UFC 100: LESNAR SMASHES MIR

On a historic night for the UFC and the sport of mixed martial arts, Brock Lesnar avenged his early loss to Frank Mir with a TKO victory and in the process unified the promotion’s heavyweight championship.  Mir/Lesnar was the main event of a stacked card and the culmination of an insane week in Las Vegas.  The anticipation surrounding UFC 100 was unprecedented among the fight sport media and, more significantly, among mainstream sports media.  MMA has long has been an object of scorn, disdain and ignorance among ‘traditional’ sports media, and in this context the fact that every major outlet including ESPN, SI.com and Fox Sports featured UFC 100 as their top story of the day is downright amazing. 

The broader implications of UFC 100 remain to be seen, but it could very likely become a turning point for the sport where MMA transcended ‘cult’ or ‘niche’ status to burst into the mainstream consciousness.  While the big metric of the event’s success will be its PPV buy rate—which will almost certainly shatter existing UFC records—the attendance numbers and other tangible measures that are already known underscore the significance of the event.  Friday’s weigh in was a ‘standing room only’ affair with over 2,000 fans turned away.  A ‘Fan Expo’ held in conjunction with UFC 100 counted over 30,000 visitors on Friday and an equal or greater number on Saturday.   Even veteran fight media experienced in covering big boxing and MMA events worldwide have reported that the energy and general ‘vibe’ around this event is like nothing they’ve seen.

And the ‘main event’ of the week was Saturday’s UFC 100 fight card where Lesnar established not only his dominance of the promotion’s heavyweight division but his status as the biggest ‘heel’ in MMA.  To his credit, he had a perfect gameplan for Mir that allowed him to use his strength and power to maul his opponent on the ground while minimizing his exposure to submissions.  By contrast, Mir made a tactical mistake in allowing Lesnar to put him on his back so quickly and control him on the ground.  He may have considered this his best opportunity to win—wait out Lesnar and look for an opportunity for a submission—but it never materialized and by the end of the first round he’d already absorbed a brutal beating.  Lesnar quickly took Mir down again at the start of the second round, ending the fight with a punishing ‘ground and pound’ assault that prompted referee Herb Dean to call a stop to the contest at 1:48 of the second round.

Lesnar diminished his dominating performance with his postfight antics—he taunted Mir after the stoppage, prompting the crowd to boo him mercilessly.  He responded to this with a double handed ‘middle finger salute’ before a short and arrogant postfight interview that would have been much more at home in the WWE than in this setting.  Mir was the consummate professional in defeat, giving credit to his opponent and generally displaying all of the class that Lesnar lacked.