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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
Donald Cerrone picked up his eighth straight win in the UFC last Saturday night at UFC 187, taking out John Makdessi with a head kick that broke the late replacement's jaw.
However, while he managed to secure the win, he was far from healthy entering the bout. One of his main coaches, Greg Jackson, commented after the bout that Cerrone had suffered a very bad rib injury in training prior to the fight, but refused to pull out of the event.
"He injured his ribs a little bit and it was pretty bad," Jackson said in an interview with Ariel Helwani after the event (transcribed by BloodyElbow.com). "I'm worried about [my fighter's] health, that's number one. The fighting is great, it's a sport. And as a person, I worry about Cowboy, so I wanna make sure that he's all right.
"So I'm like: 'This looks pretty bad,' but he's like: 'Nope, I got it, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good.' And I said: 'Ok, if you're good, then we gotta go all in. If you're gonna go, you gotta go all the way. You gotta heal, you gotta make sure, you do everything right.' And once he said: 'I'm gonna do it, no matter what,' I was like: 'All right, then we're in, let's do this thing.'
"...[If I had the choice I wouldn't have had him fight], just because I worry about his health, you know? It was a bad injury. He will never be like: 'Oh it was bad,' but I know bad, I've been doing this 22 years. He's a tough son of a gun. My hat's off to him. I was against it, but the second my guys are like: 'I'm gonna do it,' I have to be... like that's my guy, so I go all in. I think of every strategy, everything I can do to help, so we're gonna roll the dice and run it."
Penick's Analysis: Some guys are too tough or too stubborn for their own good at times, and Cerrone's very much in that camp. He's of the mindset that he's not going to pull out of a fight or say no to a fight that's presented to him, whether it's smart for his career or not. That's a danger to his long term prospects in the sport, but he's made it work so far. He's lucky the injury didn't prevent him from performing well against Makdessi, because a loss in that fight would have been a serious and significant setback. That's not how it played out, though, so he can now heal up and prepare for a likely fall Title fight with Rafael dos Anjos.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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