Why is it so important for Daniel Cormier to fight Brock Lesnar?

Reigning UFC heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier has a valid reason why he stubbornly keeps fending off the call of ‘Father Time’ despite turning 40 last March.

With all his achievements inside the octagon, which includes becoming the first man to hold the UFC light heavyweight and heavyweight championship simultaneously, Cormier is still hungry for fights that would further enhance his already shoo-in Hall of Fame career.

UFC president Dana White said during UFC 236 post-fight press conference that Cormier hasn’t given up on his dream of facing the former heavyweight title-holder, Brock Lesnar, before he calls it a career.

First of all, Brock Lesnar wants to come back. “We don’t know when and when we’ll get it done,” White said of a potential Cormier-Lesnar bout. “Daniel Cormier has done everything we’ve ever asked him. He’s fought everybody we’ve ever wanted. He’s been a great champion. He’s an incredible ambassador to the sport”.

“If he wants the Brock Lesnar fight, why shouldn’t he get the Brock Lesnar fight? He’s talking about retiring and he wants to fight Lesnar.”

The Superfight

Cormier wouldn’t be angling so hard for a fight with Lesnar to happen if he isn’t getting a tiniest of hint about the Beast Incarnate’s potential MMA return. The reality is Lesnar really has a massive interest to fight again in the octagon, and right now, he’s very much free to do so as he no longer has contractual obligations with WWE.

Lesnar, 41, might no longer be the exact fighter that dominated UFC’s heavyweight division early in the decade, but he remains one of the most marketable names in the sports. His fight with Mark Hunt at UFC 200, no matter how controversial it turned out to be, was the big reason why the event still racked up millions in pay-per-view revenues.

There’s no questioning Lesnar’s drawing power even up to this moment. The guy generated a total of 7,554,000 PPV buys over the course of his career in the UFC, five of them surpassed the 1 million pay-per-view buys barrier. That’s how big of a star Brock Lesnar is.

That’s why Cormier knows that booking a fight with Lesnar is much more important than fighting the likes of Junior Dos Santos, Stipe Miocic and other top contenders in his division. He understands that fighting someone like Brock, win or lose, would mean a lot of money coming to his bank account, perhaps enough to live a life of lavish beyond his MMA days.

The Legacy Fights

While it’s so true that the Lesnar fight is on top of Cormier’s wish-list, that doesn’t mean he’s ignoring the fact that he has two legacy fights left in his career.

Like White said in the presser, Cormier has two or three fights left in him before retirement. Those two fights happen to involve fighters that define his career: Stipe Miocic and Jon Jones.     

“He’s still got two nasty fights before he retires,” White said of Cormier. “He’s got Jon Jones and he’s got Stipe Miocic. If the guy wants to fight Brock Lesnar, he’s going to fight Brock Lesnar if I can get it done and if I can make it happen.

As everybody know, Cormier became a two-division world champion after knocking out Miocic cold in the very first round of their title fight last year. Without a doubt, that victory was the biggest in Cormier’s career, especially for a guy who struggled to step outside the shadow of a power horse like Jones in the light heavyweight division.

Now, that he officially lords atop the heavyweight realm, Cormier all of a sudden has the leverage to fight Jones, his perpetual conqueror, for one last dance at the tail end of his career.