Michael Chandler had a rough night, to say the least, this past weekend at Bellator’s 180 pay-per-view (PPV), as he suffered a first round TKO loss due to doctor stoppage at the hands of Brent Primus to drop his 155-pound title.
Chandler suffered an apparent ankle injury after eating some nasty leg kicks and seeming to have landed on his foot wrong. After Chandler looked to be having incredible difficulty moving on the injured foot, the ref and doctors decided to call the fight off. After the fight Chandler warned officials that stopped the fight that his ankle ‘better be broken,’ however, that isn’t the case.
The now-former Bellator lightweight champ joined The MMA Hour yesterday (Mon. June 26, 2017) to talk about the ordeal and stated that it was determined his ankle was not broken after having an MRI done:
“Nothing’s broken,” Chandler said. “I went straight to the ER, the doctors at Bellevue ER, I got in, they X-rayed it, nothing broken. It’s a good thing. I could be just getting out of surgery right now with a rod in my leg. Luckily, I’m not.”
“The unfortunate part of the situation was, that ref called for the doctors to come into the cage 15 seconds after I just dropped him,” Chandler said. “On one leg. You heard me, I said, I looked at three doctors in the eye and said, ‘This thing better be broken,’“ Chandler said. “If you’re going to stop this fight in front of all of these people, with all the hard work I’ve put in, with all this on the line, and that belt, this thing better be broken.”
The New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) has been under a ton of criticism for the way they’ve handled mixed martial arts (MMA) since its legalization last year, and this situation with Chandler only added fuel to the fire. Chandler stated that he has no interest in fighting in NYC again as it’s “a little bit amateur hour”:
“New York is a cool city, but I don’t want to fight here ever again,” Chandler said. “It’s a little bit amateur hour, man. It’s different. They don’t know what they’re doing in MMA as much as they should. We’ve had five fight cards and every single one of them has been some crazy controversy going on.”
H/T MMA Fighting for the transcriptions
