When my wife walked into the room shortly after Brock Lesnar’s shocking upset of one of the greatest mixed martial arts fighters of all time Randy Couture she looked around the room at me and some of the other Texas Jiu Jitsu members. After everyone left she asked me if somebody had died. I said no but I was thinking “yeah the sport of mixed martial arts just did.” I don’t know if that’s true or not but it has made me wonder if this will be good or bad for the sport.
The Bad:
Prior to Lesnar’s victory he had a total of 3 mixed martial arts fights, with two of them in the UFC. Out of those three fights he had lost one of them giving him an unimpressive record of 2-1. Most knowledgeable fans of the sport looked at Lesnar the same way we looked at the legendary Kimbo Slice giving Lesnar slightly more credit because of his impressive collegiate wrestling career. After Rick Mir’s 90 second victory over Lesnar most of the old school MMA fans figured that would be the last of him and he would go away.
Then he was given another shot and was able to pull out the victory by riding Heath Hearing for three rounds doing little to know damage and then showing absolutely no class by acting like he was riding a bull or something at the end of the fight. I’m guessing that was something from his fake wrestling days or something. Now my real problem with giving him the shot at the title has nothing to do with him or his past. It has to do with the fact that giving a guy with a 1-1 record a shot at the heavy weight title makes the sport of MMA look like a joke.
I mean imagine if some quarterback got injured right before he was supposed to play in the super bowl and then his team went out and got some guy from a local flag football team to be the quarterback. If that guy was able to lead his team to victory how would anybody ever take professional football seriously if anybody could do it. The fighters and fans of MMA have fought a long time to legitimize this sport that we love so much and try to show the skill and talent it takes to be a competitor in this sport. Having some guy with two fights to be able to become the heavy weight champion is something that is supposed to happen in the WWF not the UFC. It makes it look like anyone with a little talent can just come in and be competitive with out the years of experience needed for any other professional sport.
The Good:
The only good thing really is that it brings attention to the sport and probably will bring in some new fans that will help bring more popularity and more opportunity for MMA fighters who put everything on the line to put on a good show for us the fans. Now I think that Lesnar has responded extremely well to winning the title and has shown a lot of humility by saying that he won’t consider himself to be the true champion until he beats Mir. It’s possible that he could be great for this sport and maybe even get Dana White’s sorry ass to finally get the greatest mixed martial artist in the world Fedor Emelianenko to come and fight in the UFC so that the world can see who the best heavy weight fighter in the world really is. I guess anything is possible in this sport as us true fans know, but one thing I do know is that I’m not really that excited to see Lesnar vs. Mir II. I’m interested to see what some of the other Texas Jiu Jitsu members think so feel free to leave a comment and voice your opinion.
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