Lesnar ready to headline UFC 200
The number within the name of this Saturday's volatile MMA event, UFC 200, is big and round and glittery, but its significance is imprecise. The fight card in Las Vegas is not the 200th show in UFC's history. The company attaches numbers just to its pay-per-views, so when you count all of the assorted fight nights on network and cable TV over the promotion's two-decade history, this weekend's fisticuffs will constitute its 363rd event.
More so than any landmark number, testimony to the growth of UFC can be found in the anticipation of Saturday night's card despite a tumultuous week leading up to it. On Wednesday night, Jon Jones, who had been scheduled to fight Daniel Cormier in the co-main event, was ruled ineligible because of a failed drug test.
Quickly, Anderson Silva was lined up to be Cormier's opponent, meaning the card still will feature seven former UFC champions. And while the original co-main event - Brock Lesnar against Mark Hunt - was initially moved to top billing, the marquee was changed the next night to read "UFC 200: Miesha Tate vs. Amanda Nunes," a nod to a defending champion and a feather in the cap of women's MMA.
"Tate is the woman who beat the woman who beat the woman," UFC President Dana White said, referring to her bantamweight belt-winning victory in March over Holly Holm, who four months earlier had knocked out Ronda Rousey. "She's the champ. What she accomplished a few fights ago, you can't disrespect that. She should be the main event. She deserves that."
Suffice to say, all the additions and subtractions did not do a number on UFC 200. The enterprise that began in 1993 as an unfettered testing ground to determine which martial arts discipline would prevail in a fight has become a sports juggernaut reportedly on the verge of selling to Chinese investors for $4.2 billion.
It can be argued that Lesnar is as responsible for that rise as anyone. The crossover star from professional wrestling, who also has credentials as a 2001 NCAA wrestling champion, was once the sport's biggest attraction, both literally and figuratively. Within three fights of his 2008 UFC debut, Lesnar won the heavyweight belt, becoming the biggest champion in the biggest promotion in MMA. He was commonly acknowledged (and self-proclaimed) as the baddest man on the planet.
But that was before multiple surgeries to address an intestinal illness slowed him down and abruptly halted his fighting career.
To put Lesnar's absence from the octagon in perspective, here's another number relevant to UFC 200: 1,653. That's the amount of days it will have been since Lesnar last stepped into the cage. It has been just more than 41/2 years since the onetime leading man's feeble swan song against Alistair Overeem, his second straight first-round TKO defeat.
But though diverticulitis took Lesnar out of the fight game, it didn't take the fight out of Lesnar. He spent the past four years in the WWE, where the fighting is staged but the money is real, and the competitor in him was unfulfilled.
"It haunted me for a long time, so, well, what do you do?" said Lesnar, who turns 39 on Tuesday. "Here I am. Before it's too late, I want to get back in the cage and have some fun with it. This is all about having fun."
It's debatable whether stepping into a cage with Hunt constitutes fun, especially for a ground fighter such as Lesnar. During his first stint in the UFC, he did not always react well when punches were aimed his way.
And throwing punches is Hunt's forte. Six of his seven UFC victories have come by knockout, and the former K1 kickboxing world champion has authored those knockouts with style. He has become known for the walkoff knockout - felling his foe with one punch, then turning and walking away in confidence that his job is done.