Eddie Alvarez’s ONE Championship debut did not go as planned for the former UFC lightweight champion. Alvarez was knocked unconscious by Timofey Nastyukhin at ONE Championship: A New Era in March, and suffered an injured eye in the process. In a recent appearance on The Ariel Helwani MMA Show, Alvarez opened up on the loss and the injury:
“I’ve been fighting 16 years now I’ve never had anything feel like that,” Alvarez told ESPN. “I’ve never, during a fight, stopped giving a shit about the outcome, the opponent. I immediately didn’t care about anything other than getting to a hospital as fast as possible. I felt like my eyeball exploded. And then I could feel the air getting into my eye, like directly into my eye. It was career threatening. That’s what I felt like, the immediate feeling.”
The aftermath of the bout was no picnic for Alvarez, either, based on the chronicles of his hospital experience that night:
“Even when we got to the hospital, they were messing with it with stiches, stitching my eye lid,” Alvarez said. “And then out of nowhere, I had a gush of blood coming out of my eye….one of them popped while I was in the hospital. It was nasty, man.”
Fortunately for Alvarez, though, there was no long-term damage and surgery was not required:
“No surgery, it was a detached choroidal. But they told me no surgery, and it should be healed up within two weeks or so. And then, just the laceration of the eye lid, wait till that heals up.”
Eddie Alvarez is cleared and set to make another go at picking up his first ONE Championship victory when he faces Eduard Folayang on August 12 at ONE Championship: Dawn of Heroes.
How surprised were you when Eddie Alvarez lost his ONE Championship debut to Timofey Nastyukhin?
