Following months of seemingly endless Conor McGregor news, rumor, and speculation, the hype of former champion Brock Lesnar’s return has overshadowed even ‘The Notorious’ in MMA newswaves of late. With Lesnar returning to the Octagon for a highly anticipated showdown with Mark Hunt in the co-main event of July 9’s UFC 200 from Las Vegas,
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Following months of seemingly endless Conor McGregor news, rumor, and speculation, the hype of former champion Brock Lesnar’s return has overshadowed even ‘The Notorious’ in MMA newswaves of late.
With Lesnar returning to the Octagon for a highly anticipated showdown with Mark Hunt in the co-main event of July 9’s UFC 200 from Las Vegas, it seems the fighting community is torn about just what kind of shape ‘The Beast’ will actually come back in.
But one man already has his mind firmly made up, and that’s fellow former UFC champion and pro wrestler Josh Barnett. During an appearance on yesterday’s (Mon., June 13, 2016) “The MMA Hour,” Barnett gave a less-than-stellar prediction of how Lesnar will return to the cage:
“I don’t know what he’s done from then until now, but being out of it as long as he has, I don’t think he’s going to be stepping into the cage a better fighter than he was when he left.”
Much of the doubt surrounding Lesnar’s ability to win at UFC 200 surrounds his well known disdain for taking punches to the face, a glaring weak spot against the power-punching Hunt to be sure. Barnett furthered that opinion, noting that while there are ways around it, Lesnar is in for a tough fight:
“I don’t know, if he doesn’t like to get hit, that’s one thing, but you can work your way around that to a degree,” Barnett said. “You can at least try to condition him to get more used to the idea of it with the right kind of drills and the right kind of set-ups. But at the same time, you need to make sure that that guy can go in there and when everything is as tumultuous as it is inside that cage, when the fire is on, he can go through it and not get burnt.”
Yet even despite the fact he’s set to face arguably the hardest hitter in the history of the sport, Barnett still won’t rule Lesnar out. If he’s going to compete with ‘The Super Samoan,’ however, Barnett said Lesnar has to be at the gym training like a fighter with real fighters, and that’s something he doesn’t believe is going on with Lesnar. If he does not, according to ‘The Warmaster,’ then his massive potential will continue to go untapped:
“Of course he has a chance. He’s a tank,” Barnett said. “He’s got an incredible wrestling background. He’s a great physical specimen. He’s no dummy. Brock is a smart guy, and I still think he is a massive wealth of untapped potential. It’s just that – it has not been tapped. It has not been approached the right way. I would be surprised if his prep leading up to this is really what myself, hell, I’m at the gym right now training my fighters that all have matches coming up. And as a trainer, as someone that’s trained people for world championship matches, I just don’t think that the right approach is being taken with him.”
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