically of where he’s coming from because we share that similar wrestling background. I’ve wrestled plenty of guys that are Brock’s size. I don’t believe I’ve fought anybody that’s Brock’s size other than Tim (Sylvia). Most of my recent fights, the guys have been pretty large, at least outweighing me by 25 pounds. So those are things I’ve trained and am prepared to deal with.”
There are plenty of ways you could envision Lesnar losing this bout, as well as winning it. Couture has been in so many high-stakes fights that his experience makes him a tough nut to crack. Lesnar hasn’t been put on his back, for instance. And he hasn’t been in an extended, two-way dogfight that often serves as the final test of a fighter’s ability to hang at the top level.
But when a 6-foot-3, 265-pound bulwark of a man has to have special gloves made to fit his ham-like hands (Lesnar has said they’re size XXXXL, thank you), the power he generates even from a glancing blow can change everything. Lesnar’s first punch against Herring knocked the 250-pound Texan halfway across the cage, and Lesnar was seemingly on top of him before he landed. That kind of wild card is what makes Lesnar a factor in any fight, against anyone, even with just three matches under his belt.
Of course if Lesnar gets by Couture, he’ll be rewarded with yet another tough matchup. The winner of Saturday’s title fight will meet the victor of the Dec. 27 Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira-Frank Mir bout that fills out the opening round of the UFC heavyweight title tournament. Either revenge or a showdown with one of the sport’s all-time great heavyweights could be next for Lesnar, but there’s no point in looking that far forward when he’ll be standing across the cage from a legend this weekend.
“All us amateur wrestlers are kind of one breed. If you’re in a wrestling tournament and if you’re gonna even have a thought of winning the tournament, you have to win the first match,” said Lesnar, whose bout with Couture kicks off the four-man field. “This is one big tournament to me and one match at a time and one opponent at a time.”