Former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar is making his mixed martial arts (MMA) return in the UFC 200 pay-per-view (PPV) co-main event, which is scheduled for the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sat., July 9, 2016.
That’s where the WWE import will face brick-fisted “Super Samoan” Mark Hunt, a former K-1 kickboxing champion who made a career out of putting giant men to sleep. With that in mind, we should probably expect Lesnar to get “wrecked” on fight night.
But … but … what about Lesnar’s wrestling? Chael Sonnen breaks it down for Submission Radio:
“He wasn’t a really good wrestler, he was an effective wrestler. I’ll put this in perspective for you. In the NCAA when he won his national title, he was 265 pounds, which was the limit. In the finals, he had a guy that was 220 pounds and he had to go into double overtime with him. There’s not very many wrestlers alive, if any, that if they had a forty-five-pound weight advantage couldn’t put that guy away in about thirty seconds. So he was an effective wrestler, but you know, he had some size and he had a lot of other things to help him get his hand raised. It wasn’t skill and technique. He kept good position, he was a good competitor and he achieved some really great things. So I don’t think that a guy as short as Hunt is just gonna get bum-rushed and taken down. You gotta understand, Brock hasn’t been in the ring in five years, Hunt was the number one contender within the last calendar year. So no, you don’t have to be exactly an MMA expert to be able to see how this fight goes. Hunt’s gonna wreck him. But Brock’s still stepping in there, and he’s a once-in-a-lifetime attraction. If Brock’s fighting, you don’t want to miss it. And this truly will be his last fight. Anytime there’s speculation “is this gonna be the guy’s last fight?” that helps to draw, that helps make you go “I don’t wanna miss it”. For sure this is Brock’s last fight. So yeah man, people want to see it. I’m one of those people.”
I saw the “one-in-a-million athlete” pin The Rock at SummerSlam, so I don’t know where Chael is getting his information from.
Lesnar (5-3) has been out of action for nearly five years, suffering back-to-back technical knockout losses to Cain Velasquez (UFC 121) and Alistair Overeem (UFC 141), compounding his existing struggles with diverticulitis. Those losses — as well as his decision to not re-sign in 2015 — “haunted” him on a daily basis.
Now he’s back … but is he better than ever? Time will tell.