Frank Mir says he’s going to end Brock Lesnar’s career:
“I’m going to soon be the the destroyer of Brock Lesnar’s legacy and career…. Obviously, I’m slightly scared — just look at Brock … he is a scary guy. When he was beating me down I went to tap. Oh, well, that’s right. Brock asked the referee to come over and save him! At [UFC 81] I wasn’t really working with a jiu-jitsu coach. I was my own coach. I now have Demian Maia who is my head jiu-jitsu coach. My game has gone drastically to different levels. I thought I was actually good at it until I started rolling with him.”
Frank Mir is a great fighter and a legitimate top five heavyweight at this point, but I have a feeling that he’s playing with fire by mocking Brock Lesnar. I realize that 95% of whatever Lesnar and Mir say are strictly to build up the fight in July, but I also think that everyone in the world (including Mir) realizes that Lesnar had Frank in a lot of trouble and likely would have finished the fight if they hadn’t been forced to stand up because of the punch to the back of the head.
And the punch to the back of the head is questionable as it is, because Lesnar threw a punch that Mir turned into; it was a single punch with zero warnings before the standup by Steve Mazagatti. That incident was one of many such mistakes by Mazagatti over the past two years, to the point where many fighters request that Mazagatti not be named as the official for their fights. Without that standup, I believe Lesnar would have finished Mir within ten or fifteen seconds, and Mir’s comeback trail would have hit a sharp dead end that night.
Prior to the rematch being booked, Mir has gone on record as saying that Lesnar hits like a truck and is a legitimately scary fighter. Lesnar dropped Mir with a half-hearted jab, so Mir’s current stance that Lesnar “hits like a girl” is obviously a ploy to build up the fight. It’s a good idea to build up the fight, but it’s probably not a good idea to anger Lesnar to the point where he actually wants to inflict some damage on you. Brock is scary enough as it is; giving him a reason to hold a grudge when stepping in the cage on July 11th just doesn’t seem like the wisest of decisions.
Mir being coached by Demian Maia will certainly help his ground game, but Lesnar starting bringing world-class jiu-jitsu players into his camp after the Mir loss. The word out of his camp is that he’s very difficult to submit these days, which means that Mir’s big advantage is gone. The striking improvements Mir showed against Noguiera in December were more the result of Noguiera suffering from a staph infection and taking the fight when he was advised not to do so, resulting in him being sluggish and unable to properly defend himself.
Frank Mir obviously has the tools to beat Brock Lesnar, but any kind of chance he has in the rematch is going to rely on him being able to catch Lesnar in a mistake again. I don’t see it happening.
The final two months leading into UFC 100 are going to be very interesting indeed.
