Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [52]
David bet me the FEG execs would be sitting in a cab on their way to the airport by the time we returned. When we walked back into the restaurant, though, they were still sitting at the table. They told us they could probably make the deal work, but that they would need to confirm the details with some people in Japan before they could commit. The fact that they weren’t already halfway back to Tokyo seemed like a very good sign.
While my lawyers were working out the details with K-1, I was working on becoming a fighter. Part of the agreement was that I could choose my own trainers, and FEG would foot the bill. They wanted me ready to fight by August 2006. There were a lot of rumors floating around that they were trying to get my first opponent to be Royce Gracie, UFC’s very first star and the heir to the Brazilian jujitsu throne.
I was living just outside Minneapolis, and I was looking for a place to train locally. I didn’t want to go to California or Nevada or anywhere else to train. As far as I was concerned, my traveling days were over.
Everyone I talked to on the local MMA scene seemed to have a high opinion of Greg Nelson, who ran the Minnesota Martial Arts Academy, so I stopped by his gym one day. Greg was a former U of M wrestler like me, had trained UFC World Champion Sean Sherk and others, and he agreed to take me on and get me ready for my K-1 fight.
Now that I was a professional fighter, and was about to make a lot of money, my lawyers told me they were creating a new company for carrying on my business as a fighter, and that I had to choose the name. David, Brian, and I were on a three-way phone conversation, and we were just throwing names back and forth.
The “Death Collector” had been suggested by a guy who wanted to do T-shirts for us, but that was too WWE for me. And then I said, what about “DeathClutch”? That name really worked for me, because after the lawsuit with Vince and all of the other shit that I had been through, I felt like I had been in one DeathClutch after another. I could hear the call of the match in my head: “Lesnar gets his hands around his opponent’s body . . . it’s the DeathClutch!”
I couldn’t wait to get started, but just as I was ramping up my training, K-1 told me that they had not yet secured an opponent for what I thought would be my October 2006 fight. Oh, wait. It gets worse. They didn’t have an arena, or even a pay-per-view clearance yet either. My goal was to be in a major-league organization, but I knew at that moment I was still in the minors.
K-1 offered me big money for an extension on my contract. If I told them no, I’d just have to take a fight for another minor-league organization before the UFC would seriously consider me.
Since I was already in business with K-1, I agreed to the extension, and kept training with Greg Nelson.
In the fall of 2006, I heard that K-1 had signed “The Techno Goliath,” a seven-foot one-inch Korean kickboxer and MMA fighter named Hong-Man Choi, and wanted to pit us against each other in May 2007 at Dodger Stadium in L.A.
I never heard of Hong-Man Choi, so we looked him up. He was known for being this big entertaining son of a bitch, a friendly gentle giant who could maul people in fights. But the one thing that I couldn’t get over was the size of his head. I mean, his noggin was enormous, even bigger than Big Show’s. It was massive. I kept thinking that as soon as the referee said “fight,” I was going straight for that huge target right between his shoulders. Hong-Man Choi had an international reputation, but he was big and slow, and I knew I