Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [53]
It was around this time that I talked to my old U of M wrestling coach, Marty Morgan. Since I was scheduled to fight a giant, I wanted to train with some big guys. Marty was training Cole Konrad at the University of Minnesota, and I started hitting the punching bag with Marty while rolling around with Cole and the other heavyweights on the squad.
I felt alive again. After all I had been through, it didn’t matter who they put in front of me that first fight. I had a new lease on life, and I wasn’t going to fail.
About a month before my scheduled fight, K-1 tells us there is going to be another delay. They couldn’t get Dodger Stadium, so now the fight was going to be moved to June 2007 at the L.A. Coliseum. You know the routine. K-1 said they were planning to make this the biggest MMA fight ever, and that they were going to put a hundred thousand people in the stands. They expected all of L.A.’s Korea Town to show up for Big Head, and all of the WWE fans to show up for me.
I didn’t want to hear the hype. I wanted to get started with my new career, and while I’m making sweet dough because of my contract with K-1, I knew I’d be spending my best fighting years dealing with delays and bullshit games. I simply want to train, fight, and make money. I don’t want to have to worry about all the stuff the promotion is supposed to take care of. That’s their job.
I know I’ll live up to my end. You live up to yours.
Unfortunately, I never got the chance to knock Big Head out, because someone else beat me to it. About a month before our fight, the idiot did a K-1 kickboxing match in Japan, took a big shot to his big head, and went down like a felled tree. Scheduling him for an event so close to our fight was just plain stupid of K-1.
When Hong-Man Choi did the medical testing right before our fight, the California State Athletic Commission declared him unfit to compete.
K-1 offered me Min Soo Kim as a last-minute replacement. He was a South Korean fighter that had won an Olympic Silver Medal in judo. I didn’t care who he was, or what he had won, I knew I was going to steamroll right over him.
I have to give it to K-1, they probably put fifty thousand or so people into the Coliseum on a beautiful June evening to watch me beat up Min Soo Kim. They also did their best to create a spectacle, including my grand entrance from the Olympic flame at the top of the stadium.
My job, to me, was easy. Wait for the referee to say “fight,” and go right after Min Soo Kim. Poor bastard had no idea what he was in for. I took him right down and pounded him out. The fight lasted sixty-nine seconds, and I walked away without a scratch on me. Better yet, because the fight was delayed several times, each extension of my contract cost K-1 more money. All in all, I pocketed a lot of money for what turned out to be about a minute’s worth of work in the ring.
This is the business for me!
GETTING DANA WHITE’S ATTENTION
In WWE, you need to get Vince McMahon’s attention. In the UFC, that man is Dana White.
I’m no fool. Beating up Min Soo Kim wasn’t going to get me into the UFC. That organization was getting hotter and hotter, and mixed martial arts was finally being taken seriously by the mainstream sports media as a real sport. The last thing they needed was to give their critics ammunition by signing the big bad former WWE champion who’d had only one real fight, and that against a lower-tier opponent.
Kurt Angle and a bunch of other pro wrestlers were talking the talk, but no one was backing it up. I wanted to be the number one mixed martial arts fighter in the world. I wanted to be the champion. I wanted to main event the biggest pay-per-views, be the greatest heavyweight the sport had ever seen. But why would Dana White give a shit about me yet? I was just another guy making a lot of noise.
I had David Olsen and Brian Stegeman try to set up a meeting with the UFC, but I don’t have patience for games and everyone trying to position themselves in a business negotiation. I like to get things done.
I’ve spent a good part of