He was also, for the first time, not the focal point of WWE’s plans going forward. Eddie Guerrero had assumed the mantle of champion and was doing good business. When he beat Lesnar for the title, there were no plans to put Brock back on top. He was also scheduled to lose a series of matches to the Undertaker, something Lesnar still wasn’t quite comfortable with despite years in the wrestling business. He decided, instead of weathering the storm and enjoying his unprecedented seven-year, $1-million-a-year guaranteed contract, to quit the business. WrestleMania XX would be his last match with the company.
When word leaked, fans were furious. His opponent, Bill Goldberg, was also leaving the company and the fans let both men hear it. Chanting, “You sold out,” and “This match sucks,” wrestling fans spoke for many in the industry who weren’t happy with the two stars who had been given everything so quickly and appreciated nothing. Guest referee “Stone Cold” Steve Austin closed the book on both men’s WWE careers with his signature stunner in the middle of the ring.
Lesnar remembers looking out over the locker room, seeing the wrestlers in a pain- and drug-induced haze. He didn’t want to be them in 10 years. And he was already suffering the effects of the wrestling lifestyle after just a few years in the business.
“I had three broken ribs and a bad knee,” Lesnar told Maxim. “During that period I would take a couple Vicodin and wash ’em down with a few slugs of vodka. That’s what got me through. The ribs didn’t heal for another eight months, because there’s no off-season in pro wrestling . . . You get so brainwashed. You’re on the road 300 days a year, and that’s why guys get so messed up. This life becomes a part of them. It’s not real, but some guys who are still in the business think it is.”
Tough Enough
Lesnar left to pursue an NFL career and eventually fell into a career in mixed martial arts, but Angle was a lifer. Despite his injuries he soldiered on. Soon he couldn’t wrestle, but his personality and star power were big enough to merit a regular spot on television. That’s how he ended up in the ring for what Dave Meltzer called “one of the more famous one-minute periods in modern pro wrestling history” on November 2, 2004.
Angle was hazing contestants from Tough Enough, the WWE’s ill-fated attempt at a reality show, bullying the wrestling wannabes and challenging them to a real match. Angle pinned his first challenger, Chris Nawrocki, in just 26 seconds. And then he asked for another challenger. Daniel Puder stepped forward.
Puder was a budding MMA prospect who’d trained training for years with the famous American Kickboxing Academy in California, and even helped Frank Shamrock train for Tito Ortiz before their famous fight at UFC 22. Puder had also had wrestling training with Danny Chaid, a top amateur who had taken Angle to the limit in the 1996 Olympic trials. And, most importantly, Puder didn’t have a neck that limited his movement and strength like Angle did.
It was a bad spot for Angle to be put in. He was in no shape to perform in the WWE and certainly in no shape for a contest with a real shooter. Despite the wear and tear, and a hand gone numb after the short match with Nawrocki, Angle was able to get Puder to the mat. But there, the tables turned as Puder caught the former WWE champion in a Kimura lock and had him in a very bad position. Puder was on his back, a bad spot in amateur wrestling, but right where he wanted to be to submit Angle with his arm lock.
Gerald Brisco, a former Oklahoma State amateur, immediately recognized the danger and told the referee to quickly count Puder down. In amateur rules his shoulders were down for a one second count, all that is required. In a pro match, his shoulders were clearly up, but referee Jimmy Korderas quickly counted to three anyway. Angle was furious afterwards, refusing to shake Puder’s hand and telling him, “Don’t you know any better? It’s not a fucking UFC match, it’s an amateur wrestling contest.”
The actual rules of the bout are anything but clear. Before the two squared up, Angle asked Puder if he had ever fought an Olympic champion, insinuating this was more than a wrestling contest. Puder told Bubba the Love Sponge that he specifically asked about whether submission holds were legal.
“It wasn’t an amateur wrestling match,” Puder said. “The refs told me, ‘No striking.’ That’s it. Anything else goes.”
According to Dave Meltzer, WWE officials believed they had dodged a bullet: “A lot of people thought if Angle tapped, it would have killed his career and made WWE look bad because an unknown fighter tapped their big star.”
Others believed the promotion should have taken advantage of the unscripted moment they were handed. You couldn’t have written a better script to propel a new star to the top of the WWE — but instead of using it and making magic, the WWE ran from opportunity simply because it hadn’t been part of their master plan. In the end, nothing became of Puder at all. He won the reality television show but was never pushed prominently on WWE television.
While Angle continued the pro wrestling grind, Lesnar was trying and failing to make it in the NFL. Lesnar was an amazing athlete, strong and fast. He had the physical tools to play professional football, but there was one small wrinkle keeping him from his dream — he hadn’t played football since high school and even then wasn’t good enough to attract any real interest from a college powerhouse. Lesnar was bounced from the Vikings’ training camp roster with scant delay, his most memorable moment coming during a pre-season brawl with the Kansas City Chiefs when Lesnar hit quarterback Damon Huard in violation of a no-contact agreement and then got into a scrap with lineman Johnathan Ingram.
Football now a distant memory, Lesnar was back doing the only thing he knew how to do. He renegotiated with the WWE to return, before joining New Japan Pro-Wrestling in October 2005, following a long line of superstar foreigners that included Stan Hansen, Hulk Hogan, and the Road Warriors. Lesnar was immediately pushed hard, winning the IWGP title in his first match, but the business was in such disarray in Japan that he didn’t have much impact.
Soon he was battling the WWE in court. In order to get his release from the promotion, Lesnar had signed a no-compete deal that prevented him from fighting or wrestling elsewhere through 2010. As the two went to war in a messy court battle that included the WWE claiming Lesnar had threatened to commit suicide if he wasn’t released from his contract with the company, Lesnar continued wrestling in Japan. The two sides reached an agreement and settled their differences in April 2006. Days later Lesnar was ringside at a K-1 show in Las Vegas announcing his intention to give MMA a try and training for his MMA debut with Pat Miletich in Iowa, eventually landing at Greg Nelson’s Minnesota Martial Arts Academy closer to home. On August 12, Lesnar officially signed a contract with K-1 to fight the giant Korean Hong-Man Choi. Less than two weeks later, Angle had his own announcement — he and the WWE were parting ways. Although the split was said to be mutual, with Angle and manager Dave Hawk quoted in the WWE release announcing the news, in the Figure Four Weekly newsletter, Bryan Alvarez reported otherwise:
The reality is that this was not a mutual agreement. According to WWE sources, Angle and Hawk met with WWE on Friday and Angle, who just returned from a 30-day suspension for pain pill issues, was basically told he needed to get help immediately. He refused and was subsequently fired. The decision was made, for whatever reason, to publish all the WWE.com articles in an attempt to help him save face in the situation.
According to sources in WWE, Angle is heavily addicted to painkillers and a walking wreck. While he has serious neck and back issues dating back to the Olympics and exasperated by his intense pro style, I’m told the recent claims that he pulled his groin and tore an ab muscle are a work. It is said that he has showed up at events messed up worse than Shawn Michaels or Brian Pillman at their peaks. Others have said he’s the worst anyone has ever seen. Worse than the physical issues are the mental issues. Besides dealing with a body that won’t do what he wants it to do anymore, he’s also going through a divorce with his wife, Karen, mother of his three-year-o
ld daughter, Kira, and currently pregnant with his first son.
Pro Wrestling Torch columnist Bruce Mitchell agreed Angle was a mess in the days and months before he was fired: “Kurt Angle was fired from WWE because he was terrible shape, physically, mentally, and emotionally. He has a torn groin, a bad back, and a broken neck. He has an admitted pain pill problem that he has apparently done nothing about. He was impossible to communicate with by the end of his WWE tenure and was driving everyone in the locker room crazy.”
Angle admitted as much in subsequent interviews, facing down his problems admirably. To battle his perpetual neck problems he had become addicted to pain pills, walking around in a perpetual fog like a zombie.
“It tore my soul apart. I missed the first two years of my daughter’s life,” Angle told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “Painkillers are like heroin. When you get caught up in it, you start taking 10 or 20. I was up to 65 a day. I had to take 18 to get out of bed. I went to the pharmacy every other day. I found a way to get 10 different doctors to get my prescriptions. It worked out perfectly; every other day I got 120 pills. My first priority was to get to the pharmacy.”
Angle’s time on the national stage was over. He would go on to join Total Nonstop Action, but it was a promotion struggling to survive. The rest of his career would be featured in backwoods arenas and in front of thousands rather than millions. Lesnar, meanwhile, was nowhere near the height of his fame. Soon Lesnar would become the first man to earn an amazing trifecta: NCAA, pro wrestling, and MMA world champion.
26
WRESTLING INVASION
In June 2007 K-1, the groundbreaking Japanese kickboxing promotion, was looking to make a major splash in a new market. The UFC’s success had emboldened a slew of competitors, all looking to cash in on what looked like an enormously profitable new sport. Eventually it would become clear that UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta was right when he said, “There isn’t an MMA boom. There’s a UFC boom.” But in the middle of 2007, K-1 was thinking big. Really big. They booked the mammoth Los Angeles Coliseum, looking to put more than 100,000 fans in the building to break all American records.
The show was a debacle of epic proportions. If you wanted to write a book about how not to promote a fight show, this would be your template. K-1, it turns out, had no promoter’s license. It had no plan on how to entice 100,000 people into the L.A. Coliseum. It didn’t have the first clue about how to ensure its athletes were able to compete under athletic commission guidelines. But K-1 did do something right — they signed Brock Lesnar to fight in their main event.
The former WWE champion had been preparing for this moment for a long time. K-1 had been teasing his debut for nearly a year, with each announcement pushing his first match, further and further back. Fans had seen it before. The promotion had promised Mike Tyson so many times, once even having him stage a scene with Bob Sapp at a fight in Las Vegas, but had never delivered. Lesnar, though, eventually did get in the ring, preparing for his first fight in the comfort of his Minnesota stomping grounds.
Lesnar started his MMA training at Pat Miletich’s camp in Iowa. A former UFC champion, Pat was known for grooming champions — Jens Pulver, Matt Hughes, and Tim Sylvia had all won gold under Pat’s watch. But things had changed at Team Miletich. The training wasn’t as organized as it had been and Pat’s focus was spread thin on a number of different projects and fighters. Lesnar wanted the single-minded and focused approach he had experienced at the University of Minnesota. Instead of searching for a camp that could meet his expectations, he created it.
The first step was hiring a man he thought had been integral to his amateur success. Lesnar said, “I went back to my grassroots . . . Marty Morgan is an assistant coach at the University of Minnesota where I won my national title. He coached me to be a champion. And that’s why I wanted him on my team.”
Lesnar was supposed to be fighting the giant Korean Hong-Man Choi, but a brain scan had revelealed a tumor on Choi’s pituitary gland. The tumor is typical of those with acromelagy, also know as gigantism, and Choi was aware of the issue. “The MRI test on Choi Hong-Man didn’t go well,” K-1’s Korean CEO Jeong Yeno-soo said. “There was no MRI equipment that fit the size of his head, so he had to do an external MRI.” The less accurate external test caused doctors’ concern and Choi was nixed from fighting in California, perhaps the first fighter scratched for being too large for the medical equipment.
Lesnar ended up fighting Min-Soo Kim, a 1996 Olympic silver medalist in judo at 209 pounds. Kim had blown up in weight and was a glorified punching bag for K-1’s Hero’s promotion. They were taking no chances with their meal ticket. Lesnar went on last, a main-eventer in his very first match. He ran over Kim in just over a minute.
K-1 printed 75,332 tickets to the event. More than 40,000 people were in the building according to the California athletic commission. Unfortunately for the promotion, only 3,674 tickets were actually sold to paying fans. K-1 likely lost millions, but at least they lost them in style. Figure Four Weekly’s Bryan Alvarez was on the scene to describe the spectacle:
They had a gigantic fireworks display, and for those that didn’t see it, this wasn’t a WWE pyro display or anything like that. This was the Fourth of July in a major city. As this gigantic display was going on, as things blew up in the skies above the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, dudes shot off guns of confetti, gun after gun, and the air was utterly filled with it. Asians were everywhere, smiling and laughing and pointing, and it was like a giant New Year’s party in the middle of Tokyo. That was the magic of this show. Like with Pride in Las Vegas, K-1 didn’t come to America to run a show. This was like they took a K-1 show in all its glory in the Tokyo National Stadium, uprooted the entire thing, and took it to America. Sure, they spent $5 million to do it and probably only made a half million at the gate (and zero dollars on merchandise), but by God they did it . . . But I really wasn’t thinking much about business at the time. I just stood there watching fireworks in a snowstorm of confetti and reveled in it like a little kid. Everyone else was trying to get the hell out, so I took one last look, which I’ll never forget, and grabbed a piece of confetti to take home with me.
Lesnar was just happy to have his debut behind him. He had wanted to work on his striking, confident already in his ability to take almost anyone on the planet down, but his wrestling mindset took over and he, in turn, took Kim to the mat at the first opportunity. “I was prepared to strike with him this evening,” Lesnar said. “But he gave me his leg. It just happened like that. . . . It was instinct.”
The MMA media descended on Los Angeles in force. Lesnar took questions, and though he’d moved on from WWE, the media hadn’t. Pro wrestling was the story and essentially the only topic they wanted to cover.
“I’m an amateur wrestler first of all, a pro wrestler second. . . . My amateur wrestling is who I am, and I’m going to evolve as a fighter,” Lesnar said. “Unfortunately I have a black cloud over my head because I was a pro wrestler. . . . I had a point to prove tonight. That I am a fighter. I have a very big heart for this fight game and I’m going to be around for a while.”
Lesnar wasn’t content to be in the minor leagues for long. The top promotion in the world was the UFC and Brock set his sights on getting the organization’s attention. It wasn’t easy. Kurt Angle had made plenty of noise about fighting, and UFC President Dana White had wasted valuable time negotiating with a wrestler who was never actually going to fight. They weren’t going to make the same mistake on Lesnar.
Lesnar made a splash by showing up at UFC 74 in August 2007 to watch Randy Couture defend his heavyweight title. He bought front row tickets, but the UFC kept cameras far away from him. When a montage of celebrities was shown, Lesnar was notable by his absence. The UFC was ignoring Lesnar and he didn’t like it:
I jumped down to the main floor, pushed my way through the crowd, and walked right past security. When I got near the Octag
on I found myself directly behind Dana White, so I tapped him on the shoulder and introduced myself.
We found an empty room in the back of the arena, and Dana sat down with me and my lawyers. I’ll give him credit; Dana didn’t pull any punches . . . “What makes you think you can do this, Brock? What makes you think you can be in the UFC with the best fighters in the world?”
“Brock’s record was 1–0, but when I started talking to Brock he thought he was ready and this was where he wanted to be,” UFC President Dana White said. “We told him, ‘There’s no easy fights here in the UFC.’ And he said, ‘I don’t want easy fights. I didn’t like the way the last show went, I wasn’t happy with it. I want to be in the UFC. I want to compete at that level.’ So he comes right into the UFC taking on former world champion Frank Mir.”
Mir was the perfect opponent for Lesnar. A former world champion, he had a respectable enough pedigree that no one could accuse the UFC of giving Lesnar a tomato can. At the same time, Mir was still struggling with the after-effects of a motorcycle crash that had cost him his title and almost his career.
“I went from being one of the top martial artists in the world to being a guy who might never be able to fight again,” Mir said. “It took me four years to get back to where I was because of one car wreck. There were several times I was in the UFC head office begging not to be cut. I was one decision, one breath, away from never having my career ever again.”
Shooters Page 37