Throwing the towel in is a touchy subject between coaches and fighters, but UFC Hall of Famer Chael Sonnen said he was ready to throw the towel in for Colby Covington at UFC Tampa.
Covington suffered a nasty cut in the first round against Joaquin Buckley in the main event of UFC Tampa. The cut was pretty bad to begin with but only got worse as the fight went on and Buckley continued to target it.
The fight was stopped in the first round after the ref called the doctor in and decided to call the fight.
“He’s busted open so bad the doctor has to look at it three times. Twice he stops the action to let it keep going. The third time he said ‘we can’t go anymore’. I was going to stop that fight,” Sonnen said on his YouTube channel.
“I already grabbed the towel. When the doctor came in for the third time, and I’m watching the blood, it’s not stopping. It is going into the eye.”
For someone like Sonnen to be willing to throw the towel in is very telling. MMA fighters in large part would rather get finished than have their corners call it quits.
“When we as fight fans, we as tough guys, think the doctor should have stopped it, we’re talking about it doesn’t really matter how bad the cut is from our perspective as long as it’s not going in the eye. If it’s blinding a guy, it doesn’t matter if it’s a little or a lot, if it’s in his eye, and he can no longer see out of that eye, it’s the same thing,” he said.
“This was bad. This was in the eye. I literally stood up so I could see what the doctor was doing. I told Charlie, the No. 2, I said ‘hand me that towel, I’m stopping this.’ I bring that to you because the referee was taking some criticism. Well, let me be fair here, I saw what they saw.”
Both Covington and UFC CEO Dana White came out and said the fight would not have been stopped if it took place in Las Vegas which, to be fair, isn’t for sure.
Regardless of the result Sonnen had plenty of positives to say about Covington.
“When you look at the grit-meter, this was one of Colby’s best fights,” he said.
“When you look at the digging deep, this does not replace the fight with Kamaru Usman but g*ddamn, it’s right there. When you look at grit, you look at the shots that he took, you look at the damage that they did, he did not care.”
Watch the entire video here.
