Brock Lesnar must feel like Al Pacino in the Godfather, Part 3: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
After getting crushed by Cain Velasquez and losing his UFC heavyweight title, he was "confronted", on camera by WWE star The Undertaker in what appears to be a work.
I'll let the Pro Wrestling experts from Cage Side Seats explain the angle:
Ariel Helwani should have known that something was up when top WWE star and member of Vince McMahon's inner circle The Undertaker agreed to be interviewed by him at UFC 121 for AOL Fanhouse. Especially after the last WWE veteran to do such a cardinal sin, Jim Ross, ended up in Vince's doghouse. So it should have come as little surprise to Ariel when The Undertaker made sure to catch Brock Lesnar's eye as he left the cage, made a feeble attempt to goad him into a fight, which Brock ignored, and claimed that they have personal issues. Alarm bells should have been ringing in Ariel's head that maybe The Undertaker, under instructions from his present employer Vince McMahon, was trying to publicly goad Lesnar into doing a WrestleMania match with him next year, just like John Cena did in 2009 with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
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...Dana White won't be too happy about all this when he finds out about it. Personally I don't think anything will come out of this and Brock will just use WWE's interest in him as negotiating leverage to get a better PPV cut from Dana, given the millions and millions of dollars that would be left on the table if he jumped ship now and didn't have his rubber match with Frank Mir, which he should comfortably win to set up another big money rematch with Shane Carwin or Cain Velasquez. Returning to WWE can wait until the money dries up in UFC.
Brock was not a happy camper during his four year WWE tenure and quit six years ago, enduring a legal battle with Vince McMahon to escape his contractual obligations. He can't be amused at his old carnie colleagues trying to suck him back in and steal his limelight, especially on the heels of a devastating real-life beat down.
But it's a reminder that you can never really escape your past and in Lesnar's case that means the WWE. He'll forever be known as the man who was the champion of fake wrestling and went on to become the "Baddest Man on the Planet" for real, if only for a brief time, by taking and holding the UFC heavyweight title.
It's also an unpleasant reminder for Dana White and the UFC that it's impossible to completely distance MMA from professional wrestling in the minds of fans. There are just too many connections. The UFC has based its business model completely on Vince McMahon's WWE and has built much of its fanbase from former WWE fans -- both those who first discovered The Ultimate Fighter during its post-WWE time slot in 2005 and the second wave who came to the UFC to see how Brock Lesnar would do.
Well now they know. Brock won some and lost some and he's clearly no longer "the Baddest Man on the Planet." The question will be who will capture the fan interest that Lesnar created. Vince and the Undertaker would love to steal back some of those fans even if they don't realistically expect to get Lesnar back for WrestleMania, they've succeeded in inserting themselves into the post-fight discussion.
For Dana White and new champ Cain Velasquez, it's an open question as to how many of the fans that came with Lesnar from the WWE will stick around to see Cain defend his title. You certainly can't fault Velasquez' performance. Millions of casual fans have now seen him utterly dominate Brock Lesnar in dramatic fashion. Will that be enough to make them want to see him fight again against Junior Dos Santos whose name ID is even lower than Cains? Time will tell.
UPDATE: As an indicator of how well Undertaker played his role, here's MMA writer Kaleb Kelchner's response:
Forget that these two were professional wrestlers together, when Undertaker leans over and dryly states, "You wanna do it?" I'm seeing something real. Like, Undertaker comes home late and sees Lesnar riding bareback on Mrs. Undertaker kinda real. I highly doubt that was a question regarding a return to professional wrestling, because that hardly seemed like a friendly invitation. Regardless, there's surely an interesting story there that we may never know about. Lesnar looked so out of it here, I was reminded of UFC 100, when he approached Frank Mir after bloodying his face, and gave him a piece of his mind. Lesnar looked just as bewildered as Mir then.
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