Ah, the part-timer era. When Brock Lesnar shockingly returned to WWE in April 2012, there was a lot of dream match-making going on. The Next Big Thing hadn't been seen in a WWE ring in eight years. In that time a lot of new stars had emerged. Would we be seeing Lesnar going one-on-one with the likes of Dolph Ziggler, Daniel Bryan and CM Punk? Although Lesnar and Punk did collide (in a five star match at SummerSlam 2013), his services were usually reserved for the 'real' stars of the business, like John Cena and Triple H. Brock had clashed with both of them before, when Cena was a doctor of thuganomics and Triple H was doing his best to bury everyone in sight. But The Game and The Beast's only meeting prior to Lesnar's 2012 return was a decade earlier in 2002 during the Global Warming tour of Australia. The match, a triple threat also featuring The Rock, was released on DVD but remains something of an obscurity. You won't find it on the WWE Network, surprisingly. Had Hunter and Brock clashed in singles between 2002 and Brock's exit in 2004, it could have been something special. Their matches in 2012 were anything but. Slow, boring and bereft of crowd heat, their match at WrestleMania XXIX, in particular, was underwhelming.
