UFC heavyweight challenger Brock Lesnar has had a meteoric rise. Randy Couture is like a comet, passing through the limelight every once in a while.
The 45-year-old champion's title defense vs. Lesnar is his latest pass through a rapidly changing mixed martial arts universe in which he has won and lost belts, left and re-joined Ultimate Fighting Championship and handled generations of younger, bigger challengers (Saturday, 10 p.m. ET on pay-per-view).
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Through it all, Couture has been an unofficial ambassador for the sport he took up at 33 after seeing early UFC bouts.
"I'm excited to see people's attitudes about the sport change," Couture says. "I never thought of wrestling or mixed martial arts as violent. Physical, yes, but violent? There are so many other things that come to mind when you think of violence. Malicious anger and those sorts of things that shouldn't exist and in a lot of ways don't exist in our sport."
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Couture, an All-American wrestler and former Olympic alternate, learned MMA quickly, entering UFC 13 and winning twice a few months after seeing that early footage. Since then, he has gone through several eras:
• By the end of 1997, his first year in the sport, he was the heavyweight champion. But he abandoned the belt to fight in Japan, fighting an erratic schedule for almost three years.
• In 2000, he returned to UFC and reclaimed his heavyweight belt from Kevin Randleman. He kept the title through 2001, then lost twice in 2002.
• In 2003, he moved down to light heavyweight and knocked out Chuck Liddell. He lost and regained the light heavyweight belt, lost to Liddell after the two rivals served as coaches in the first season of The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV, then retired in the octagon after losing to Liddell in the decisive match of the trilogy.
• In 2007, after 13 months away, Couture returned as a heavyweight to face champ Tim Sylvia. A unanimous decision gave him the belt for a third time. Later in the year, he knocked out Gabriel Gonzaga, then walked away in a contract dispute.
But UFC never stripped him of the belt. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira was named interim champion after defeating Sylvia in February, and he'll face Frank Mir after the two heavyweights finish their stint as Ultimate Fighter coaches. Then the Couture-Lesnar and Nogueira-Mir winners are set to face off.
Nogueira's ascension is just one of the changes in the UFC landscape since Couture last fought in 2007. Upstart promoter EliteXC put mixed martial arts in prime time, only to fall into legal limbo. Affliction, the clothing company that sells Xtreme Couture T-shirts, put on its own MMA card with heavyweights including Fedor Emelianenko, the Russian fighter against whom Couture has long coveted a fight.
And the sport keeps growing in popularity. "I have been experiencing that for the last four or five years, since the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, and it continues to ratchet up," Couture says. "It's been a fun time to be involved, to see the changes. Seeing 5-6,000 people show up at a weigh-in is pretty remarkable."
