All the size, skill and he couldn't take a punch.
If you're 30 the first time you get punched in the face, it's hard to adjust I imagine.
Yeah all the training in the world wasn't going to keep him from leaving a trail of piss from the locker room to the cage.
That might be overexaggerating a little bit.
I hated Brock as much as anyone here when he was signed to the UFC.
"Freakshow," I called him.
"Big dumb vanilla gorilla wrestler shithead," was another improper sentence I might have used.
"We're going to be flooded with retarded WWE fans, eventually the companies will merge!"
I may have been a little on the nose with that one and apologize for any voodoo curses I placed on our sport with that.
But...
Coming into the sport, at his age, and doing what he did, was impressive. If he wasn't Brock and he was any other NCAA wrestler who decided to go to MMA, we would have all been massively impressed with him. For the limited amount of training he had with a gym full of yesmen, beating two legitimate HW champions, three if you count Carwin's interim belt, while holding the gold is impressive.
Freak physical specimen that, had he been taking punches to the face since he was 20 in an MMA gym, had never gone to football/wrestling and had been an MMA fighter his entire life, he undoubtedly would have been one of the greats at HW due to sheer physicality and athleticism alone.
Imagine a Lesnar that could take a punch because he was used to it. We saw he has a block head and a pretty solid chin, he was never spark KO'd. Overeem got him out of there with body work. Carwin couldn't KO him. The punch that Cain dropped him with was a perfect massive overhand right that hit Lesnar behind the ear as he was turning, there isn't a human alive that wouldn't go down from that shot and still took like 30 significant strikes to Brock's big dome to TKO him.
Imagine him as a competent kickboxer with that freak strength. Not a K1 champ, just competent. He sent Heath Herring
flying across the octagon with the one "good" punch he threw in his career and he didn't even turn his hips all the way into it. Before Herring can even look up at Brock again, he's already charged across the octagon on top of him. Scary fast for a HW.
Now with all of that, imagine with the top tier wrestling he already had for the division, that he also worked his way up to a black belt in BJJ under the Noguieras or Jean Jacque Machado.
Maybe I'm just jaded with the current generation of mostly fat slobs at HW with a handful of good fighters, but I've always given the thought of a Lesnar who trained MMA from college onwards as one of the scariest HW fighters that could have been. He didn't need to go to Russia in this scenario, he already had top tier American wrestling in his game. Had he after college gone to Holland for a few years and Brazil for a few years, that would have been a terrifying fighter.
