A nice story about Brock Lesnar

Former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar has the look and act of a mean person. However, super coach Mike Winkeljohn appeared recently on Submission Radio and told a story indicating otherwise. Winkeljohn student UFC light heavyweight Jon Jones recently called out Lesnar, and while the coach likes the fight, he also likes the man.

“Personally I really do like Brock Lesnar,” he said. “He’s got some great character, he has been real cordial to me in the past that was definitely not needed. So I like the guy, I’ve always actually wanted to train him.

“Brock Lesnar is this guy that’s supposed to be this mean WWE star, blah blah blah, and he didn’t know who I was – I don’t know how many years ago it was, [it was] when he basically was even thinking about getting to the UFC and he hadn’t even gotten to the UFC yet. He was at a casino – I don’t know if he’d watched the fights, I had Michelle Waterson fight outside of Phoenix – and I’m walking around the hotel at 2:30 in the morning and my car didn’t show up to take me to the airport and he goes, ‘Hey Coach’ which just surprised me because I didn’t know he even knew I was a coach, and he said, ‘What’s going on? I said, ‘Ah, the ride to the airport [didn ’t arrive], I gotta figure this crap out.” This is before Uber. He said, ‘Hold on’, he went and got his bags, he got his driver and he drove me to the airport. He went to the airport early. He didn’t know me. And that’s my own story.

“You know, who does that? Here’s this guy that’s supposed to be, you know, some people don’t like for whatever reason. To me, I just… I don’t know how to describe him other than, I was very taken back and very appreciative and I never really spoken to him since, but I like the guy. But with that being said, it’s a sport and he’s a big guy that can run a hard double and he’s a big train and you do not want to be on his train tracks when he’s coming at you, but I think it would be a great fight for the fans, I think it’s a big money fight and I think it can bring a lot of excitement to the sport.

I think it’s the perfect fight for many reasons. I think it’s a marketable fight, it’s a money fight and it’s at this place where it shows the two different styles. So now you have somebody that’s smaller, assume he’s quicker, against the bigger fighter that’s coming forward. So it’s a very sellable fight, it’s kind of an exciting fight to see who can impose their will and we think Jon can win that fight. So we’re real excited to have him do that.

No one has ever taken Jones down and forced him to work off his back, but the coach says he has an effective Guard.

He could [take Jones down], but people will be surprised,” said Winkeljohn. “You haven’t seen Jon on his back, what Jon can do. He’s got some great sweeps in there, but also, getting Jon on his back is very hard. His hips are first all the time, he’s very good in the scramble and Jon’s hard to take down. It’s like I said, Brock’s gonna shoot on him, but it doesn’t mean Jon’s gonna be right in front of him. So expect Jon, like I said, to get out the tracks, and I see Brock coming so hard that he’s gonna be one of those things, I’d like to see Jon get out of the way and Brock basically run into the cage, you know, in essence, that kind of theory, get out of the way. So stuffing the shot is different than not letting the shot happen and doing things to your strikes that makes him not wanna shoot. You know, scare him kind of like Alistair Overeem did. So there’s a lot of different ways for the fight to play out.

The coach also was confident Jones could stop Lesnar.

“I sure do,” he said. “I think Jon can knock out anybody with his strikes. The problem in the past was, Jon’s striking was not his base, wrestling was his base. So all those years when he came over to us, it was just kind of working with Jon, he was doing a lot repetition, a lot of different unpredictable type of shots. But it was always a lot of reps, a lot of, I want to say just, Bop, bop, bop, bop.’ That type of thing. But you saw in this fight with Daniel it was time. We had that conversation that it was time to go hard and he started letting some things go hard. And that’s kind of a first for Jon Jones, letting his 100-percenters go. And he believes. And once he believes in something, like I said about Jon Jones, he always makes it work.

Coach Wink previously expressed reservations about another of his fighters, Holly Holm, fighting Cris Cyborg due to the latter’s history of PED use. The coach was asked if he also had similar concerns around Lesnar.

Well, you know what you got in front of you,” said Winkeljohn. “Like I said, so you got this guy who’s just gigantic and stuff and coming at Jon, so it is what it is. No, it’s not really a concern with him. I think guys that have done PEDs in the past is different than girls that have done them in the past, because they do get bigger, but you kind of expect that with the guy. The girls that do it, you know, I’m always worried about, okay, they’re clean, but what about their past? Did it change bone structure? Did it change density on different things? That’s where things change a little bit. So I think it has more of an effect for girls than it does for guys, not that it’s not cheating for guys as well.

In any case, Lesnar has six months of a PED suspension tolling, so even if he takes the fight, immediately, it won’t happen for some time.