Wrestlers Shouldn't Try to Kelly Kelly Their Way into MMA

He'll walk for miles in a pit of danger, but he won't
train properly for a career in MMA
Photo Credit: WWE.com

It's always said that just not anyone can waltz into a wrestling company with limited experience and shine. Paying one's dues isn't just something that vets make rookies to in order to keep them in their places (although that is a very important role when talking about limiting ego sizes and such); it's vitally needed so that a wrestler actually looks like he or she belongs in the ring. It's why WWE takes so much (deserved) heat for hiring models, training them for a year and shoving them on RAW as Divas who are supposed to be smart, sexy and powerful, but rarely exhibit all three in a convincing manner. Obviously, anyone who has made it in WWE knows it takes time to be successful.

So, why is it that these wrestlers forget that hard work and paying dues isn't domain exclusively to wrestling? I don't like or watch MMA, but I'd be totally lying if I said that I thought it would be easy to bust through. Yet, there are guys like Batista and Bobby Lashley who dropped wrestling to try and make it on their wrestling names, only to have their careers stall after they went for too much, too soon. There are guys like Kevin Nash, who thinks that people would want to see his untrained ass fight the Ultimate Warrior in a MMA contest that would probably end up being to MMA what Sharmell/Jenna Morasca was to pro wrestling?

The name "Brock Lesnar" gets bandied about as an "instant" success. It might have seemed like a short period of time between his WWE exit in 2004 and his UFC debut, but four years is really a long time. He had almost two solid years of training before his UFC debut, where he began his largely impressive and disappointing at the same time career. One might argue that if he had never contracted diverticulitis twice, he might still be a dominant force in the company right now, but after suffering all those stomach issues, his career clearly declined, suffering a few pretty devastating losses that mentally forced him out of the game. Even so, was that decline inevitable? I don't know, this isn't a MMA blog, and I would have no idea where to start analyzing.

My point is, Lesnar didn't come out of nowhere. He trained his ass off before he got to MMA. What did Lashley and Batista do? The former tried to juggle MMA and pro wrestling when he signed with TNA. The latter talked a big game, but all his MMA fights failed to materialize after he tried to jump right in the pool with very little training. Top-tier MMA companies seemed to be pretty wise to the lack of dedication these two potential fighters had, and now, both are trying like hell to get BACK into WWE.

Honestly, it's the same for any means of making a living in a skilled art or sport. The fact that Lesnar quit WWE to try to make the Minnesota Vikings cold and failed should tell anyone trying to make a career jump to a company with a huge learning curve that it's just not going to happen without a lot of hard work. If wrestling is what a guy knows and he's not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to become great at MMA or football or whatever else he's trying to do other than wrestling, then that guy should probably just stick with wrestling. Either that, or maybe he should shut the fuck up next time a Mason Ryan or a Kelly Kelly comes in with no wrestling background and is pushed to the moon.