Brock Lesnar isn't coming back, so MMA needs to learn to let him go

Brock Lesnar

So it turns out that Brock Lesnar isn’t coming back. At least now we know. At least now we in the MMA world can stop talking about him, hopefully, and move on with our Brock-less lives, such as they are.

This is a good thing, is my point, because, if I can be honest here? We’ve gotten a little weird about this guy in the past few years.

On some level, I get it. Lesnar was MMA’s enigmatic but deeply flawed ex. We didn’t think he could ever really love us or we him, but we were both surprised with how well things turned out, at least for a little while.

And then, well, you know how things go. He got sick. We maybe weren’t as supportive as we could have been. An enormous Dutch man kicked him in the gut while we cheered. The usual relationship stuff, really. It didn’t work out. He got back together with an old flame, but we secretly wondered if maybe we might give it another go someday. And by “secretly,” I mean openly, at almost every opportunity.

But then Lesnar announced – on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” of all places, which typically only deals with sports that are sports rather than the sports that are scripted theatre, but fine – that he’s never coming back, that the WWE is the only one for him.

So that’s it, then. It’s really over. For real this time. Now what?

For starters, we need to knock off a lot of the stupid crap we’ve been doing in Lesnar’s absence. You know what I’m talking about.

Brock Lesnar

The baseless speculation, the rumor-mongering, the manic desire to interpret his appearance at a UFC event as a breathless news item that we must spend the next several days picking apart. Now that we know he’s not coming back, we need to stop talking about what would happen if he did. We probably need to stop thinking about him in general. And, paradoxically, maybe the best way to do that is to finally ask ourselves, wait, what did all this mean?

If Lesnar isn’t coming back, that frees us up to finally decide what to make of his legacy in MMA. That’s not as easy as it sounds, either.

This monstrous pro wrestler decides to take up pro fighting on a whim, and then uses his size, strength, freakish athleticism and college wrestling credentials as a catapult to launch him into the sport’s uppermost level. While we’re still debating whether he belongs in the UFC, he’s winning fights there. While we’re still unclear on what qualifies to fight for the heavyweight title, he’s strapping the belt around his waist.

Just when we get used to the idea that this behemoth with the ’50s crew cut might actually be as much substance as hype, he gets punched in the face so hard that he runs back to the pretend fighting from whence he came. As if that weren’t complicated enough, somewhere in there he also suffered a life-altering illness that may or may not have changed the entire trajectory of his career.

A little more than three years, exactly seven fights (of which he won slightly more than half), and his UFC career was over. It’s just enough of a body of work to give it some sort of arc, but not so much that we feel like we actually learned anything.

Was Lesnar truly good? Was he great? Or was he just big and strong and athletic enough to briefly trump a heavyweight field typically comprised of guys who could lay claim to no more than two of those attributes? And, if that latter explanation fits, what exactly is the difference between being all those things and being the rightful king of a sport based on people trying to beat each other up?

What made Lesnar so fascinating as a mixed martial artist was how perfectly he seemed like the kind of dude that martial arts were invented to deal with. Big dude with a head like a cinderblock walks into the party and starts shouting about what he intends to do with a horseshoe that he believes, for reasons still unknown, can be found somewhere in your rectum? Sure would be nice to know some combination of kickboxing, wrestling and submission grappling right about then.

Lesnar was a kind of litmus test for MMA, backed by the cultural force of pro wrestling fame and the strange charisma that comes from a complete lack of self-awareness. We were equal parts fascinated and repelled by him, which is to say we couldn’t get enough of the guy. He was an MMA superstar before he even did MMA. Then he was gone.

What does his career in MMA mean, when you strip away the other baggage, all that before and after and would-haves and could-haves? I’m still not sure I know. Just talking about his actual, in-cage career without getting into the other stuff feels so difficult. The myth was what made the man seem possible, and the myth changed depending on where you were standing when you looked at it.

Maybe we’ll never come to any consensus about exactly what Lesnar and his short, but dense, career meant to the sport of MMA. Now that we know it’s really over, however, at least we can stop waiting for him to do something more that might tell us.

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