Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [51]
I trained with Pat and his team for a while, and during the time I was with them I really learned a lot. This is no knock on Pat, because I respect his work and appreciate all that I learned from him, but I soon realized that his gym wasn’t for me.
I figured I had money again, and I could afford to create my own camp, one that was dedicated to one and only one purpose, which was making me the best fighter I could be in the shortest period of time. I didn’t want to spend years and years going through MMA’s equivalent of my time in Louisville. I wanted to fight for a living, and my thought was that if you have a gym designed to accommodate a bunch of fighters, then no one gets the full benefit of the coaching staff. It’s spread too thin. Where’s the focus?
But if you have your own training facility, and everyone is dedicated to the goal of making you the best, you have a better chance of reaching your full potential. There’s a lot of money at the end of that rainbow, and I wanted to reach for the pot of gold.
From the moment I decided to get into mixed martial arts, I knew I wanted to be in the UFC. That’s the big league . . . the only place to be. The UFC is the most professionally run organization, and the people there have the resources to put on big-time fights for big-time money. No rinky-dink bush-league bullcrap for that organization. It’s first class all the way.
The best thing about the fight business is that people pay to see a fight, and for the most part, you’re going to see someone win and someone lose. It’s a simple formula. If you want to be the best, you have to enter the fight and go for broke. No one is going to be champion for long by attempting to win on points.
Ultimately, there are only two positions a fighter can be in. Either you’re number one, or you’re not. For me, number one is the only place to be, because number two is just not good enough. It’s the same as being last.
I had my goals set, but I also had a problem. The UFC saw me as a WWE “fake” wrestler. Yes, I had a name, but I had no MMA experience to speak of, which meant I had to start somewhere else. Believe it or not, that road led me right back to doing business with a company in Japan.
I was getting offers to fight as soon as word got out that I had been training at the Militech camp. It didn’t matter if they promoted fights in arenas, on beaches, or in high school gyms, everyone wanted to promote my first mixed martial arts fight.
In April 2006, David Olsen and a new member of my legal team, Brian Stegeman, set up a meeting for me with the Japanese promotion K-1. This promotion is owned by a company called FEG, and they sent their international operations manager, Daisuke Teraguchi, and their Japanese-American lawyer, Toru Nakahara, to Minnesota to cut a deal with me.
We met at the Minneapolis Grand Hotel for a sushi dinner.
The food was great, but the meeting was going way too slow for my taste. Unlike the Inokis, who just sit there and stare at you, waiting for you to tip your hand, these guys just wanted to talk and talk and talk. I thought they would never get down to the bottom line, so against my lawyers’ advice, I spoke up and cut to the chase. Right in the middle of the California rolls, I told them how much I needed for one fight or there was nothing further to talk about.
To their credit, Daisuke and Toru didn’t even blink. They calmly asked if they could have a few minutes to discuss my demand in private. Feeling my oats, I generously said they could have fifteen minutes, and then I wanted an answer.
I went outside with David and Brian, and we just looked at one another. I was supposed to let them do the talking and negotiating, but I’d felt