Is the middle of nowhere geographically chartable? What are its coordinates? By any chance do the stores there sell artificial vaginas for collecting bull semen? If so, Alexandria, Minnesota (pop. 11,000), halfway between Minneapolis and Fargo, North Dakota, might very well be it.

On a frigid morning in early March, a man parks his ’89 Dodge pickup in front of a large shed in an industrial section of Alexandria. He wears a huge black parka that—well, on second glance, it turns out to be a hoodie. The illusion of parka-ness comes from the man’s massive bulk. At 6'3" and nearly 300 pounds, he’s like Sasquatch in sweats. On November 15, 2008, this man, Brock Lesnar—previously an NCAA wrestling national champion, a WWE superstar, and a late cut from the Minnesota Vikings training camp—won the heavyweight title of the Ultimate Fighting Championship by knocking out UFC legend Randy Couture in a devastating display of barely controlled violence. It was just his fourth professional mixed martial arts competition.

Inside the shed is a small room that’s carpeted from wall to wall in thick black corrugated rubber. There are treadmills, shelves of dumbbells in five-pound increments from five pounds to 125 (Lesnar uses the heaviest for shoulder presses, but good luck trying to lift one), and beyond, a spacious, high-ceilinged gym. Within a couple of minutes Lesnar’s coach, Marty Morgan, and training partner, Chris Tuchscherer, arrive, each of them having driven more than 100 miles to get here.

We’re a long way from Vegas, where many UFC fighters live and train. On the other hand, we’re close to gun stores, ice fishing holes, and large edible animals, all of which rank high among the amenities favored by Lesnar. “Everything in here is mine,” he says defiantly, looking around. “It’s a controlled environment. I don’t have to have people in here that I don’t want around.” He ducks into the gym’s tiny dressing room and minutes later emerges naked except for a pair of black training shorts. If I were supposed to fight him, this is the part where I’d forfeit.

For years steroid rumors have dogged Lesnar, and certainly there’s something brazen about a physique like his at this particular moment in sports history. His 56-inch chest looks like it was made to be draped with shackles; it’s the torso of a man who, in another time, might have led a galley slaves’ rebellion. His slit-eyed, crew-cut head is like a boulder you might find lying around Easter Island. He seems simultaneously mythological, like a golem, and cartoonish, like the Thing.

Lesnar tunes in to an all-metal station on the radio, and a P.O.D. track begins churning through the room. A few warmup exercises later, he and Tuchscherer don gloves and begin sparring. “Forward, forward!” Les­nar yells, but Tuchscherer, a beefy, dopey-sweet blond kid who weighs 265, can’t stop retreating. As Lesnar hammers him with fists the size of cinder blocks, Tuchscherer covers his face. Behind his gloves you can see him wincing in fear—a strange sight in a man so large. He inches tentatively toward Lesnar; all he’s doing, it seems, is trying not to be a pussy. Finally, the inevitable: Lesnar lands a huge, crunching shot to the side of Tuchscherer’s head—and then turns away, suddenly bored. It’s not easy for the baddest man in sports to find a worthy foe.

Meanwhile a Tuchscherer leans against the wall, blinking and working his jaw and facial muscles. “I was so dizzy I would have fallen over if I didn’t grab the wall,” he says later. “I had to gather my brain up again.” On that morning, I’m later told, Lesnar was sparring at just 70 percent of his full strength.


“I like to punish people," Lesnar says mildly. His workout is done, and beating the tar out of Tuchscherer appears to have put him into a state of blissful relaxation. From a bench at the far end of the gym, he gestures toward the mats. “It’s a feeling you can’t get anywhere else, really. If I did it to somebody on the street, I’d get sued or arrested.”

Instead Lesnar, by fusing the showmanship he learned as a professional wrestler with the athletic gifts that won him an NCAA champ­ionship, is quickly becoming the greatest pay-per-view star of our time. Last year, his first in the UFC, his fights took three of the top five placesamong bestselling events. Largely because of the 2.2 million buys he generated, the UFC smashed the all-time record, set by the WWE during its glory days in 2001, for pay-per-view revenue by a single organization in a calendar year. And boxing? “Boxing is done. It’s fucking over, man,” says UFC president Dana White, a former boxer himself. “Remember in boxing when you’d want to see the big fight, but they could never make it happen? Well, all our fighters are under contract. We make the fights that the fans want to see right now.”

Today, even as the first generation of UFC stars begin to approach retirement, Lesnar’s box office appeal is expanding the sport’s fan base. He’s been pushed accordingly, earning a shot at the heavyweight title in just his third fight. “If Brock Lesnar was never in the WWE,” says Frank Mir, against whom Lesnar will mount his first title defense on July 11, “he would never have gotten a title shot. And he knows that. But that’s how people get paid. The bottom line is it’s not always about who’s a better fighter.”

Brock Lesnar grew up desperately poor on his family’s dairy farm in Webster, South Dakota, a town so sparsely populated it makes Alexandria look like New York. As a kid, he says, “I was always fascinated by strength. Arnold was an idol of mine.” Lesnar wrestled in high school, but without any overarching sense of purpose. “I thought I was gonna be a farmer,” he says. A discouraging stint with the National Guard led to an epiphany: “I wanted to go to school. I wanted to wrestle. I wanted to be something other than what I was.”