The truth Hurts-Caged animal Lesnar will unleash UFC's golden age

[Guest baseball25]

 

Brock Lesnar doesn't care about me, and that drives me nuts. He competes in a sport still trying to break all the way through into mainstream media acceptance, which means he should court me, and people like me. But he doesn't. He doesn't care about the media at all, which makes me care about him more than I ever thought possible.

Lesnar's apathy makes me want to hop a plane to Fargo, rent a car and drive to his farm in the middle of Nowhere, Minn., and spy on him from the woods outside his cabin where he ice fishes and girds his gargantuan body for UFC battle.

   

Brock Lesnar's mauling of Frank Mir at UFC 100 on Saturday is what MMA is all about. (Getty Images)   

Lesnar's apathy toward me -- and let's be honest, his apathy toward you as well -- is going to make him the biggest thing in MMA since, um, ever.

The fact that he might just kill somebody someday doesn't hurt, either.

Naysayers and those who pooh-pooh professionally won't agree with this, and that's fine. Mixed martial arts, which in this country (and for the rest of this column) is synonymous with the UFC, isn't going to cross over into full-blown respectability by courting the pooh-pooh vote. Those people, and there are a lot of them, aren't ever going to like this sport. Not ever. It's too violent. Too raw.

Too real.

They'd rather watch plastic people play golf, and that's fine. Somebody has to, except for when Tiger Woods isn't playing. And then nobody wants to.

Lesnar wasn't going to win them over even if he had been on his best behavior Saturday night at UFC, which of course he wasn't. First, Lesnar used Frank Mir's face to polish his knuckles. By the time this fight was finished, Mir looked like the Elephant Man. His face was a lopsided, misshapen mess. Naysayers and those who pooh-pooh professionally don't like that stuff, which is fine. Watch tennis. You babies.

But then Lesnar really got nasty. In a sport known for camaraderie among fighters, even (and especially) fighters who have just fought each other, Lesnar broke the code. He walked over to Mir, and instead of checking on his health, he gloated about the beat down. And then when the crowd booed, Lesnar flipped them off. With both hands. As he stalked the cage like an animal.

And then he mocked one of the sponsors, a beer company that was sponsoring the night's festivities but wasn't sponsoring Lesnar specifically, which apparently ticked him off.

None of that post-beat-down stuff sat well with UFC president Dana White, who is as crude as they come. If he's offended by something, wow. That must be some pretty offensive stuff.

And still I say Lesnar will become the biggest star this sport has ever seen. Still I say that what happened Saturday night -- all of it, because his role in UFC 100 lasted just 10 minutes from start to brutal finish and therefore can't really be sliced into segments -- will give the sport another boost toward its inevitable breakthrough.

• Burkholder: Lesnar's attitude not bad for sport ... just for opponent

Because we're drawn to this stuff. It's primal or instinctual. Witness the aftermath of UFC 100, which didn't just fade away -- like most UFC cards do -- when the pay-per-view went off the air. Even comrade Ray Ratto, a good man even if he is a naysayer, wrote about it in the wake of UFC 100. Beats writing about the Giants or A's, but that's not the point. Point is, people are writing about UFC 100. They're writing about Lesnar.

Are they writing negatively? Some of them, sure. But so what? A year from now, you won't remember the negative stuff (unless I write it; and then you people have elephantine memories). You'll just remember the brand. The UFC. And maybe along the way you will have sampled a show to see what all the fuss is about. Maybe UFC 101 or 102.

If you're lucky, you'll sample the next show featuring Lesnar.

The guy is charismatic as hell. He's charismatic for the wrong reasons, but so be it. He's charismatic. Magnetic. He spent the buildup to UFC 100 alternately snarling and yawning at the media, and by extension, you. He's not a professional wrestler anymore, but Lesnar is still a villain -- a villain like Hannibal Lecter from the Silence of the Lambs series. He's a bad guy you want to see win. Or maybe that was just me rooting for Lecter ...

Anyway, that's Lesnar. He's so bad, so repulsive, that he's good. Frank Mir seems like a great guy, and if he had broken Lesnar's arm on Saturday night that would have been fine by me. But the only thing better than seeing him destroy Lesnar was seeing him get destroyed by Lesnar.

Win or lose, Lesnar is fascinating. And since any fighter can afford to lose only a few times before we lose interest ... Lesnar needs to win for now. To stay on the radar.

And Lesnar on the radar is the best thing for the UFC. Some people know him from his days as an All-American college wrestler. Millions more know him from his days in the WWE. And now millions more are starting to know him as the most fearsome fighter in the UFC.

UFC fighters are mayhem machines, all of them, capable of knocking you out or choking you unconscious. After beating Joe Stevenson to a bloody pulp at UFC 80 in January 2008, lightweight champion B.J. Penn licked the blood off his gloves in post-fight frenzy. They're predators, but Lesnar is the most perfect predator of them all. He's like a great white shark, bigger and badder than even the most terrifying creatures in the ocean.

And what draws the biggest ratings on Discovery Channel?

Shark Week. As long as it's not ours, most of us love the sight of blood.

[silentassasin]

Great article, hit the nail right square on the head!