ESPN – The Worldwide Leader in Sports – has decided to devote significant amounts of tape, commentary and bandwidth to a man who hasn’t actually played a sport in years.
Brock Lesnar’s quest to make it to the National Football League has become front-page news on the most popular sports website in the world. Now, I’m not sure what either side hopes to gain from this thinly veiled ad campaign to get Lesnar’s physical résumé out to every NFL team on the planet. But, one thing I do know is this:
Brock Lesnar will never play a down in the National Football League.
Oh, sure, he might entice a handful of scouts with his speed in the 40, assuming he’s recovered from a near fatal motorcycle accident. Hell, he might even catch the fancy of a star-struck General Manager or two who’s naïve enough to think that Lesnar’s legion of WWE fans will take their monthly pay-per-view stipend and spend it on a cheap seat in the back row of “Generic Corporate Whore” Stadium to watch Brock play a real sport.
And, while it does seem mildly amusing to think of pockets of Brock Lesnar fans in those front-and-back screen printed WWE shirts mixed in with the face-painted, costumed fanatics who fill the football stands every Sunday, it’s just not going to happen.
Most of these Lesnar/NFL stories have gone to the ends of the earth (by way of South Dakota) to find one coach who raved about Brock’s talent as a high school senior. They’ll recount a game where the erstwhile WWE Champion scored “five or six” touchdowns. Of course, if one great game against competition saturated with 16 and 17 year olds was the litmus test for excellence, then Al (four touchdowns in a single game) Bundy might’ve done more with this life than sell women’s shoes.
And speaking of fictional characters, let’s start with Brock Lesnar, himself. No, not the 2000 NCAA Heavyweight wrestling champion, I’m talking about the other Brock Lesnar. I’m talking about the Brock Lesnar who was less about the sport and more about the circus.
I completely understand that the life of a professional wrestler is long and grueling. Its sidelines are littered with the careers of those who couldn’t handle the 300-day per year travel schedule, the unavoidable injuries or the chemical addictions and abuses that are synonymous with the territory. Being the star gate attraction of a multi-billion dollar freak show conglomerate only adds to the pressures that eventually forced Brock Lesnar to make a career change.
With all that said, the life of an NFL player is exponentially more difficult.
Let’s set aside the physical comparisons for a second and talk about the preparation before you even step onto the field. This isn’t the leather-helmeted 1920s or the 8-bit NES goodness of Super Tecmo Bowl. Players are required to learn the most complex and creative plays in all of sports and these reference guides (that would be a “playbook”, Brock) are encyclopedia thick…written with the assumption that the reader hasn’t taken an almost 10-year hiatus from the game.
Those 22 men who appear on your TVs every weekend from September through January have lived this sport from Pop Warner through high school and college. It requires a commitment that is unrivaled in nearly every civilian endeavor. For Brock to dismiss this dedication by thinking he can just walk in, spend a year or two on a practice squad and start swapping war stories with Jevon Kearse is the epitome of hubris.
Make no mistake…Brock will bomb and in the end, it’ll be his reputation and (to a lesser degree) that of the WWE that he’ll bring down with him. Think about it…where can Brock Lesnar go after this? When he finally decides to hang up his pads, he could probably crawl back to the choreographed confines of McMahon Land. But, there’s no telling how the juvenile locker room politics will play out. And I can’t imagine a man who left his sports entertainment “family” high and dry will be welcomed back with open arms.
And you can bet that Brock’s failure will give the mainstream media carte blanche to ignorantly paint the WWE as a place where “anyone” can succeed, while “real” sports are best left to the “real” athletes.
Ten years ago, Michael Jordan tried his hand at pro baseball, after his first retirement from the Chicago Bulls. He was assigned to AA-Birmingham and spent the entire year in the Southern League. That was also the year of the infamous nuclear winter of 1994, when Major League Baseball cancelled the remainder of the season after the players walked out in mid-August.
Jordan’s diamond folly was initially reviled by baseball traditionalists, but eventually embraced by fans who were looking for something to follow other than labor agreements and stalemates. Minor League crowds set attendance records wherever he played.
Michael Jordan hit .202 that year.
The greatest athlete of our generation went from the top of one sport to the bottom of another in about a year’s time. Brock Lesnar could just barely be called an athlete, based on his line of work over the last few years, yet he’s left the world of pulled punches and chairshots for pancakes and chop blocks.
This won’t be pretty…but, it probably won’t last that long.
Aaron Cameron’s “Bootleg” column appears every Friday in The Music Zone. At six feet tall and 185 pounds, he has a better chance of playing NFL football next year, than Brock Lesnar.
