7. 2012 Return And Facing John Cena (Extreme Rules 2012)
When Brock made his return to WWE the night after WrestleMania 28, it was literally a "holy s***" moment. As soon as the opening bestial growl of his music hit the crowd in Miami exploded. He confronted John Cena, fresh off his loss to The Rock, and in lieu of a return speech gave him an F5 instead. When he kicked Cena's hat across the ring with a palpable contempt, he showed the WWE posterboy that he could, in fact, see him. A match was made for Extreme Rules and fans were eagerly awaiting to see if The Next Big Thing would return to his previous form or if there'd be significant ring rust. Considering the night before we'd witnessed a lackluster match from the most electrifying man in sports entertainment, largely due to his prolonged absence from the squared circle, skepticism was understandable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnnxMwM32Nw Always striving to silence his critics, the performance Lesnar and Cena delivered was nothing short of a masterpiece of pain and violence full of stiff shots and hardway bleeding. This wasn't your traditional wrestling contest with sleepers and wristlocks. This was a savage brawl between a bloodthirsty viking warlord and the man who stood in the path of his conquest. It was like nothing WWE was presenting at the time, and it was hailed by critics and fans as one of the greatest matches of the year. In a scripted sport like wrestling, it's truly not whether you win or lose, and while Brock losing certainly seemed to make little sense from a booking standpoint, the match was a tableau of human cruelty that reestablished him as The Beast Incarnate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AgyyVQY36o
Brad Hamilton is a writer, musician and marketer/social media manager from Atlanta, Georgia. He's an undefeated freestyle rap battle champion, spends too little time being productive and defines himself as the literary version of Brock Lesnar.
