So for the past few months there has been a lot of hype about a certain UFC fight. Easily the UFC's biggest draw, Brock Lesnar, was making his return to the octagon on December 30th to face off against the UFC Heavyweight newcomer, Alistair Overeem. Winner gets a shot at the Heavyweight Championship. Big stakes involved in this fight and the best part is both these guys have back stories. After losing the Heavyweight Championship at UFC 121 to Cain Velasquez, Lesnar got diagnosed with mono and diverticulitits (Apparently your crap leaks into your abdomen... sounds unpleasant), apparently almost died from it. Lesnar was out for over a year and had to get rescheduled from at least two fights because of the reoccurence of this condition. However, on December 30th, Brock Lesnar was coming back to destroy the Heavyweight Division.
"Here Comes The Pain... Again!"
His opponent, Alistair Overeem also has a good back story. He is, by far, the best Heavyweight fighter not in the UFC. This man was the K-1 Kickboxing Heavyweight champion, DREAM Heavyweight Champion (Japanese MMA) and the Strikeforce MMA Champion. He is actually bigger than Brock Lesnar and looks more vicious.Of his 36 overall career wins, 34 of them have been by either knockout or submission, which is an incredibly impressive feat for any professional fighter. Here he is, about to get his shot at the biggest prize in MMA in his first ever match against the biggest draw in MMA, Brock Lesnar.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, the opponent, Alistair Overeem"
Now let's skip channels for a moment. Don't worry, these two subjects will coincide shortly. In November, some strange videos started to air in the world of World Wrestling Entertainment on Monday Night RAW featuring some schoolboy and schoolgirl making biblical quotes and talking about how "he is coming to take what's rightfully his" and "how the end of the world is near". They were actually very well done and were placed in the middle of segments making them look very viral looking. It actually made me want to watch the following episodes of RAW to see who it could be (I used to watch wrestling as part of my regular TV watching but the product over the past two years has been pretty stale at best. Aside from CM Punk giving some people like me hope that maybe, just maybe the drought is going to end and things will be "fun again" as he put it, there really hasn't been much to tune in for.). So time went on and they made about five of these videos before December 26th. They had these viral videos say that on January 2nd, the end is coming.
Switch back to UFC. December 30th has arrived. Lesnar and Overeem is about to happen and the hype has been phenominal. Lesnar is being typical Lesnar and Overeem is guaranteeing a knockout in the first round and he would be shocked if the fight made it to the second round. This fight between two behemoths was about to begin. It felt as if they threw punches at each other, earthquakes would be felt around the world. That is how hyped up this felt. The fight starts and in about two minutes... Lesnar crumbles after a punch by Overeem and just gets beaten in the corner until the ref calls the fight. Alistair Overeem just dominated Brock Lesnar, beat him in about two minutes and basically made Brock Lesnar look pathetic. In reality, Brock should've used his wrestling background (Lesnar is a former NCAA champion in amateur background, not talking about his professional wrestling background, although it would be cool to see him try a F-5 in the octagon) against a guy that is weak at grappling instead of trying to fist fight with a guy that absolutely dominates fist fights. So after all of this Joe Rogan interiews Lesnar and Lesnar retires right there, on the spot. That was unexpected... Wait a minute! WWE is about to reveal a mystery person on January 2nd! If you watched the fight, Lesnar went down fast and retired on the spot. If this actually happened, it would be a brilliant move by Vince McMahon to bring back interest to his product.
"R.I.P. Brock Lesnars MMA Career"
So a few days later, January 2nd arrives. The speculation on the internet is that Chris Jericho will return as the mystery man. Other people play conspiracy like I wanted to and picked Brock Lesnar and others thought maybe it was the Undertaker, ready to come back after his year off like. All of these men would get a great reaction but Jericho was the easy money on this one. So at 9:15 I tune into RAW (In Canada, it airs at 9:15. Go ask the people at thescore.ca why, I have no idea). John Cena comes out and gives his generic "I am who I am" promo with a newly masked Kane saying some stuff about showing him hate. We get a good match between World Champion Daniel Bryan and Intercontinental Champion Cody Rhodes which Bryan wins with a roll-up. Neat. Miz talks about how he's scared of R-Truth, his former partner looking for revenge after Miz crushed his skull on the entrance ramp (aka-a reason to take Truth off TV because of a suspension for smoking fake weed). Wade Barrett crushes Santino Marella and wastes my time. The Miz was supposed to fight Sheamus but the daffy Truth distracted him and this match didn't happen. More of my time wasted. WWE Champion CM Punk defended his title against the quick rising Dolph Ziggler in a great match, however it ended in lame fashion with a countout. Diva matches generally suck and this one between the Bella Twins against Kelly Kelly and Eve lived up to the stank aside from an Eve top rope moonsault, something you don't see very often from women. CM Punk bitches to evil GM John Laurinitis (Fun fact- he is the uncle of St. Louis Rams Middle Linebacker James Laurinitis) about his involvement in his match. Finally, it happens. We get the preview, lights go out... and it's Jericho! Kind of expected but whatever. He's running around high fiving people, screaming excitedly in his incredibly flamboyant jacket... and he keeps doing it... and doing it... and doing it. Finally he grabs a microphone, probably to give one of his cookie cutter good guy return promos. Nope, he drops the microphone and goes back to running around like an idiot, getting a reaction from the crowd for about another eternity (That's what it felt like). He keeps getting a reaction from the crowd and then just leaves. This lasted for over TEN MINUTES!!! All he did was run around like an idiot getting the fans to make noise. It was pretty pathetic and unless he is going to come out next week and become a heel (wrestling term for bad guy), this just made him look like a douchebag.
So in a matter of four days, two incredibly hyped up events in different sports fell flat on their face. However, both did for very different reasons. What happened in UFC wasn't in any stretch Dana Whites fault. It was a legitimate competition and Lesnar just got dominated. It was similar to the crowd reaction to the movie The Great White Hype. Everyone was expecting the fight to go at least a round, not two minutes. WWE on the other hand has a lot of explaining to do on this one. They hype up a return and it's just ten minutes of Jericho running around like a moron then leaving? That was the best you could come up with for arguably, the best pound for pound professional wrestler in the business? It just displayed why their product is weak and unless their plan was to pidgeonhole him into being a heel, this was incredlibly stupid and a waste of time for, what was a pretty weak show overall without that ten minute time filler. Things like this are why people like me are switching the channel on Monday nights to re-runs of Family Guy and American Dad instead of watching that stuff. This is just another disappointment in a three year span of disappointments in professional wrestling.
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