Frank Mir knows what he speaks of, being a TKO victim of Brock Lesnar’s takedowns and ground-and-pound (GnP) in their second UFC fight. A reversal of roles less than a year after he submitted the former WWE headliner in their first encounter, which also served as the latter’s UFC debut fight.
His exact words from this article by Kevin Iole found on Yahoo! Sports:
Hey, if he (Overeem) hits you in the first two minutes, he could knock down a house. I’m not taking that away from him. Is he explosive? Absolutely. But the other guy [Lesnar] has the same thing. Brock is just as explosive, if not more. Brock is just as powerful, if not more. But when you’ve wrestled, are you telling me the striking is going to get easier as the fight goes on? No way. The only way Overeem wins that fight is if he can knock Brock out in the first minute, minute-and-a-half.
He’s also watched outside the octagon how Lesnar himself fell prey to the GnP of Shane Carwin and Cain Velasquez, with opposite results.
Lesnar survived Carwin’s fists and later submitted his challenger to keep his crown. Then, less than four months later, he got pulverized by Velasquez until the referee stoppage sealed his defeat.
Even when he lost his UFC heavyweight belt to Velasquez, Lesnar wasn’t lying when he said, “…I’ve taken a lot of shots. I’ve never been knocked out cold.”
No matter the difference in the outcomes of these two fights, they have one thing in common: Lesnar, indeed, did not get knocked out. He tried to survive each time, without tapping out despite the battery.
Lesnar may get rattled with powerful strikes, but he has shown that he has the resiliency and will to weather them, successfully or not.
Unless Lesnar’s chin has been softened up significantly by all the GnP he’s taken, beating the UFC cash cow via striking will always be a grind.
For Overeem to successfully beat the former UFC heavyweight champion, he has to do a Velasquez and rock him early in any given round (ideally the first), to give him ample time to deal out punishment and eke out a TKO—or maybe even Lesnar’s first KO loss.
Otherwise, if The Reem “only” staggers him late in a round, expect Lesnar to hang on and be saved by the bell. Then, he can recover during the break and rebound in the next five minutes, as he did versus Carwin. (This is unless he gets sufficiently dazed in the prior round and can’t regain his bearings for the next.)
And UFC 141 on December 30th will be a long—or short—night for The Reem, in his disfavor.
Sure, he was able to stuff Fabricio Werdum’s takedown attempts in their Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix Quarterfinal fight, but against a top-caliber wrestler in Lesnar?
The Dutch Cyclone, with 19 of his 35 career wins coming by way of submission, can always try to out-grapple the American champion wrestler.
Tough luck, though, as Lesnar learned to avoid getting submitted by the best submission artist in MMA’s heavyweight class in their rematch, the very fighter quoted in this article: Frank Mir.
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