In the nearly seven minutes it took for him to beat the Brazilian legend he idolized, Frank Mir looked like the best MMA heavyweight on the planet.
Demonstrating striking skills that should make many of today's top American heavyweight boxers envious, Mir picked apart Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira in the best performance of his eight-year career to earn the UFC interim heavyweight title.
Mir has breathed the rarified air of UFC titleholder before, after beating Tim Sylvia at UFC 48, but never had he looked the part of a lethal striker capable of dominating the division's best.
Despite a remarkable comeback from his well-documented 2004 motorcycle accident, Mir had struggled to find solid footing among the sport's top heavyweights, with lingering questions about his commitment and conditioning. After beating both Brock Lesnar and Nogueira in 2008, those questions have been answered to set up a highly marketable rematch with Lesnar.
While no home for Lesnar-Mir II has been announced, UFC 97 in Montreal seems a likely destination. With the UFC schedule seemingly set through March, the April 18 show at Bell Centre appears to be the first opportunity to reunite Lesnar and Mir to decide the UFC's undisputed heavyweight king. And, the fight has the ingredients to produce a stellar pay-per-view number for the UFC.
With Lesnar at the top card, the show is guaranteed to sell well. In 2008, UFC events featuring Lesnar generated more than 2.2 million PPV buys. The only other UFC fighter to exceed 2 million buys in a calendar year was Tito Ortiz in 2006.
Lesnar's star power will draw for the foreseeable future, and Mir's lights-out effort against Nogueira ups the ante in the rematch. Following his fight against Randy Couture, conventional wisdom suggested that Lesnar now owned the skills and, perhaps more importantly, the patience to handle Mir a second time around. However, Mir has been subsequently reincarnated, thanks in large part to stand-up coach Ken Hahn, into a boxer who also carries a black belt in jiu-jitsu.
With his win over Nogueira, Mir has made the rematch with Lesnar a much more interesting fight, and pairing the rematch with a proposed Anderson Silva vs. Thales Leites bout for the middleweight title would be ideal for the UFC. The company would have its most popular PPV fighter on the same card with its best fighter to help get more exposure for the Brazilian middleweight champion.
Lesnar-Mir I, which also featured a welterweight title fight between Georges St. Pierre and Jon Fitch, produced 625,000 buys. With a three-part "UFC Primetime" series that the UFC is using to promote the St. Pierre-B.J. Penn rematch to push the fight, along with its usual advertising blitz, the UFC could generate more than 750,000 buys with Lesnar-Mir II.
That buy rate would make it one of the top five PPV shows in UFC history.
