UFC 100 Post-Mortem: Falling Hammers, Lesnar Lunch Boxes and More

A prizefight ring offers up a lot of truths, not all of them pretty. UFC 1, airing to a mostly-nauseated pay-per-view audience of 80,000 homes in November 1993, used a lot of cringe-worthy brutality to prove that fighting wasn’t what Bruce Lee had led us to believe; UFC 100, which played to unprecedented media coverage and perhaps over a million households on Saturday, used a lot of cringe-worthy brutality to prove that fighting wasn’t even what Royce Gracie had led us to believe.

Brock Lesnar silenced nearly 18 months of derisive talk about his submission loss to Frank Mir by using his face like he was kneading pizza dough, his orangutan arms battering like pistons. Lesnar, who is a massive man in a sport that almost humors size, is keeping a promise made by Mark Coleman back in 1996 -- that if you’re athletic, and you can wrestle, you’ve got a career for the taking.

Lesnar’s growing mystique is a little less subtle than Gracie’s: Most of us are built like Royce, not Brock, and it’s easier to project ourselves in the place of a guy who weighs 170 pounds than someone who looks like a Neanderthal with cantaloupes for biceps. But there is very little doubt that he has positioned himself as the UFC’s headlining attraction.

If his destruction of Mir indicates he’s getting comfortable in the Octagon, expect the UFC to hire a staff reconstructive facial surgeon. Considering that tickets for Lesnar’s appearances sell faster than they can be printed, they can certainly afford it.

Next for Lesnar: The appeal of seeing Lesnar against the winner of Couture/Nogueira on 8/29 just deflated considerably: Both men are not as fresh as Mir and would probably be fitted for a toe tag during their pre-fight physical. Shane Carwin has the horsepower to make it interesting; fans will scream for a bout with Fedor Emelianenko -- and they should get it, just for history’s sake -- but a demure and Russian-speaking opponent is not going to pull the attention the gleefully arrogant Mir did, cult following or not.

Next for Mir: 1-2 weeks of basement dwelling until the swelling goes down; the loser of the rumored Carwin/Cain Velasquez bout.

Next for Georges St. Pierre: A year off to build the requisite amount of muscle to challenge Anderson Silva -- and wait for a contender to emerge. (I like Mike Swick, but his chances against St. Pierre could not be any worse if he were blindfolded.)

Next for Dan Henderson: Yoshihiro Akiyama if he’s lucky, Anderson Silva if he’s not -- along with a UFC Hall of Fame slot.