Brock Lesnar was the center of discussions in WWE and UFC again this week.
Until Raw Monday, Lesnar had not appeared or been mentioned on WWE television since he met with Dana White at UFC 146 on May 26th in Las Vegas. White this week reiterated his claim that the post-show meeting with Brock was a disaster. “Probably the worst meeting we’ve ever had with Brock Lesnar, and I haven’t talked to him since,” White said. This mirrors the stories coming out of the meeting the day after it went down.
However, sources in both WWE and UFC this week expressed skepticism that this was really the case, and both sides had differing opinions regarding rumors that Brock wanted to fight for UFC before the end of 2012.
The WWE side almost universally claims that Brock has an iron-clad contract and that there is no way he could fight for UFC until that contract expires following WrestleMania 29 in April of 2013. On the UFC side, there are people who insist that his contract is non-exclusive (more than one source used the term “on loan to WWE”), and that he and White were discussing a potential fight during the meeting.
Not everyone in UFC believes he’ll fight. Some believe that even if his WWE contract allowed it, his heart really isn’t into fighting and all of this is some sort of ploy by Lesnar to increase his bargaining power or leverage with WWE. There is a great deal of heat on Lesnar from the WWE side, in part due to the belief that the stories coming out of UFC about the meeting going poorly are false.
As of last week he was still scheduled to wrestle HHH at SummerSlam. The company has an angle planned which involves HHH appearing at No Way Out to address his future. The plan is to shoot the angle on the PPV in the hopes that it will add viewers to Raw the next night as opposed to shooting the angle on Raw hoping it will add buys to the PPV.
As reported last week, Lesnar is only scheduled for 24 dates under his one-year contract, so it is believed that after SummerSlam he won’t be used at all until around Royal Rumble 2013 when the build for WrestleMania begins.
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