The World Series of Fighting’s middleweight title eliminator between Jesse Taylor and Elvis Mutapcic at WSOF 5 was canceled in Atlantic City just minutes before it was set to happen.
The New Jersey State Athletic Commission discovered prohibitive prescription medicine in the Bosnian-American fighter’s Mutapcic’s locker room. One official discovered the medication just as the fighters were about to walk out for their main card bout at the Revel Casino. Nick Lembo, the head of the commission, was therefore forced to cancel the fight.
During the telecast, NBCSports’ in-ring reporter Joey Varner broke the news, saying that a Mutapcic cornerman was discovered with a bottle of unspecified pills which had not been approved by the commission. An official was said to have witnessed the cornerman give Mutapcic the medication, which left Nick Lembo no choice but to scrap the fight from the card.
WSOF president Ray Sefo later said that there were at least six different kinds of pills in the bottle, and put the blame on the “incompetence of the corner.”
“There were some prescriptions that weren’t given to our doctors during the physicals and that weren’t approved by us, the commission,” the commission said in a statement. “So since we don’t know what they are and what they do, we cancelled the fight.
“We can’t take that chance to have that fight go off, so those things need to be looked at, and they need to be talked about. We just feel that we’re not going to have a fight in New Jersey when we don’t know what someone is taking.”