Coach Reveals Why He Let Paige VanZant Fight Through Serious Injury
Paige Vanzant has the heart of a heavyweight in a women’s flyweight frame. In spite of a seriously broken arm, “12 Gauge” persevered and fought on, even though the break ended up being a massive fracture.
Her coach and former mixed martial artist Fabiano Scherner insists that even though she said she had broken her arm, he couldn’t even notice a difference as she kept on fighting in a losing effort to Jessica Rose-Clark at UFC Saint Louis on Sunday:
“I was asking her to stay away from the clinch and keep the distance to use her boxing and kickboxing, and she said, ‘My arm is broken. She wasn’t feeling any pain, so I thought it could be a fissure, that sometimes hurts as much as a fracture. She said she fractured it in the first round, but she didn’t remember that the spinning back fist was in the second round.”
“Everything that happened in the second round led me to believe that it wasn’t a serious injury because the way she continued fighting, you couldn’t notice it. I went back to the corner and asked the other coaches if they thought it was really broken, and they couldn’t give me a concrete answer. I kept telling her to hit with the right hand, and when I saw that she wasn’t throwing punches, I knew it was more serious than I thought.”
And that’s the shot that broke my arm lol @missjessyjess you got a hard head girl!! Congrats tonight. Tough as nails https://t.co/khKxLO1ugB
— Paige VanZant (@paigevanzant) January 15, 2018
Scherner says he didn’t make an effort to stop the fight because PVZ didn’t look to be in any pain, and that she thanked him after the fight for not trying to stop it:
“I let the fight play out because at any moment she… She wasn’t using her right hand, but I was looking at her face and she didn’t appear to be in pain or anything like that, so I thought it was serious but that she could continue,” he said. “I didn’t think about throwing in the towel. We spoke about it after the fight and I saw the X-ray, I apologized to her for making that call, and she said, ‘It was the right call because I wanted to go back and continue fighting. I would be disappointed if you had stopped the fight.’ I think it was the right call because she really wanted to go back.”
Should the fight have been stopped due to PVZ’s broken arm? Do you agree with her coach in letting the fight continue?
