UFC 100: Lesnar’s boorish behavior bothers Mir
Frank Mir says Brock Lesnar embarrassed his sport — and embarrassed Mir’s children — by going on a tirade of spit and trash-talking after beating Mir at Saturday’s UFC 100.
Mir is already planning to train for a “rubber match” rematch.
And Mir is not impressed that Lesnar later apologized for being a sore winner, since he did so only after UFC head Dana White scolded him for vamping like a WWE wrestler.
Mir tells me: “That’s like: You steal a guy’s bike, your dad kicks your ass, and then you apologize only because your dad kicked your ass. How genuine is that?”
“I don’t buy it,” Mir said Sunday, after I called the Vegas native and informed him of Lesnar’s apology.
At issue: The UFC is a brutal but gentlemanly sport. Yes, guys pin each other down in a sort of missionary position, then rain down furious fists on bloody faces.
But White, fans and media want winners and losers to be good sports. Usually, they are, since respect is a Zen code in mixed martial arts.
Lesnar, who went from top college wrestler to WWE wrestler to UFC heavyweight champ, broke that code from start to finish.
Lesnar, 32, went into the match with a grudge. Mir, 30, had beat Lesnar in February 2008. On Saturday, Lesnar wouldn’t tap gloves with Mir before the bout. That’s disrespectful, though Mir calls it “no big deal.”
Lesnar beat Mir in two rounds, and Mir gives him props. (“No complaints.”)
But once the referee stopped the fight, Lesnar yelled in Mir’s bloody face.
“When I stood up, and he’s screaming, it took me a few seconds to realize” what Lesnar was doing, Mir says.
Lesnar spit out his mouth guard at a camera. He flipped two birds at the booing crowd. Microphone in hand, he said he wouldn’t drink the UFC-sponsored beer because it hadn’t paid him money (Lesnar got $3 million for the fight); and he said he’d torn a lucky “horseshoe” out of Mir’s butt and “beat the hell out of him with it” (metaphors).
Mir went to a room and saw TV recaps with his kids.
“ESPN showed him spitting and hollering. My children are looking,” Mir says. “I’m shaking my head, pointing at my kids and going, ‘That’s not how you want to do it, guys.'”
Normally, Mir’s kids see their dad and his training partner exchange blows but afterward they hug it out.
“They see it as harmless. When it’s over, it’s over,” Mir says. “We’re all warriors. Well, some of us are.”
Mir reiterates the code of mixed martial arts:
“We’ll be cocky,” especially before a fight, to help sell it. “If you ever heard any speeches (Bruce Lee) gave, he was a smart ass (before a fight). But at the end of a competition, he would be respectful.”
Post-fight, White chided Lesnar privately. Then Lesnar went to a news conference and apologized for being a bad sport, for demeaning the beer sponsor, and for bringing WWE showbiz into the UFC.
“I was so jacked up,” Lesnar explained. “The only thing I had against Frank was he beat me” in their previous match.
The apology didn’t come fast enough to stop media from painting Lesnar as a super villain of sports.
Some UFC fans previously thought Mir engaged in too much pre-fight trash talk. But Mir says when he beat Lesnar in 2008, he behaved with class.
“I didn’t degrade him and say he was an idiot,” Mir says. “There was no point to kick the guy while he was down.
“OK, I beat the guy. What, am I going to spit on you, too?”
Mir underestimated Lesnar’s weight advantage.
The top-heavy Lesnar is an inch taller, with an arm reach of two inches longer. More important, he had 20 pounds on Mir’s lean, 245-pound frame.
“I didn’t think it would matter that much,” Mir says of Lesnar’s heft. (Mir had beefed up with weights, dumbbells, a lot of high reps, cardio and attribute balancing.)
Mir wrongly assumed Lesnar’s game plan. Lesnar had trash-talked Mir’s standup fight game, so Mir thought Lesnar would fight in standing positions. Not so.
“When he didn’t come after me, that really threw me off,” Mir says. “He didn’t land any punches on his feet, did he?
“I didn’t expect him to run,” Mir says. “He ran like a lightweight. … It’s my fault. I should have trained that he would be intimidated from the standup” fighting position.
Instead, Lesnar went for pinning Mir on the ground and punching him in the face. Mir knows he got “rocked pretty hard in the first round.”
Mir didn’t want to lose round two the same way. So he came out swinging and kicking. Lesnar back peddled to avoid hits.
“When I chased him, that’s what changed my game plan,” Mir says. But, “I basically was (within) a half-an-inch of catching him.”
Mir threw a “Joe Frasier” hook, barely grazing Lesnar, he says. Mir caught Lesnar with a knee and elbow, but Lesnar spun away.
In the end, Mir couldn’t stop Lesnar from trapping him on the ground, pinning his hands and punching Mir in the face until the fight was stopped.
“I knew he was hurt, but he had good leverage, with my shoulder against the cage,” Mir says.
“I made a stupid mistake,” Mir says, while saying “my hat’s off” to Lesnar and his coaching staff for executing a winning game plan.
“I have a huge lump on my ear where he hit me.”
Mir is eager for a rematch. He’d have to beat other fighters to earn another bout with the champ in a year or 18 months, he says.
On Sunday, he felt he’d slept only 20 minutes, pacing through the day, calling his trainer and insisting on getting back to training, doing power lifting to boost his weight and close in on Lesnar.
“If I can just nail that gap to even 10 pounds, it’ll be a different fight next time,” Mir says.
“Hopefully next time, I’ll show him how somebody is supposed to act in victory.”
Doug Elfman’s column appears on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 702-383-0391 or e-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He also blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.
