Benoit Saint-Denis wasn’t the only fighter competing after a bad case of staph. Australian fighter Jack Della Maddalena also arrived in Miami with an infection in his knee.
Staph. Staph everywhere.
That was the story of UFC 299, which featured not one but two cases of staph (that we know about). Benoit Saint Denis fought Dustin Poirier with a nasty spot of staph on his forehead. He would savage “Diamond” through the first round before falling in the second.
“My body didn’t keep up after a week of antibiotics to fight an infection,” Saint Denis said following the loss. “I only had one round to give you.”
That wasn’t the case for Jack Della Maddalena, who managed to fight three hard rounds against Gilbert Burns, knocking the tough Brazilian out with just over a minute left in the fight. “JDM” broke his arm badly sometime early in the fight and didn’t let that stop him. Now he’s revealed that he didn’t let a little staph stop him either.
“I had staph just heading into [UFC 299], just before we left,” Della Maddalena said on the Grin Reapers podcast. “I was on antibiotics. I think it was like, really sore the weekend before. It had gotten quite a lot better, so I was thinking the antibiotics are obviously working. It was just like, a pimple on my knee.
“I just didn’t really train. Just chilled for the first four days we were there.”
His coach Ben Vickers wasn’t willing to let him play down the situation.
“Let’s be honest, you limped on to the plane with staph,” Vickers said. “He limped on to the plane on antibiotics the Wednesday before fight week. We’ve got guys pulling out of fights two weeks out with Staph. Jack was never gonna pull out. But unfortunately, we lost a week of training.”
Jack still had enough left in the tank to pull off an impressive win over Gilbert Burns. That’s rocketed him up the welterweight rankings to No. 5. Now the Australian fighter is looking to relax until August when the UFC returns to Perth, Australia for UFC 305. If he has his way, he’ll fight Shavkat Rakhmonov there, or Kamaru Usman.