I Want To Talk A Little Bit About Brock Lesnar’s 2012 WWE Run

 

Brock Lesnar is back in WWE. Really you didn’t know that already? I would say that that line was a joke, but honestly I’m not sure if it would click or not. Lesnar’s return has been questionable to say the least with a lot of holes all throughout it. Today I’m going to take a look at Lesnar’s return and talk about what I would have done differently, what they’ve done right and wrong, and whatever else comes to my mind. Let’s get to it.

 

 

So back on April 2^nd as the Kentucky Wildcats were winning the national championship, John Cena was in the ring and the fans were chanting that they wanted Lesnar. Brock walked out and beat Cena down, returning for the company for the first time in eight years. It was announced that Lesnar had a limited amount of dates to work so he wouldn’t be there every week. Fine. So a week or so later there was a pull apart brawl with Cena being busted open from a punch by Lesnar. Cena was fired up and a match was announced. That got us to Extreme Rules. What happened there? Here’s the rating for the match:

 

 

Rating: A. WOW. This is going to be a disputed rating but this was an absolute war. Cena got one homerun shot to win it but that’s all he needed. Lesnar dominated about 95% of the match but it was good enough to make both guys look great. Lesnar can come back but Cena has the first win, which sets up a rematch where Lesnar can beat him. I had a blast with this and Lesnar looks AMAZING.

 

 

In short, the match was a complete success. I’ll get to the criticisms of it later and explain why most of them are stupid. The following night on Raw, HHH showed up on Raw to face Lesnar. Lesnar had been having on air contract disputes with HHH and now we were getting the resolution. Lesnar broke HHH’s arm and left the building. A few weeks later, Paul Heyman came out and said Lesnar had quit the company. A week later, a lawsuit was announced. Then at No Way Out, HHH challenged Lesnar to a match at Summerslam. It wasn’t until the 1000th episode of Raw when Lesnar came out and accepted the challenge. This would be roughly three months since the last time Lesnar had appeared on Raw. That brings us to now, with the match official for Summerslam.

 

 

Brock Lesnar returned to the WWE four months ago today and approximately three months of that has been wasted. I LOVED the portion of his time spent with Cena. The company did a masterful job of building up the idea of these two forces colliding and showing how much trouble John Cena could have been in. Now let’s take a look at the payoff to that build up.

 

 

It was in Chicago at Extreme Rules and Cena got ROCKED very fast. Lesnar ran him over and didn’t stop beating on him for almost fifteen minutes. The match was almost stopped but Cena hung in there, eventually making Lesnar miss a flying knee, hitting Brock in the head with a chain and hitting an Attitude Adjustment onto the steps for the pin. We’ll ignore the post match stuff about Cena saying he was taking a vacation because it really meant nothing overall.

 

 

The match was a huge success, drawing more buys than most Extreme Rules PPVs usually get. The criticism seems to be that Cena won. Why? Why is that such a big deal? Cena was DESTROYED for the majority of the fight then caught Lesnar in a miracle, hit a big move and won. This for some reason was determined to be the worst possible idea. Clearly these people are right because you can NEVER come back from a loss in wrestling right?

 

 

By comparison, let’s take a look at what happened in Lesnar’s UFC debut. He faced Frank Mir, a former world heavyweight champion with a career record of 10-3 coming in. Mir never lost the world title either, as he had to forfeit it due to injury after holding it over a year. This man had success in the sport of mixed martial arts and in the UFC in particular. Know what happened in their fight, which was Lesnar’s second professional fight ever? Lesnar ran Frank Mir over. He took Mir down almost immediately and pounded on him, only being taken off of him due to an illegal strike. Lesnar then took Mir down again but made a mistake and got caught in a submission after 90 seconds.

 

 

Now, since there’s no logic in having Lesnar lose in his first match back to Cena and since losses matter much more in MMA than they do in pro wrestling, it’s clear that Lesnar’s career in MMA was completely over and no one would ever want to pay to see him again right? If you can’t sense the sarcasm in my voice, I’ll spell it out for you: OF COURSE THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENED. Lesnar came back, beat up a guy named Heath Herring and then faced arguably the best fighter of all time for the World Heavyweight Championship. Brock dominated champion Randy Couture and won the title, which he held for nearly two years, all the while becoming one of the biggest draws in MMA history and destroying Mir in a rematch.

 

 

So now that the idiocy of saying that Cena beating Lesnar was a bad idea, let’s get to something that is a pretty bad idea: the feud with HHH. What’s the biggest problem with this you ask? My guess is that it’s a feud with HHH. Why is HHH of all people getting this feud? He wrestles 3-4 times a year, it’s pretty clear that Lesnar is gone after Mania, and we’ve spent three months of that time on HHH. HHH is barely a wrestler anymore so why does he need to feud with Brock?

 

 

In short, he doesn’t. There are probably half a dozen guys you could put out there against Brock to give a rub to/that would you get a better feud out of. It could be Brock vs. Punk, Sheamus, Cena again, Orton, Undertaker, Rock and probably more than I’m overlooking. Think about it like this: Lesnar was put with Cena because Cena needed a challenge (there’s another article on the concept that Cena had reached a level in WWE that they had to bring in The Rock and the former UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World to give him a real challenge. We’ll get to that someday). Lesnar is put with HHH because…….somebody help me out here.

 

 

It makes no sense. I don’t know what Lesnar is going to do at Summerslam but if there’s any logic in the world, the answer is WIN. Now let’s say that’s the case. The interesting question is where do we go from there? Here’s what I would do: first off you need to figure out the end goal of all of this, and by that I mean the Wrestlemania match. It’s pretty clear that Undertaker, Lesnar, Rock and Cena are going to be involved with each other at Mania in some two combinations. Any one of these is perfectly acceptable but you have different paths to get there.

 

 

To begin with, we’ll go with the least likely: Lesnar vs. Rock. There’s a backstory here of Summerslam 2002, but I can’t imagine Cena vs. Undertaker, the biggest super match WWE has left, is happening anywhere other than Wrestlemanie 30. It’s possible, but I’d be very surprised if it happened. The way to do this is have Rock win the title at the Rumble and then have Brock win the Rumble or the Chamber later in the night, but I can’t see that happening. It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s happening.

 

 

The most likely and the result I think will happen, is Brock vs. Taker. This has an interesting story to it as they could go more than one way. The less likely way is to point out that Taker has never beaten Brock, but that would mean talking about Biker Taker time which is rarely mentioned. The more likely choice is to have Brock challenging the Streak with the machine facing the MMA Cowboy of Death. That could be an excellent match with Taker always getting fired up to show off his MMA skills.

 

 

This brings us to the interesting story. It’s not going to be able to work due to the issue of Cena needing to be on PPV every month, but it gives me a chance to play fantasy booker which isn’t something I can do often. The way I would have played it (and this could still be done) is to have Lesnar injure Cena, maybe breaking his arm or a limb or something like that. Then you have Lesnar go on a path of rage and run over everyone on the roster, eventually facing Punk for the title, perhaps at the Rumble (this would be assuming Rock either doesn’t win the title at the Rumble or doesn’t get the Rumble shot). Lesnar leaves Punk a bloody mess and takes the title.

 

 

On Raw, Lesnar comes out and says he has no competition left and that he’s taking the title back to Minnesota with him and only defending it when he has to. As he’s about to leave, Cena comes to the stage and points at Lesnar, setting up Wrestlemania with Cena challenging for the title and Lesnar wanting to get his hands on Cena because he’s the one that got away. That sets up Cena vs. Lesnar II at Mania and Rock vs. Taker at Mania. Think that would draw pretty well? Another possible option, and a decent one, is to have Lesnar actually take the belt hostage and only defend it when he had to. But that couldn’t work because then you would only have the World Heavyweight Championship to main event a show and that could NEVER happen could it?

 

 

Either way, I can’t believe Lesnar isn’t victim #21 of the Streak. So now that we have the end game of it, we need something else to fill in the gap between Summerslam and Wrestlemania. This is where things are a bit less complicated. There are a ton of people that you could throw out there against him: Sheamus, Punk, or the guy I would throw out there: Orton. He’s still popular, a loss isn’t going to hurt him, and a win over him means something. There aren’t many wrong answers here, but I’d go with Orton on this one.

 

 

So anyway, overall Lesnar’s 2012 run hasn’t been a disaster, but as I look at the HHH vs. Lesnar build, the big question continues to be why HHH? He’s one of the last people I’d pick and while the match will likely be good, it really doesn’t need to happen.