Screw the Haters: Brock Lesnar, More Beast Than Man, Was a UFC God

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

Yesterday I made the mistake of opening up Twitter.

I could stop right there, as you can surely imagine the many dumb things I saw. But chief among them was something I can’t let slide—some impossibly ignorant dipshit claiming the immortal Brock Lesnar was the worst UFC champion of all-time.

Writing about the history of a sport like mixed martial arts is a real challenge. The fanbase changes over frequently, the audience is mostly immune to standard forms of reasoning and the UFC is run by a man whose approach to preserving the sport’s history is to lie about, well, almost everything, erasing all those who came before him in what ESPN’s Jake Rossen called UFC’s auteur theory. Dana White wants people to believe the modern sport is his creation. The truth, of course, is a little more complicated:

The UFC and MMA as we know them today are products of many, many people: the Gracies, who popularized the idea of disparate styles meeting in Brazil; the boxers who would sporadically consent to fighting a wrestler throughout the 20th century; Bill Viola, who strapped headgear and pads on martial artists and let them punch and submit each other in Philadelphia at the height of the Toughman craze; Pat Jordan, who wrote a 1989 Playboy article on Rorion that brought Davie to his academy; Davie and Rorion, who packaged the sport as a commercial property; SEG, which turned it into a viable television product; Joe Silva, who can make sense of the bigger picture in matchmaking; and White and the Fertittas, who used money and connections to make it digestible to the masses.

Worse, it’s not just the sport’s pioneer days that are largely ignored, its creators mostly uncredited. White’s endless feuds with top fighters makes him loathe to give any individual much credit for the sport’s rise, forcing UFC to re-write its origin story again and again. It’s created a sport that exists only in the present, every new champion quickly anointed as the “GOAT”—right up until they lose to Sean Strickland and the cycle starts anew.

Fans of MMA are beyond eager to declare legends of the past “washed” or to proclaim even the best fighters have been “exposed” when they struggle even one iota in the cage. This is an enterprise that only looks forward, with no rear-view mirror allowing even a cursory glance at the past.

And so you end up with an athlete like Brock Lesnar casually disparaged by a cretinous know-nothing on Al Gore’s internet.

Lesnar, simply put, is one of the great fight sport athletes of all-time. Genetically optimized for single combat, he has reigned supreme wherever he’s tread, all traps, sneers and championships. His chest was 56 inches, his biceps a mere 21. His head, unmeasured, appeared to be a block of concrete. Even in worlds dominated by physical specimens way beyond the mean, Lesnar stood out.

"Brock Lesnar is a freak of a man," UFC announcer Joe Rogan told me in a 2016 interview. "That's the deep end of the gene pool. Brock is the creation of generation after generation of Vikings passing on their warrior bloodlines." 

In college, muscles straining against his taut skin, Lesnar won more than 100 matches against just five losses, an NCAA championship his just reward following a dominant senior year.

WWE was his next proving grounds and he excelled there as well, quickly assuming his rightful place at the top of a business that still included the likes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Steve Austin.

"He's a laboratory guy," former WWE Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and Hall of Fame AEW announcer Jim Ross told me in 2015. "If you put all the elements that you wanted in a pro wrestler in a lab, out would walk Brock Lesnar."

In mixed martial arts, he won the UFC title from Randy Couture in just his third appearance in the Octagon. His fists were so large the UFC had to make custom gloves—and his wrestling loomed almost as large. In his fourth fight he wrecked the man who had quickly submitted him in his first foray into the Octagon, multiple time champion Frank Mir.

Lesnar was no mere brute; he was a violent learning machine.

"I had always been taught that being a big, strong guy wasn't enough to win fights," Mir told me in a 2010 interview. "You learn martial arts because you believe technique and intellect can defeat size. But he taught me strength and size do matter. He showed me the error of my ways."

Lesnar was first felled, not by a mortal man, but by his own rebellious body. Diverticulitis nearly killed him. The Brock that returned to the cage after this fierce battle for his life was not the same man who had ruled it before a tiny hole in his digestive track laid him low. He had 12 inches of his colon removed and, with it, some of his fighting spirit. He lost his final two bouts with the company in 2011 and went back to wrestling where he once again ruled the roost.

“That's the deep end of the gene pool.”

-Joe Rogan on Lesnar

In 2016, three days before his 39th birthday, Lesnar was the star attraction at UFC 200 where he casually dismantled a top 10 heavyweight with startling ease before returning to his regularly scheduled life. A subsequent drug test failure may have dimmed that accomplishment in some ways, but the truth was clear—Brock Lesnar remained one of the scariest human beings walking unchained on God’s green Earth.

Even in a sport with no past like MMA, Lesnar has always been a difficult case. He came to UFC from pro wrestling and to pro wrestling he returned. This made him public enemy number one to the handful of MMA fans desperate to distinguish their sport of choice from the other homo-erotic human car crash on the cable dial. Lesnar, in their minds, wasn’t a “real” fighter, meaning his many accomplishments had to be diminished at all costs.

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But if you saw Lesnar with eyes wide open, there is little doubting his stature in this sport. He was arguably the greatest prospect to ever emerge from the primordial wrestling ooze, so good that he was still in the learning stages while reigning as champion and re-writing box office records.

He’s also among the sport’s greatest what-ifs: What if he’d gone straight to the Octagon rather than the WWE ring out of college? What if he’d eaten less meat and more fiber and his body had never betrayed him? What if there wasn’t an arbitrary weight limit of 265 pounds and he could enter the cage at a glorious, gleaming 4800 ounces?

I’ve thought about all these things more often than is probably healthy. Fans in my era were obsessed with the man. Whether they loved him or desperately wanted to see him lose, you couldn’t ignore a talent that vast. Suggesting he was anything but an absolute stud is heresy of the most egregious kind. There was only one Brock Lesnar. Put some respect on his damn name.