Death Clutch (11 page)

When we got to the airport, Simon Inoki comes up to me and says in this soft-spoken, respectful tone, “Mr. Lesnar, you should leave the title belt with me, because we want to polish it up for you and fix the rhinestones so that the belt looks very nice for when you come back to Japan!”

The Inokis had to know there was a chance I wasn't coming back, so that meant there was a possibility they were going to ask me to turn over the title belt. I was one up on them, though, because I had the title belt buried all the way at the bottom of my suitcase … and you can just imagine what my grip on that suitcase must have been like. I was holding on for dear life, because they still hadn't paid me, and I wanted to keep their title belt as an insurance policy. As long as I had possession of the IWGP Heavyweight Championship belt, I knew they would find a way to come up with the money they owed me.

As polite as Simon was to me, I was even more polite to him. I thanked him for the offer to take care of the belt for me, but told him that I was planning on polishing it myself back home, and that I was going to make the rhinestones look nice for the New Japan fans.

Always trying to stay one step ahead of everyone, the Inokis must have anticipated my response, because Simon had a couple of the New Japan wrestlers with him. It looked to me and Brad like they were going to try to strong-arm me for the title belt. They had the advantage because I was a foreigner on their home turf and didn't speak the language, and if security jumped in they could say anything they wanted to. But, when those guys tried to intimidate us, Brad and I stared right back at them as we backed ten steps to the ticket counter, where I just let them know in no uncertain terms, “I'm taking the title with me!”

There was nothing they could do at that point unless they wanted to create a major incident in an international airport, so Brad and I checked in and got on the plane with the title belt still in my possession. I had heard New Japan was talking to TNA about a joint promotion, and it was easy to figure out that they were going to want me to come back and drop the title. That gave me a lot of negotiating leverage. I had something they wanted, and they had the money to pay me, so I used that to my advantage.

It wasn't long before Simon Inoki called my lawyers and wanted to set up a big title match in Japan. I told my lawyers, “Here's my price, give them the number and tell them to take it or leave it.” They tried to counter, so we didn't have a deal.

As the months rolled by, Simon kept calling, but he wouldn't meet my price. Eventually, over a year later, after I was well into training for my first MMA fight and had more or less put wrestling in my past (although the IWGP belt looked good hanging in my garage), my lawyers got a another call from Simon. The Inokis had cut ties with New Japan and were starting a new promotion called “IGF.” They needed a main event for their first show and they wanted it to be Brock Lesnar vs. Kurt Angle for the IWGP title. Now they were willing to meet my price.

I agreed to do it, but, since Kurt was working for TNA, I made Simon confirm that both TNA and Kurt were committed to the match, and let them know that it could not take place until after my first MMA fight.

I enjoyed getting back in the ring with Kurt for one night and had no problem dropping the title to him.

When I did that match, I was sure that I would never have to lace up a pair of wrestling boots again . . . with just one exception. In the back of my mind, I knew that when I became a big enough commodity doing something else in life, there would always be a big payday waiting for me when I decided to come back for one big event, one big night, one big match.

But that was looking far into the future.

Brock Lesnar vs. WWE.

WWE vs. Brock Lesnar.

Before I ever got to that last match with Kurt, I had spent a fortune fighting against a big, publicly traded company that had unlimited resources. WWE did an excellent job of making me spend a ridiculous amount of money fighting for the simple right to go out and work for a living, but the day of reckoning was at hand.

In February 2006, the judge ordered us to enter into what's called mediation, which is an attempt to settle the case before a trial, in front of a federal magistrate, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. If we were not able to reach a settlement, the judge would finally decide the motion I had filed nearly a year earlier to have my noncompete agreement declared to be a worthless piece of shit. WWE was running out of ways to delay that from happening, but what was I going to do once I was a free man?

The mediation was scheduled for the day after the Super Bowl, so David Olsen and I flew in and caught part of the game in the hotel bar. We got up the next morning and headed for the courthouse, and I wasn't holding out any hope that WWE would accept any settlement because Vince McMahon wasn't going to allow me to show that his noncompete agreements were unenforceable.

WWE claimed that my demand for freedom was outrageous. I thought WWE's offers were insulting. We kept going back and forth, and I just wanted to walk out and go home, but the judge had ordered us to hash things out this way, so we finally worked out the outline of a deal.

Settling the case was the right move to make, because if it came to trial, and even if I won in court, there would be appeals and more delays, and I just wanted to be done with it all and move on with everything. WWE was motivated to settle because they didn't want a public court declaring their noncompete clauses to be illegal. That would open the floodgates and cause them all sorts of problems with other wresters who might be thinking about leaving.

I've been warned by my lawyers that I can't go into detail here about the terms of the settlement because it's confidential. What horseshit. I made some compromises, and so did WWE. In the end, we both got a deal we could live with.

There. I didn't reveal any specifics, but you get the point. WWE didn't lose face, and I was a free man, with my whole life ahead of me, and the ability to choose how I wanted to earn a living so that I could feed my family. All I had to do now was make the decision regarding what I wanted to do.

I didn't have to think about it very long. I wanted to compete as a real athlete. I wanted to test myself. I talked it over with Rena, who was now my wife, and she assured me she would be supportive in anything I decided I was going to do. My wife knows I'm a competitor, and that competition is what drives me. It's in my blood. It's what I want to do. It's what I was made for.

In 2006, the fight business was picking up steam and getting a lot of serious attention from the media. It looked to me like there was money to be made if I could stir up some noise and grab everyone's attention again. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but nothing worthwhile in life ever is.

My legal battle with WWE was behind me. So was the NFL, and my dance with vodka and Vicodins, and, I thought, Japan Pro Wrestling. It was time to get back to doing what was second nature to me, what I had been trained to do since I was five years old.

So, looking for the next great challenge in my life, I got into the world of mixed martial arts. A whole new adventure was about to begin.

GETTING STARTED IN MIXED MARTIAL ARTS

W
hen I decided to become a fighter, there were certain things I had to accept from day one. I'm an athlete and a wrestler, but that doesn't automatically make me a great mixed martial artist. To get to the top of the sport, I was going to need a lot of coaching.

I asked around about all the different training facilities, and decided to give Pat Miletich's gym in Bettendorf, Iowa, a try. Pat was one of the pioneers of mixed martial arts, and he is very well respected within the MMA community. He's a former UFC Champion, and his gym has produced guys like Matt Hughes, Tim Sylvia, Jens Pulver, and Robbie Lawler. I immediately liked Pat because he was originally an amateur wrestler, so he knew what it would take to transform another wrestler into a fighter.

I trained with Pat and his team for a while, and during the time I was with them I really learned a lot. This is no knock on Pat, because I respect his work and appreciate all that I learned from him, but I soon realized that his gym wasn't for me.

I figured I had money again, and I could afford to create my own camp, one that was dedicated to one and only one purpose, which was making me the best fighter I could be in the shortest period of time. I didn't want to spend years and years going through MMA's equivalent of my time in Louisville. I wanted to fight for a living, and my thought was that if you have a gym designed to accommodate a bunch of fighters, then no one gets the full benefit of the coaching staff. It's spread too thin. Where's the focus?

But if you have your own training facility, and everyone is dedicated to the goal of making you the best, you have a better chance of reaching your full potential. There's a lot of money at the end of that rainbow, and I wanted to reach for the pot of gold.

From the moment I decided to get into mixed martial arts, I knew I wanted to be in the UFC. That's the big league . . . the only place to be. The UFC is the most professionally run organization, and the people there have the resources to put on big-time fights for big-time money. No rinky-dink bush-league bullcrap for that organization. It's first class all the way.

The best thing about the fight business is that people pay to see a fight, and for the most part, you're going to see someone win and someone lose. It's a simple formula. If you want to be the best, you have to enter the fight and go for broke. No one is going to be champion for long by attempting to win on points.

Ultimately, there are only two positions a fighter can be in. Either you're number one, or you're not. For me, number one is the only place to be, because number two is just not good enough. It's the same as being last.

I had my goals set, but I also had a problem. The UFC saw me as a WWE “fake” wrestler. Yes, I had a name, but I had no MMA experience to speak of, which meant I had to start somewhere else. Believe it or not, that road led me right back to doing business with a company in Japan.

I was getting offers to fight as soon as word got out that I had been training at the Militech camp. It didn't matter if they promoted fights in arenas, on beaches, or in high school gyms, everyone wanted to promote my first mixed martial arts fight.

In April 2006, David Olsen and a new member of my legal team, Brian Stegeman, set up a meeting for me with the Japanese promotion K-1. This promotion is owned by a company called FEG, and they sent their international operations manager, Daisuke Teraguchi, and their Japanese-American lawyer, Toru Nakahara, to Minnesota to cut a deal with me.

We met at the Minneapolis Grand Hotel for a sushi dinner.

The food was great, but the meeting was going way too slow for my taste. Unlike the Inokis, who just sit there and stare at you, waiting for you to tip your hand, these guys just wanted to talk and talk and talk. I thought they would never get down to the bottom line, so against my lawyers' advice, I spoke up and cut to the chase. Right in the middle of the California rolls, I told them how much I needed for one fight or there was nothing further to talk about.

To their credit, Daisuke and Toru didn't even blink. They calmly asked if they could have a few minutes to discuss my demand in private. Feeling my oats, I generously said they could have fifteen minutes, and then I wanted an answer.

I went outside with David and Brian, and we just looked at one another. I was supposed to let them do the talking and negotiating, but I'd felt like the meeting was going nowhere with everyone just smiling at each other and telling stories. My lawyers were in disbelief, because by handling the meeting the way I'd done, they thought I might have killed my MMA career before it started, and I wasn't about to disagree. We started laughing, because depending on what happened in the next fifteen minutes, I was either going to fail Negotiating 101, or get an A-plus in the graduate-level course. And the suspense wasn't going to last very long.

David bet me the FEG execs would be sitting in a cab on their way to the airport by the time we returned. When we walked back into the restaurant, though, they were still sitting at the table. They told us they could probably make the deal work, but that they would need to confirm the details with some people in Japan before they could commit. The fact that they weren't already halfway back to Tokyo seemed like a very good sign.

While my lawyers were working out the details with K-1, I was working on becoming a fighter. Part of the agreement was that I could choose my own trainers, and FEG would foot the bill. They wanted me ready to fight by August 2006. There were a lot of rumors floating around that they were trying to get my first opponent to be Royce Gracie, UFC's very first star and the heir to the Brazilian jujitsu throne.

I was living just outside Minneapolis, and I was looking for a place to train locally. I didn't want to go to California or Nevada or anywhere else to train. As far as I was concerned, my traveling days were over.

Everyone I talked to on the local MMA scene seemed to have a high opinion of Greg Nelson, who ran the Minnesota Martial Arts Academy, so I stopped by his gym one day. Greg was a former U of M wrestler like me, had trained UFC World Champion Sean Sherk and others, and he agreed to take me on and get me ready for my K-1 fight.

Now that I was a professional fighter, and was about to make a lot of money, my lawyers told me they were creating a new company for carrying on my business as a fighter, and that I had to choose the name. David, Brian, and I were on a three-way phone conversation, and we were just throwing names back and forth.

The “Death Collector” had been suggested by a guy who wanted to do T-shirts for us, but that was too WWE for me. And then I said, what about “DeathClutch”? That name really worked for me, because after the lawsuit with Vince and all of the other shit that I had been through, I felt like I had been in one DeathClutch after another. I could hear the call of the match in my head: “Lesnar gets his hands around his opponent's body . . . it's the DeathClutch!”

I couldn't wait to get started, but just as I was ramping up my training, K-1 told me that they had not yet secured an opponent for what I thought would be my October 2006 fight. Oh, wait. It gets worse. They didn't have an arena, or even a pay-per-view clearance yet either. My goal was to be in a major-league organization, but I knew at that moment I was still in the minors.

K-1 offered me big money for an extension on my contract. If I told them no, I'd just have to take a fight for another minor-league organization before the UFC would seriously consider me.

Since I was already in business with K-1, I agreed to the extension, and kept training with Greg Nelson.

In the fall of 2006, I heard that K-1 had signed “The Techno Goliath,” a seven-foot one-inch Korean kickboxer and MMA fighter named Hong-Man Choi, and wanted to pit us against each other in May 2007 at Dodger Stadium in L.A.

I never heard of Hong-Man Choi, so we looked him up. He was known for being this big entertaining son of a bitch, a friendly gentle giant who could maul people in fights. But the one thing that I couldn't get over was the size of his head. I mean, his noggin was enormous, even bigger than Big Show's. It was massive. I kept thinking that as soon as the referee said “fight,” I was going straight for that huge target right between his shoulders. Hong-Man Choi had an international reputation, but he was big and slow, and I knew I could eat him up.

It was around this time that I talked to my old U of M wrestling coach, Marty Morgan. Since I was scheduled to fight a giant, I wanted to train with some big guys. Marty was training Cole Konrad at the University of Minnesota, and I started hitting the punching bag with Marty while rolling around with Cole and the other heavyweights on the squad.

I felt alive again. After all I had been through, it didn't matter who they put in front of me that first fight. I had a new lease on life, and I wasn't going to fail.

About a month before my scheduled fight, K-1 tells us there is going to be another delay. They couldn't get Dodger Stadium, so now the fight was going to be moved to June 2007 at the L.A. Coliseum. You know the routine. K-1 said they were planning to make this the biggest MMA fight ever, and that they were going to put a hundred thousand people in the stands. They expected all of L.A.'s Korea Town to show up for Big Head, and all of the WWE fans to show up for me.

I didn't want to hear the hype. I wanted to get started with my new career, and while I'm making sweet dough because of my contract with K-1, I knew I'd be spending my best fighting years dealing with delays and bullshit games. I simply want to train, fight, and make money. I don't want to have to worry about all the stuff the promotion is supposed to take care of. That's their job.

I know I'll live up to my end. You live up to yours.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to knock Big Head out, because someone else beat me to it. About a month before our fight, the idiot did a K-1 kickboxing match in Japan, took a big shot to his big head, and went down like a felled tree. Scheduling him for an event so close to our fight was just plain stupid of K-1.

When Hong-Man Choi did the medical testing right before our fight, the California State Athletic Commission declared him unfit to compete.

K-1 offered me Min Soo Kim as a last-minute replacement. He was a South Korean fighter that had won an Olympic Silver Medal in judo. I didn't care who he was, or what he had won, I knew I was going to steamroll right over him.

I have to give it to K-1, they probably put fifty thousand or so people into the Coliseum on a beautiful June evening to watch me beat up Min Soo Kim. They also did their best to create a spectacle, including my grand entrance from the Olympic flame at the top of the stadium.

My job, to me, was easy. Wait for the referee to say “fight,” and go right after Min Soo Kim. Poor bastard had no idea what he was in for. I took him right down and pounded him out. The fight lasted sixty-nine seconds, and I walked away without a scratch on me. Better yet, because the fight was delayed several times, each extension of my contract cost K-1 more money. All in all, I pocketed a lot of money for what turned out to be about a minute's worth of work in the ring.

This is the business for me!