Photo/Zuffa LLC via Getty ImagesBrock Lesnar entered the UFC's heavyweight division in February of 2008. The champion was forgettable Frank Mir, and the largest pay-per-view buy to date was 1,050,000 -- for a Chuck Liddell fight.
By New Year's Eve 2011, when Lesnar would announce his retirement, the UFC heavyweight division was the promotion's largest draw and Lesnar accounted for four of the top six PPV sales in UFC history, including the promotional best 1,600,000 for his 2009 title fight against Frank Mir.
In business terms, Brock Lesnar was an unqualified success for the UFC. He made lots of people lots of money and did so with a charisma that hasn't been matched until the recent stirrings of Chael Sonnen. However, unlike the silver-tongued middleweight, Lesnar was fighting in the most important and most profitable division in all of combat sports.
Let's face it, every man wants to know what he is capable of accomplishing against the biggest and the best. And with sledgehammer fists, a 56-inch chest, and a bench press of over 450 pounds, nothing excites our curiosity more than heavyweights. That thrill also opens our pocketbooks.
Nobody has looked the part, or picked up more of the promotional workload than Lesnar. Were it not for the WWE convert -- an Aryan-Paleolithic vision of man -- who knows what would have become of the division, or the promotion? Would they have been as successful? Would the UFC have ever earned their deal with FOX?
Why Lesnar chose to leave will always be up for debate, but if a man battling a sometimes fatal stomach illness believes that his ability to fight has been hampered; fans and writers have no place to judge. Few men have the salt to face the unknown, and even fewer on the international stage on which Lesnar has been perpetually elevated since leaving college.
Still, the UFC is a business, and with the loss of a marketable fighter comes the birth of worry about the feasibility of his replacements to create financial gain for the company.
Dana White has not made any pronouncements as to who he thinks can carry the cards in the future, but Overeem and champion Junior dos Santos are both viable candidates; good-looking, intelligent guys with salesmanship equal to that of any other fighter within the organization. Their international appeal -- Overeem in Europe and Asia and JDS in his native Brazil -- could make them the perfect ambassadors for a promotion with stated goals of worldwide domination. However, until now these fighters have only been character actors in someone else's big play; Steve Buschemi before the bright lights of Boardwalk Empire, just two more brutes wandering a lonely road outside Fargo.
It's likely that Overeem and JDS won't be alone in tackling the financial burden left by Lesnar. The UFC has already added talent from their culling of the Strikeforce heavyweight division -- a commitment to the class that will only expand and deepen with the conclusion of the promotion's Heavyweight Grand Prix.
But the question that keeps Dana White and other UFC executives unsettled is whether or not the promotion can expand as rapidly under the weight of a heavyweight division run by a committee, as easily as it could with the star power of Lesnar.
The reality is the heavyweight division might end up like boxing, with less-charismatic draws like the Klitschko brothers holding onto titles, dominant in competition but almost wholly unsellable to mainstream audiences. That scenario might seem less likely in a world where the UFC PR machine can get butter from brisket fat by forcing fighters (Nate Diaz) into meaningful fan interactions which are then beamed across the FOX family of channels.
The promotion's next big star is unknown, but the parsing of marketability should be interesting to fans who like to calculate the organization's next move. What will the UFC be trying to sell and how much will they direct their market by creating fights that both fans and advertising executive want to watch? The Brazilian JDS, the European Overeem, the Mexican-American Cain Velasquez -- just like a bulked-up, super trap Lesnar sold American viewers -- a character that forced you to love or hate him in a time when competition was souring -- each of the division's new fighters offer their unique marketing potential.
Lesnar will be missed. His relevance among the mainstream fan base and recruitment of WWE fans forever altered the financial and professional future of the organization. That he went out on his shield, albeit in an uninspired performance, is also something that MMA fans, regardless of their allegiances, should note and respect.
For most fighters, their time at the top is limited to a few years. Lesnar was clear in his post-fight interview that his decision to retire was best for the health of his body and his family. A man at the end of his line in a sport where he'd been as controversial as a winner as he was a loser. His time, his luck, his passion for the sport had simply run its course.
Fans will have to adopt a new hero and a new villain, someone who they can rally behind, or curse with gusto. Either way, the UFC would just like you to choose, because at the moment they're all out of heavy lifters.
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