The big man turned his head slowly to look at me as I gave him the news. Naively, I’d assumed he already knew. It was all over the internet by then, or at least the little MMA quadrant of it.
Word had spread quickly that Frank Mir was officially out of his planned heavyweight title fight main event against Brock Lesnar at UFC 98. But somehow no one had thought to tell Lesnar yet, so when I asked what he thought of this new development I was inadvertently breaking the news to him. Lesnar and his wife, Rena (better known to pro wrestling fans at the time as Sable), both turned to look at me like I was a bug who’d just landed in their soup.
This was March 2009. The big rematch with Mir was supposed to be in May. Lesnar had come to Columbus, Ohio, for the Arnold Classic in order to make a promotional appearance for a sponsor.
I was there to do a story on him for a magazine, and we weren’t off to the best start. We’d just met and here I was "lying" to him. “No way,” Lesnar said after I showed him the online report on my phone.
“I’d have heard something.” By the next morning when I met him for an interview over breakfast at his hotel, he had. It was all true.
Mir was out of the fight. Lesnar was despondent. All the money he was going to make from that fight — and Lesnar loved money, insisting there was “no such thing” as enough of it — and now he could only shake his head as it slipped through his enormous fingers.
What he couldn’t have known then was ho.
