UFC
Shane Carwin says he'd come out of retirement to fight Brock Lesnar again: "All the pain would be worth that"
Oct 21, 2014 - 11:40:01 AM Shane Carwin says he'd come out of retirement to fight Brock Lesnar again: "All the pain would be worth that"

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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief

There was a short time in 2010 where Shane Carwin was on the cusp of becoming the top heavyweight in the UFC, but a loss to Brock Lesnar at UFC 116 flipped into the beginning of the end.

Carwin would fight just one more time after that, a 2011 loss to Junior dos Santos, before retiring due to chronic pain issues in his back. However, were he to get another shot at Lesnar, Carwin said this week he'd fight through the pain to make a return.

"I'm all in [for a Lesnar rematch]," Carwin said in an interview with FoxSports.com. "All the pain would be worth that."

Though he was submitted in their fight at UFC 116, Carwin came very close to stopping Lesnar in the first round of the bout. He maintains that a drastic and unexpected energy dump was to blame for his performance in the second round, and feels he set out the blueprint on Lesnar's vulnerabilities.

"I basically almost died in that fight," Carwin said. "In the second round, anybody could have tripped me and landed on me."

"I should have let him up and kept punching him in the head. Lesson learned. Cain learned it. If I didn't make it obvious what to do to that guy, the next guy did."

With the way Lesnar went out of MMA, Carwin doesn't expect this to ever become a realistic possibility, and he doesn't think Lesnar could make the improvements necessary to be competitive even if he did return.

"He's not coming back," Carwin said. "I don't even know why he would have the desire... He's not going to improve the part of his game he needs to improve in that short [amount] of time. The guys these days are too far ahead. You can't be one-dimensional. This isn't the early '90s."

Penick's Analysis: Carwin certainly showed how little Lesnar liked getting punched in the face, and that was a big factor in Cain Velasquez capturing the title later that year. However, this was still in the midst of Lesnar's battle with diverticulitis, and it's being completely disingenuous to discount that aspect of things entirely. Now, that doesn't mean Lesnar is without fault, or that there aren't a myriad of things in his game in need of improvement, but I'm still not convinced that his fights with Carwin, Velasquez, and Alistair Overeem were indicative of him at his best. Regardless, I honestly don't think we see him ever fight another MMA fight anyway.

[Shane Carwin art by Cory Gould (c) MMATorch.com]