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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
Fresh off of this morning's report from MMAJunkie.com that Brock Lesnar could face Cain Velasquez at UFC 119 in September, Lesnar appeared on ESPN's Sportscenter and gave some hope for that to actually take place.
"It feels great [to be all the way back], and I'm excited to get back to the Octagon," Lesnar said.
"This morning I feel great, I want to get into the gym and get back at it."
Lesnar called into the show and talked to Josh Elliot about Saturday's fight with Shane Carwin at UFC 116. With clips running of the fight, Lesnar described the events of the fight.
"From the uppercut to the knee it's hard to remember anything, then when you get to the ground you've got to regroup as fast as you can," he said. "I have to take my hat off to the ref for seeing that there was still a fighter's chance."
There are those that felt the fight could have been stopped in the first round, and Lesnar said there was a point where that could have happened.
"There was a point where I thought 'aw, I need to keep moving here' and I thought to myself that it was going to get stopped and I was preparing myself for huge disappointment," Lesnar said. "And then i just kept thinking in the back of my head that I've got to show some fight because the ref in the pre-fight [in the] locker room said 'I'm going to give you three chances to keep up the fight' and I thought two of them were almost up."
But Lesnar said he fought through it, and could sense things shifting as the round wore down.
"I could feel each and every punch getting less and less force on it... you can sense somebody's body going out on them," said Lesnar. "I was coming back and I felt fine. I got to my feet and pushed him against the cage and i didn't want to rush anything... we were getting close to the second round and I would have a fresh start."
Lesnar finished by talking about the comeback, both in the fight and in his life, that he's gone through, and reiterated one of the points he hammered into the pre-fight interviews.
"It was an awesome feeling [to feel the tap from Carwin]. To go through what I've been through in the last year, it was a great victory," he said. "I came from almost scratch in the last year, i had to build myself up... to get in there for a title fight and to defend the title, it's just remarkable, I feel great about it."
Penick's Analysis: Seeing Lesnar's face after the fight and seeing that there's likely not much if anything in the way of major damage that he sustained in the fight, it accentuates what a good job Josh Rosenthal did of not stopping that fight in the first round.
The way he's talking about wanting to get back to action right away should give fans in Indiana hope that he can make that return quickly and be the headliner at UFC 119 against Cain Velasquez. It will be much better than the extended layoffs between fights that he's had in the last two years because of his illness and the injury that pushed his bout with Frank Mir from UFC 98 to UFC 100.
It will be very interesting to see the type of reaction Lesnar gets from a different midwest crowd than his adopted hometown area in the Twin Cities, especially after the way he handled everything at UFC 116.
Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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