Colby Covington is disputing reports that he suffered a broken jaw in his UFC 245 bout against Kamaru Usman in 2019.
The first fight between Kamaru Usman and Colby Covington shattered all expectations. It was undoubtedly one of the greatest welterweight title fights of all time, with nonstop strikes thrown by two of the UFC’s best-oiled cardio machines.
In the midst of the barrage of strikes, Covington’s face particularly suffered noticeable damage at the hands of Usman. Prior to the fourth round, Covington even told his corner that he thought he broke his jaw.
Usman would go on to win the fight, and the “broken jaw” piece would become conjoined with the narrative of the fight. However, although Covington sounded certain at the time that his jaw was broken during the fight, he has since adamantly denied that Usman “broke his face.“ Furthermore, he says the media hastily ran with a falsified x-ray from one of his haters to add fuel to their biased reporting.
“It was one of the worst photoshops in the history of this sport,” Covington began in a recent ESPN interview. “Someone went and took an image off Google, they put my name on it, ‘Colby Covington.’ And first off, if you ever see an x-ray film, it never will read your name straight across. It’ll look backwards. And they photoshopped the image. The front tooth had a cap on it. Do I have caps on my front teeth? I don’t think so.
“So it was just a bad photoshop. And that’s just the trolls, the people that hate me the most because they hate my success, they hate that I’m in this position, they hate that I’m doing better in life than them. So they want to try and discredit me, and they want to downplay my accomplishments. And the media ran with it, ‘Oh, broken jaw. It wasn’t competitive.'”
There was one thing broken that night, though, says Covington. However, it wasn’t anything on his body nor was it something even visible to the naked eye. And at UFC 268, Covington plans to take the shattered remains and discard it permanently.
“So nothing was broken. The only thing that was broken was Marty’s pride that night,” Covington said. “Because he doesn’t want to run this back in round 2 and he got forced to. And now, November 6, I’m gonna take everything he’s worked for his whole entire life, and he’s gonna have nothing left to show for it.”
What are your thoughts on Colby Covington’s comments about the broken-jaw reports following UFC 245?
