Mark Hunt's continued drama with the UFC

From my perspective it looks like Hunt is going after a big payday without fighting for it and this is coming from a guy who is a fan of Mark Hunt. Mark has been in a legal battle with UFC and Brock Lesnar for a while now and it stems back to a fight that Hunt lost by decision against Lesnar nearly 5 years ago back at UFC 200.

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The match during UFC 200 was pretty boring. I know this because it was the match that finally solidified my opinion of Brock Lesnar of being a boring fighter who is just big enough to take almost anyone down and keep them there, even though he doesn't necessarily do any damage to them once he has them on the ground.

Mark Hunt is a striker and does virtually no work on the ground and he almost never goes for takedowns against his opponents either. So when this fight was announced I knew what was going to happen and I was exactly right. As soon as Brock realized that standing up and exchanging blows with a guy that has a 1-punch KO complete with walkaway resume wasn't going to end well for him, he switched to clinch, takedown, laydown strategy and this eventually got him a win on points.

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We saw plenty of the above image in that 5 round fight - a lot of it just looked like Mark was sitting down and getting frustrated because even though Lesnar rarely did any work once he got him to the ground, Brock always brought the fight back to that point.

Brock's tactics during the fight are not what this is really about though. It was later discovered that Brock Lesnar failed a doping test for Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED's) and it kind of looked like the UFC was aware that Brock was going to fail the test and concealed it so they wouldn't have to scrap the lineup.

Brock won the fight, was later fined $250,000 for his drug infraction, but he never lost any of the money that he was awarded by the UFC or their parent company at the time, Zuffa. Lesnar was stripped of the win from his record.

Mark almost immediately filed suit against the UFC and Brock for a variety of charges most of which are things that lead towards compensation. This is what kind of makes it look like he is just after the deep pockets of the UFC rather than justice. Was it wrong that Brock was on PED's? Well, of course it is. Would it be even more wrong if the UFC knew about it and went forward anyway? Yeah, sure... but this isn't the first time this has happened in a sport where PED use is frequently a part of the game.

Mark was later released by the UFC and he is suing for that as well (in a roundabout way.)

Recently, Hunt's charges were dismissed by certain judges and just yesterday it was announced that his legal team is applying for an appeal with the 9th circuit court. I do not know what that is, but I hear that term a lot so it must be important. His next case against UFC / Lesnar also includes demands for compensation for a fight that he didn't even participate in because of a last minute card change that looks like revenge against Hunt for suing his then employer. It probably looks like that because that is almost certainly exactly what happened. Well, that and the fact that at that point in his career, the "Super Samoan" had lost his last 3 fights.

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At the end of 2019 Zuffa has actually counter-sued Hunt and his legal team for attorney fees totaling $388,000 and I think that is the real crime here. Legal fees in this one case for one side of it is more than a quarter of a million dollars?