Khabib Nurmagomedov’s manager is taking responsibility for how things were handled with “The Eagle’s” weight cutting mishap.
Nurmagomedov was set to compete against Tony Ferguson for the interim Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight title at UFC 209. The bout never happened as Nurmagomedov fell ill due to weight cutting issues.
UFC President Dana White expressed his discontent with Nurmagomedov’s team for not contacting UFC doctors and instead going to a “random” hospital in Las Vegas. “The Eagle’s” manager Ali Abdel-Aziz recently appeared on MMAFighting.com‘s “The MMA Hour.” Abdel-Aziz admitted that he should have followed protocol and reach out to the proper doctors:
“I know Dana came out and said I should have called the UFC doctor, or called (UFC medical claims official) Briana [Mattison], but I never did this before. And you know what? Dana is right. I wish I called Dr. Davidson, because we went to the Sunrise Hospital, and were there for almost seven hours. And they treated us so poorly. And now, I got a little offended when Dana was talking, but he’s right. If we called the UFC doctor — that I never had before, I didn’t know I was supposed to call him — we would have gotten probably treated like kings. Listen, I don’t know if the fight can be saved or maybe can be saved if we went to a different hospital, but the first thing they wanted to do with Khabib, they wanted to stick him with some IVs. Me and the doctor who’s fighting with Khabib to put an IV in him, he fought him for almost an hour-and-a-half, and finally the pain was so great, he just got an IV with some medication in it, and we all submitted. Now he probably went back to 165 or so, there’s no way this fight can happen.”
