Brock Lesnar and Shane Carwin are both former college wrestling champions, and they'll both walk out to the Octagon Saturday night at UFC 116 carrying UFC championship belts. But Lesnar would like to make it clear that he doesn't view Carwin's championships as on par with his own."I was a Division I national champion and he's not," Lesnar said of Carwin on SportsCenter Thursday. "And I'm the UFC heavyweight champion and he's definitely not that."
Lesnar is right: He was the NCAA Division I champion at Minnesota, while Carwin was Division II champion at Western State College. And Carwin himself has acknowledged that his UFC interim heavyweight title isn't particularly significant, and that Lesnar is the owner of the true heavyweight championship belt.
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More significant than Lesnar's comments, however, are the way he made them: Lesnar gave an entertaining, engaging interview on SportsCenter and showed that he wants to sell this fight not just to the UFC fans who wouldn't dream of missing it on pay-per-view, but also to the mainstream sports fans who might be convinced from seeing Lesnar on SportsCenter to purchase a UFC pay-per-view for the first time. It's interviews like this that show why Lesnar is a pay-per-view powerhouse.
Saturday night's fight will be Lesnar's first in a year, but he says he feels great and that he feels "great" and "phenomenal" despite a bout of diverticulitis that has kept him out of the Octagon since he beat Frank Mir at UFC 100.
"It was a minor setback -- huge in some ways, but minor in others, and there's been lots of time to train, to get ready for Shane," Lesnar said. "Whether or not I was going to fight again was a huge question mark, and the day the doctors gave me the green light was the day I decided to really excel and improve and become a better heavyweight champion."
That improvement, Lesnar said, has been mostly in his diet. He says he's now eating healthier foods than he ever has before, and that he currently weighs about 270 pounds and won't have any trouble making the heavyweight limit of 265 on Friday. Lesnar said that in the past he has weighed 275 or 280 pounds on the day before the weigh in, making the final day of weight cutting a little more strenuous.
"When you fill a race car with the top fuel, you're going to perform better," Lesnar said. "That's what I'm doing."
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