Probst: Injury Perspective

---

Dennis Hallman’s extremely short trunks will probably be remembered most in his loss to Brian Ebersole, who, for his part, had an arrow carved out of his chest hair. It made for the most visually odd UFC combination in recent memory. There is also the all-too-exposed visual of what happened with 2:42 left in the first round, the adult-themed likes of which we will not link here.

Like many fighters, Hallman came into the ring at UFC 133 on Saturday already banged up. Two days before the fight, he claims he awoke with throbbing pain in his elbow; his bursa sack had exploded.

“I had the doctor check it out, and he drained it and put some corticoids in it,” Hallman told Sherdog.com. “Unfortunately, overnight, it swelled up even worse. We drained it and treated it again. On Saturday morning, I convinced myself that everything was OK, but I knew deep inside that it was still very bad. I didn’t want to screw over the UFC, so I made the choice to go for it, hoping that adrenaline would take over. Well, needless to say the injury made it next to impossible to finish those chokes. It was a mistake to go into that fight in the condition I was in.”

In this fast-moving digital world, fighters have taken to the Internet to post pictures of the injuries they have either sustained preparing for a fight or and incurred during the fight itself. They endure a world of pain and privation few could understand, from making weight to shoring up long-term injuries and battling new ones resulting from years of training. Fans often rejoice at a fighter’s rebound from a previously poor performance, but, quite often, it is simply that he was at his best on one night and not so much on another. The excuse factor is a far too simple rejoinder, though it certainly has its place. At the end of the day, only the fighter really knows.

Jason Probst can be reached at Jason@jasonprobst.com or twitter.com/jasonprobst.