(“The fact you would even bring Barthelme into this discussion tells me everything I need to know about your view of so-called postmodern literature, Mir. Seriously, grad school is over, man.”)
We’re still 10 days out from the scheduled release of Brock Lesnar’s autobiography and – if you’re like us – it’s getting hard to wait, since you already expunged your spring reading list by powering through “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “The Emperor of All Maladies” over the weekend. What can you say? You are a fucking voracious reader. Luckily for you, the fine folks at literary giant Harper Collins have served up a fairly lengthy excerpt from the former UFC heavyweight champion’s upcoming opus “Death Clutch” to keep you sated until the actual publication date.
Some of the middle-aged ladies who work at HC have even been tweeting links to the outtakes from Lesnar’s book – something we bet they never thought they’d be doing when they got into publishing – and so we checked it out. Oddly, we were sort of delighted with what we found. Firstly, it turns out that Lesnar finds a way to dis Frank Mir in the book’s very first paragraph. We read that and started thinking, ‘OK Brock, you have our attention.’ Look for Mir to fire back in his upcoming memoir “Confessions of a Strip Club Bouncer.” After the jump however, Lesnar gets the first word …
“I’m supposed to be better than that,” Lesnar writes (through ghostwriter Paul Heyman) on the topic of his loss to Mir at UFC 81. “I handed this guy, who will never be half the man I am, a victory he didn’t deserve.”
Now see, that’s the kind of stuff that we can imagine coming out of Lesnar’s mouth pretty much word-for-word during whatever assumedly extensive interviews he conducted with Heyman to enable the former professional wrestling promoter to write this book. It also seems like Paul E. is pretty much following the celebrity autobiography script of starting with a dramatic dark moment that will hook the audience from the first line. That way you can build them back up for the triumph at the end, which we assume involves Lesnar battling back from diverticulitis to defeat Shane Carwin at UFC 116. Not to spoil it for you.
On the topic of his stomach ailment, the book provides a description we’re just as certain Lesnar did not come up with himself. It does sound pretty bad though, and is made all the more poignant since we know the big fella is going through it all over again right now. No wonder the dude couldn’t properly train for Junior dos Santos. Check out this description of the pain:
“It felt like I had taken a shotgun blast to the stomach,” Lesnar writes, “and then someone poured in some salt and Tabasco and stirred it all up with a nasty pitchfork.”
Yuck.
The excerpt further delves into Lesnar’s ill-fated trip to Canada, where it says he fell sick during a family vacation and things got so bad he had to be carried to the car by his brother. Dear God. Lesnar has a brother? And he can carry Brock? Well, shit, now we gotta read this.
For more Lesnar-fied goodness, we suggest you do yourself a favor and follow that link to the entire excerpt. Plus we like to think some eyebrows will be raised over at the Harper Collins IT department when they see a spike in their referrals from a site called CagePotato.com. Who knows, maybe they’ll even reach out to us and we can finally pitch that novel we’ve been working on for years: It’s a picaresque set in Argentina during the turbulent 1960s. A rebellious giant falls in love with a clubfooted woman and together they forge an unlikely … ah, forget it … you think it’s stupid. No, really, forget we said anything. We were just joking. Seriously guys, you couldn’t tell we were just joking? A novel? Come on, you know us better than that …