Did Brock Lesnar Harm MMA’s Image at UFC 100? No, Just His Own

(Say what you will about his sportsmanship, his howler monkey impression is unassailable.)

Let’s get one thing straight: Brock Lesnar acted like a jerk on Saturday night.  Even by Lesnar standards, which have a certain expectation of jerkishness already built in, he conducted himself poorly.  First he got right in Frank Mir’s face mere seconds after TKO-ing him, just to let us know that he had no intention of being a gracious winner.  When the fans didn’t care for that, he gave them the old double Stockton Heybuddy and implored them to keep booing.  He finished by embarrassing a UFC sponsor and making tentative plans to get on top of his wife, who had to be as flattered as a stripper asked to work the lunchtime shift when she heard that one.

But the question is, with the increased media visibility of this event and this fight, did Lesnar do damage to MMA’s credibility as a real sport in the eyes of mainstream media and casual fans?  The answer is, not unless they’ve never seen pro sports before.

There’s no excusing Lesnar’s behavior.  Steve Cofield seems to think that Lesnar playing a typical pro wrestling heel was “pure brilliance” because it made fans feel something about him.  Of course, that something was negative, which is the easiest kind of feeling to evoke, so maybe we shouldn’t be so impressed with a guy’s ability to make himself hateable.  In non-scripted sports, showing zero class in victory isn’t an accomplishment, it’s a character flaw.  

But the truth is that Lesnar is not a stand-in for the entire sport of MMA, and anyone who knows anything about sports (like, say, sportswriters) should know that.  When Terrell Owens or Manny Ramirez does something to remind us how selfish and emotionally crippled he is, we’re not so quick to accuse him of hurting his entire sport.  That’s because we realize that in any given group of people, some are bound to be assholes.  Some are going to shake their opponent’s hand after they win, and some are going to act like a guy who just found out he is not the father on the Maury Povich show.

Maybe it’s the MMA fan’s tendency to be overly protective of their sport that keeps us from realizing that here.  But Lesnar didn’t embarrass the sport with his behavior, because the sport is much bigger than him.  He only succeeded in embarrassing himself, and he did that with startling efficiency, turning what should have been a triumphant celebration of redemption into a one-man show of egotism and boorish behavior.

That’s Lesnar’s problem, not MMA’s.  The vast majority of fighters are true martial artists who give their opponents their due respect.  Guys like Georges St. Pierre, for example, who doesn’t need to push all the easily accessible villain buttons to get people to care about him.  Lesnar is the exception.  

We don’t need to praise him for exhibiting qualities that none of us would aspire to or even tolerate for very long in our own lives, but we also don’t need to worry that he’ll harm MMA. He’s just a player, not the game itself.

(BF)