8 Intriguing Implications Of Brock Lesnar At UFC 200
4. UFC Fighters Aren't Going To Like This
Aside from Hunt himself, I can’t imagine many UFC contracted fighters being impressed with the newest addition to the card.
True, Lesnar’s presence will amp up the buyrate and bring more money in, which could financially benefit everyone else on the card. Fundamentally however, this is a guy who isn’t contracted to the UFC coming in for a main event level payday and taking a spot from someone else on the biggest event the company have ever produced.
It’s a perennial complaint from wrestling and fight fans, and even from wrestlers and fighters themselves… only this time, they’d have a fairly unassailable point. Lesnar had the choice between WWE and UFC - between mixed martial arts and pro wrestling, between real fighting and ‘fake’ fighting - last year, and chose to be a professional wrestler instead. Now he gets to have his cake and eat it too.
Like all pay-per-view based events, the UFC200 card is limited to a certain number of bouts by virtue of the format. One of those bouts is now a fight that will take a place on the card that could benefit two fighters actually contracted to the company, whose careers are entwined with the fortunes of UFC.
Worse, Lesnar vs. Hunt will be a hype-fest of gargantuan proportions that will overshadow practically everything else on the card.
Not only that, but the cross-promotional juggernaut of UFC and WWE means that Lesnar will constantly be billed in all that hype as a WWE wrestler. That’s like grinding lemon and salt into a paper cut.