Brock Lesnar has ‘retired’: Really? Does anybody ever really ‘retire’ from pro wrestling?

Brock Lesnar, who announced his retirement from pro wrestling this week, is on the record, per data from Cagematch, for 445 career matches dating back to his rookie year, in 2000.

And most of that total was in the books by the end of 2003 – 334 of his matches, a smidge over 75 percent of his career total.

After Lesnar’s return to wrestling in 2012 from the excursion that included an aborted NFL tryout and go 5-3-1 in MMA, with two UFC heavyweight championship wins, we got 85 matches out of “The Beast Incarnate” – 21 in his last five active years, from 2021-2026, with him taking off 2024 following the departure of former WWE CEO Vince McMahon, amid sexual-assault allegations against McMahon that ensnared Lesnar as well.

Lesnar made the most out of his relatively limited time in the ring, with 10 WWE world championship reigns on his record – seven of those coming in a 68-match span between 2014 to 2022.

For perspective: Ric Flair, a 10-time NWA world champ, eight-time WCW world champ and two-time WWE world champ, so, a total of 20 world title reigns, has 5,007 matches on his ledger, over a career spanning from 1972 to 2011.

That’s nearly 12 times the match output.

More perspective: we got 21 matches out of Lesnar over the final five years of his active career; Flair averaged more than 21 matches per month from 1981 to 1983.

Lesnar, indeed, was used as an attraction, more along the lines of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, who has worked 15 matches since 2002, after making the transition from WWE to Hollywood, though before Johnson hit it big in the movies, he was a worker – Cagematch has Johnson with 856 career matches, the bulk of those (680) coming in the four-year period between 1997 and 2000.

It’s safe to say that few have made more money – Lesnar’s career earnings from WWE and UFC are estimated in the $150 million range – for doing less.

I bring that last point up to suggest – I doubt that Lesnar, at 49, is truly done.

There has to be a one-off “Wrestlemania” or “Crown Jewel” payday coming at some point in the next few years.