With WrestleMania 33 just a few days away, Brock Lesnar’s humble advocate Paul Heyman joins the Fight Society podcast for a special episode to look ahead at the event this weekend.
Heyman has been a fixture of the professional wrestling industry for more than three decades, but his latest endeavor has been working alongside the former UFC heavyweight champion as he prepares for his main event match against Goldberg at WrestleMania.
While Lesnar is approaching his 40th birthday later this year, Heyman doesn’t expect the former NCAA wrestling champion to slow down any time soon because he’s finally healthy for the first time in his life, which means audiences are seeing him at his best right now.
“I would suggest that Brock is really now in his physical prime because he was robbed of reaching his full potential as an athlete in his 20’s and early 30’s by diverticulitis,” Heyman told the Fight Society podcast. “If you look back at his career, by the time he was in the NCAA Division I wrestling championships, he was already suffering from diverticulitis. His body, which was so fine tuned and he had done so much to train his body to accomplish the goals he had envisioned for himself, his body was suppressing and using up so much energy and so much of his strength and his ability to suppress the diverticulitis, and finally diverticulitis couldn’t be suppressed. He probably had it throughout his entire college career.
“So you never saw him at his full potential in college. You never saw him at his full potential in his first run in WWE. He went into the Minnesota Vikings camp not only with the diverticulitis inside of his system but a broken jaw and a fractured pelvis, which he covered in the book that we wrote together and then you never saw him, not once did you see him in UFC at his absolute physical peak.”
If Lesnar is truly just now reaching his true physical potential, does that mean he might have another run in the UFC left in him?
Lesnar recently informed the UFC that he was retired after facing a one-year suspension for testing positive for a banned substance surrounding his bout with Mark Hunt last July, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone for good.
Heyman says there’s no telling what Lesnar will do next when it comes to his athletic endeavors. He could easily decide that the last experience in the Octagon left a sour taste in his mouth and Lesnar could return again or he could opt for another sport where he’s not supposed to succeed just to prove people wrong.
“I think what’s next for Brock Lesnar besides what’s happening in WWE, could it be UFC? Could it be another sport? I think it’s something that he’s going to look at and say ‘I bet no one thinks I can do that. All right, I’m going to conquer that’,” Heyman said.
“Besides obviously the greatest payday of his life, it’s the same thing that’s motivating [Conor] McGregor into wanting to fight [Floyd] Mayweather because … I’d have to say a great deal (is obviously) the lure of the enormous payday but a lot of it (is also) the lure of ‘you know what people don’t think I can (beat Mayweather) … and I can!”
Heyman also talks about the growth of the women’s division in professional wrestling, Ronda Rousey’s potential future in the WWE, the latest with CM Punk and so much more.
Listen to the latest Fight Society podcast via Soundcloud or download and subscribe to the show via iTunes.
