Rory MacDonald
This past Saturday night, UFC president Dana White revealed to the media that welterweight Rory ‘The Waterboy’ MacDonald had withdrawn from his upcoming UFC 152 bout against BJ Penn due to a bad cut suffered in training.
MacDonald, who posted a picture of the cut via Twitter, needed 38 stitches to close the wound which went down to the bone. The cut was caused by an accidental elbow while training at the Tri Star Gym in Montreal.
Speaking in an interview on Monday, MacDonald knew immediately that he was “screwed” as he watched the blood “spurt out.” The Canadian fighter has been given a no contact order and will need 4-6 weeks to recover before he can start training again.
“You know when you have a gut feeling when something happens?” MacDonald asked MMAFighting.com’s Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour. “I felt it and then I kind of knew. I didn’t move and I hit him or whatever, and then I just kind of stopped and then I watched the blood just kind of like spurt out sporadically. And then, I know when that happens that it’s deep. It was spraying. So I just kind of sat there, I knew, I just knew that I was screwed.”
“The way this cut is, it’s a deep cut like I explained,” he said. “But, you know, if I got re-injured and re-injured and re-injured if I went in too early that could be a problem later on down in my career. So it could re-open in fights, re-open in training, It could be an issue I don’t want it to be around. My coaches and my management, we all got on the phone and we talked. They calmed me down and gave me the points, the best option was to wait.”
Both MacDonald and Penn have agreed to delay the fight, but ‘The Waterboy’ is hoping to fight in Montreal at UFC 154 in November, while ‘The Prodigy’ is looking to book the fight in October at UFC 152 in Brazil.