Tag: Shane Carwin

Before Brock Lesnar stepped in to the Octagon, he first signed a deal with K-1 Heros. He made is MMA debut on June 2, 2007 on the K-1 Dynamite!! USA show.

K-1 hoped to put together the largest North American MMA event in the sport’s history, as they held the event at the Los Angeles Coliseum. They succeeded, selling approximately 44,000 tickets, but that record was later broken by UFC 129.

In his mixed martial arts debut, Lesnar was scheduled to take on Hong Man Choi. However, Choi was not issued a license to fight by the California State Athletic Commission, which left K-1 Heros without an opponent for their main event.

On short notice, Korean Min Soo Kim stepped in to face Lesnar. At the time, Kim was sporting a 2-5, which made him a great opponent to introduce Lesnar to mixed martial arts.

It didn’t take long for Brock to assert his dominance against the over-matched Kim. It took Lesnar only 69 seconds to get a takedown, land a few punches that left Kim’s face a mess, and earn the TKO victory.

After his impressive debut, he was signed by the UFC. The rest is history.

Without the king of UFC pay-per-view, UFC 131 won’t reach 500k buys.

Even though he is no longer the UFC heavyweight champion, Brock Lesnar is the undisputed pound-for-pound champion when it comes to selling pay-per-views.

So far in his career, Lesnar has headlined three major events—UFC 100 and UFC 116, and UFC 121.

UFC 100 did over 1.6 million buys, UFC 116 did nearly 1.1 million buys, and UFC 121 drew in around 1.2 million buys.

The only other event to come close to that mark was UFC 114, which did somewhere between 950k and 1 million buys.

Now instead of Lesnar vs Junior dos Santos headlining, you have Shane Carwin vs dos Santos trying to bear the weight of UFC 131 on their shoulders.

For this pay-per-view to sell, it will really need some help from its supporting cast. To be frank, it just isn’t there.

You have a few named fighters there like Kenny Florian, Demian Maia, and Mark Munoz on the pay-per-view portion of the card, but will that be enough to help this event out?

No way.

While there are some that are arguing that Carwin vs dos Santos is a better match, it sure isn’t in the eyes of Dana White and the rest of Zuffa.

For nearly two months now, The Ultimate Fighter reality show has been getting whoever is watching it pumped up for Lesnar vs dos Santos. Now they have to settle for Carwin vs dos Santos.

With a let-down of a main event, combined with a relatively weak undercard, UFC 131 will be lucky to do half the buys it would have had Brock Lesnar still been headlining the card.

Do not be surprised at all if you see numbers for this event just slightly north of what UFC 130 does at the end of this month.

Despite not performing at 100 percent, he was still performing at a high enough level to wear UFC gold.

Brock Lesnar accomplished what very few accomplished in only their 5th professional fight in any combat sport—win a major championship.

The closest that comes to mind was when Leon Spinks, in his 8th professional fight, defeated the great Muhammad Ali for boxing’s heavyweight title.

What makes Lesnar’s accomplishment even more impressive is that he won the title when he was not firing on all cylinders.

After his being diagnosed with diverticulitis following his bout against Frank Mir at UFC 100 for the heavyweight title, the doctors treating Lesnar stated that with his illness, his body was only functioning at around 70 to 80 percent. 

That is scary.

If Brock was able to do what he did while only performing at 80 percent of his natural physical ability, can you imagine what he would be capable of at 100 percent?

The only two losses in his career came against Frank Mir and Cain Velasquez.

In his loss to Mir, Lesnar was submitted with a knee bar. This was after he put a beating on Mir. Based on his follow-up performance against Heath Herring, it is safe to assume that he was healthy during that fight.

His loss against Velasquez came with the challenger to his title pounded his way to a TKO victory. The way Velasquez defeated Lesnar was not unlike the way Shane Carwin almost beat him.

The difference in the Velasquez fight was Brock did not display any sort of defense aside from putting his arms in front of his face. In the fight against Carwin, Lesnar did the same thing, only he utilized head movement to make a majority of Carwin’s punches miss their mark.

With this news breaking of his illness, one has to wonder if it had any affect on Lesnar’s performance against Velasquez. Everyone who saw that fight could notice there was something that just wasn’t right about Lesnar that night.

As this story develops, answers to these questions may come to light.

As it was reported on Thursday, Brock Lesnar was forced to pull out of his upcoming fight against Junior dos Santos due to another case of diverticulitis.

The bout was to take place at UFC 131 in Vancouver to determine who would be the No. 1 contender to heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez’s throne.

In the days and weeks to come, there will be more and more news to surface regarding this situation. As it is released, you can bet that it will be updated here.

There’s also no better time to take a look back at Brock’s short—yet accomplished—mixed martial arts career. How will this all affect his career moving forward? How will it affect the UFC moving forward?

While all these questions will be answered over time, we will take a look at what could happen.

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