Lesnar-Mir Quick Quotes
Joe Hall Jul 1, 2009
UFC 100 is approaching, and Brock
Lesnar and Frank Mir are
headlining. The two heavyweight champions -- one holding an interim
title and the other punctuating a “direct” lineage that long ago
went crooked as a question mark (which is which, Lesnar or Mir,
interim or direct, soon won’t matter anymore, thankfully) -- had a
conference call chat Wednesday and said the following:
Lesnar snips back at Mir for suggesting he fights for money
Here’s the crack Mir took at Lesnar in May, courtesy of
MMA Weekly: “I’m a martial artist; he’s a professional fighter.
He fights because he gets paid to fight. If the UFC were to go
bankrupt tomorrow, a month later I would still be in some small
organization fighting. Not because I need to; my house is paid off,
my cars are paid; I don’t need the money as far as desperately. I
fight because I enjoy fighting. I enjoy the preparation and the
training and the mindset, everything that goes behind it. I don’t
know if we can say the same about Lesnar. If Lesnar was making
$10,000, would he show up to fight?”
Lesnar’s response Wednesday: “He has his desires to fight, and I’ve got mine. I truly love what I’m doing. It just so happens that I get paid a lot more money than he does. At the end of the day, whoever’s happy, that’s his prerogative. I’m happy with the way I’m doing it. Hopefully he’s happy with the way he’s doing it.”
“That’s one thing, to be honest with you, that’s hard to watch tape on,” Mir said of Lesnar’s rapid progression. “You don’t know how much more he’s going to improve every fight. You watch and say, ‘Wow, he really made a mistake in his fight with how overeager he is. He’s just flying across the cage. That will take a couple of fights for him to get over that.’ And then the next fight, from Heath to Randy, you see him very composed. I remember my trainers were like, ‘Hey, man, is he just standing there and actually fighting strike for strike instead of just bullrushing across the cage?’ I’m like, ‘Wow, that only took one fight to fix that.’
“It makes it difficult on my part to sit there and assess what we’re going to prepare for. On the flip side of that, I guess, to make it easy, we just went ahead and prepared for the worst case scenario: that Brock knows everything I know about mixed martial arts, and on top of that he’s stronger and bigger and faster than I am. That’s what you have to train.”
Lesnar adding to his game, not his bulk
“I hardly lift weights anymore,” Lesnar said. “I lift weights, but that’s not my main focus here. I bill myself as a fighter now, and I want to evolve and make myself a well-rounded fighter. So obviously I’m not going to leave any stone unturned when it comes to submissions, submission defense, striking, knees, leg kicks and also learning to defend everything.”
Mir’s boxing epiphanies
“The boxing thing,” Mir said, “I’ve really fallen in love with it because I’ve realized that out of all the different arts, technique is probably the most important in boxing. … It’s funny cause once you hit a certain level with technique and training, you have not these little tiny developments but these huge bursts, like, ‘Wow, I just learned how to do 15 different things better right now.’ Every time I go, like last night I remember I was throwing, for example, a certain punch and all of a sudden it just clicked on how I was rotating my hips and throwing the punch and relaxing. After I made contact, I noticed I was stiffening up after shots. It’s something I’ve always done … but it never clicked. All of a sudden, last night after I threw a punch, I was extremely relaxed, not just before the strike … but after the strike.
“That’s the thing about boxing; there are just so many details. How you put your toe on the ground affects the punch. You can’t ever, ever actually master it. It seems like the more you do it, the better you get at it and you have these breakthroughs.”
Lesnar not listening to critics
“I don’t go around looking for any respect,” said Lesnar when asked whether he gets the respect he deserves. “I just try to get in and do my job. I guess the main thing is, I enjoy what I’m doing. I got the best job in the world, I think. It’s great. I get paid to train, paid to fight. I’m home with my family every night. There’s four million people without jobs right now. I’m lucky and feel very fortunate. There’s going to be critics out there and there’s going to be jealous people. There’s going to be people who want to be your friend. No, I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks.”
Mir on the fighter’s mentality
“It’s the same kind of guy that will jump out of an airplane, same kind of guy that goes bungee jumping, same kind of guy that signs up to go in the military and doesn’t just sign up to go fix cars; he wants to sign up to be a Ranger, be the first guy into battle,” Mir said. “That risk-taker type mentality, where you have a lack of inhibition for your ability to move forward.”
Mir can’t hang out at Wal-Mart anymore
Mir-Lesnar is of course headlining UFC 100, a number that has sparked a good deal of reflection among fight scribes (and probably confusion, then anger, over how to chronicle all those unnumbered events, the trips to Japan and Brazil, the Ultimate Ultimate redundancies, UFC 37.5 and so on and so forth). Anyway, Mir distilled MMA past and present into one fight, Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar, which he considers the turning point.
“I could be at Wal-Mart, hanging out, shopping with my wife or whatever and the casual fan wouldn’t recognize me five years ago,” Mir said. “But now it’s at the point, because of that fight and the popularity of the UFC now, typically I can’t even get out of the car to go in the gas station without signing an autograph or taking a picture with somebody.”
Lesnar snips back at Mir for suggesting he fights for money
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Lesnar’s response Wednesday: “He has his desires to fight, and I’ve got mine. I truly love what I’m doing. It just so happens that I get paid a lot more money than he does. At the end of the day, whoever’s happy, that’s his prerogative. I’m happy with the way I’m doing it. Hopefully he’s happy with the way he’s doing it.”
Mir training for an opponent he hasn’t really
seen
“That’s one thing, to be honest with you, that’s hard to watch tape on,” Mir said of Lesnar’s rapid progression. “You don’t know how much more he’s going to improve every fight. You watch and say, ‘Wow, he really made a mistake in his fight with how overeager he is. He’s just flying across the cage. That will take a couple of fights for him to get over that.’ And then the next fight, from Heath to Randy, you see him very composed. I remember my trainers were like, ‘Hey, man, is he just standing there and actually fighting strike for strike instead of just bullrushing across the cage?’ I’m like, ‘Wow, that only took one fight to fix that.’
“It makes it difficult on my part to sit there and assess what we’re going to prepare for. On the flip side of that, I guess, to make it easy, we just went ahead and prepared for the worst case scenario: that Brock knows everything I know about mixed martial arts, and on top of that he’s stronger and bigger and faster than I am. That’s what you have to train.”
Lesnar adding to his game, not his bulk
“I hardly lift weights anymore,” Lesnar said. “I lift weights, but that’s not my main focus here. I bill myself as a fighter now, and I want to evolve and make myself a well-rounded fighter. So obviously I’m not going to leave any stone unturned when it comes to submissions, submission defense, striking, knees, leg kicks and also learning to defend everything.”
Mir’s boxing epiphanies
“The boxing thing,” Mir said, “I’ve really fallen in love with it because I’ve realized that out of all the different arts, technique is probably the most important in boxing. … It’s funny cause once you hit a certain level with technique and training, you have not these little tiny developments but these huge bursts, like, ‘Wow, I just learned how to do 15 different things better right now.’ Every time I go, like last night I remember I was throwing, for example, a certain punch and all of a sudden it just clicked on how I was rotating my hips and throwing the punch and relaxing. After I made contact, I noticed I was stiffening up after shots. It’s something I’ve always done … but it never clicked. All of a sudden, last night after I threw a punch, I was extremely relaxed, not just before the strike … but after the strike.
“That’s the thing about boxing; there are just so many details. How you put your toe on the ground affects the punch. You can’t ever, ever actually master it. It seems like the more you do it, the better you get at it and you have these breakthroughs.”
Lesnar not listening to critics
“I don’t go around looking for any respect,” said Lesnar when asked whether he gets the respect he deserves. “I just try to get in and do my job. I guess the main thing is, I enjoy what I’m doing. I got the best job in the world, I think. It’s great. I get paid to train, paid to fight. I’m home with my family every night. There’s four million people without jobs right now. I’m lucky and feel very fortunate. There’s going to be critics out there and there’s going to be jealous people. There’s going to be people who want to be your friend. No, I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks.”
Mir on the fighter’s mentality
“It’s the same kind of guy that will jump out of an airplane, same kind of guy that goes bungee jumping, same kind of guy that signs up to go in the military and doesn’t just sign up to go fix cars; he wants to sign up to be a Ranger, be the first guy into battle,” Mir said. “That risk-taker type mentality, where you have a lack of inhibition for your ability to move forward.”
Mir can’t hang out at Wal-Mart anymore
Mir-Lesnar is of course headlining UFC 100, a number that has sparked a good deal of reflection among fight scribes (and probably confusion, then anger, over how to chronicle all those unnumbered events, the trips to Japan and Brazil, the Ultimate Ultimate redundancies, UFC 37.5 and so on and so forth). Anyway, Mir distilled MMA past and present into one fight, Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar, which he considers the turning point.
“I could be at Wal-Mart, hanging out, shopping with my wife or whatever and the casual fan wouldn’t recognize me five years ago,” Mir said. “But now it’s at the point, because of that fight and the popularity of the UFC now, typically I can’t even get out of the car to go in the gas station without signing an autograph or taking a picture with somebody.”
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