Former UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz suffered a bad dislocation that pushed him into retirement before he could step into the octagon at UFC Seattle against Rob Font.
Cruz, while on The Anik & Florian Podcast, spoke on how a simple elbow post during training ended his career.
“It was a basic thing I’ve done a million times. You’re on your back from half guard, you get up on your elbow, and then you reach to a single and you use your elbow to get up,” Cruz said.
“When you post on the ground like that with somebody on top of your head, it just pretty much shot out the back the second I put my elbow down and went to pull in that single leg.”
This was the second dislocation Cruz suffered in the span of a couple months. The first one he dealt with wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he was able to do a relatively quick rehab before getting the Font fight.
“I had one dislocation about eight weeks prior to this recent one that I posted and that one kind of set the stage that I’m on a different kind of timeline than just age, which I didn’t really add to the equation. It was more just like I feel good, I’m still fast, all these things,” he said.
“So then your shoulder falls out and then you’re like, OK, I rehabbed it for six weeks straight and then I went and sparred with Jeremy Stephens and a few other pro boxers just to see where it was really at after the rehab I had done and I did really well, I felt really good, nothing messed with me at all.”
Then the second dislocation took the entire camp off the rails.
“The difference with this one from the first one was the first one was only out for maybe three minutes, it was a nice quick slide back in that was excruciating pain, but it was so quick. Whereas this second one, they went to pull it in and it did not go back, it just stayed where it was at and all the muscles locked down on top of the nerve and for about an hour and a half,” said Cruz.
“Driving through traffic to the hospital, to getting to the hospital and then needing to get an X-ray-because it’s not like the movies where you just slide a shoulder back in every time, it doesn’t always work that way-so the second time it didn’t work that way.”
The realization that the injury was potentially serious dawned on Cruz when his arm and fingers began to turn blue.
“They had to do an X-ray to see how to pull it back in, what direction to yank your arm when they reset it, because if you pinch certain nerves then it can shut the whole arm off and it’s just really damaging. So I’m in the hospital for an hour and 15 minutes, my arm starts turning blue and when I see my fingers turning blue and just things being weird and the pain was excruciating, it just gave a different perspective for me,” he said.
“This one, it was a 20 on a scale of 1-10, so it just changed my perspective of where the shoulder’s at because I’d already had tendon damage that had torn and that’s why the shoulder starts coming out because the tendons are no longer connected, so there’s separation and that thing can just fly out. So if it can happen twice within six-to-eight months, that’s when the shoulder just starts working on you after a while if you start learning about the anatomy of the shoulder, which I have at this point.”
“It’s still painful, I have a lot of rehab to do, but is that worth more than what I’m getting paid for this last fight? Definitely,” said Cruz.
“Now, if they offer me a couple of mil or something, I don’t know, I might have showed up, and gone with a 50 percent arm and maybe done that, but you’ve got to figure out what your arm’s worth.”
