After a career marked by bad injuries, a dislocated shoulder in training camp was the final straw for Cruz.
Dominick Cruz’s storied MMA career ended last week, not with a bang but with an injury.
It’s almost fitting that the bantamweight great retired off an injury rather than one last fight. He spent a huge chunk of his career sidelined by some the worst injuries an athlete can take. Three major knee blowouts. A torn groin. Torn quad. Broken arm.
And the straw that broke the camel’s back? Two shoulder dislocations eight months apart, the second happening midway through a final fight camp to take on Rob Font. That was set to be “The Dominator’s” retirement bout, but Cruz pulled the plug after his shoulder popped out again in training.
The former bantamweight champion described the agonizing injury on the Anik and Florian podcast.
“After [rehabbing my shoulder], I booked the fight and then they offered me Rob Font.” Cruz said (via BJPenn.com). “I was like, ‘I should just take it, I’m not going to get in better shape, I feel amazing still now.’ I felt amazing before the second dislocation and that’s why I took the fight.”
“It was a basic thing I’ve done a million times,” he said of how the injury occurred. “You’re on your back from half guard, you get up on your elbow, and then you reach to a single and you use your elbow to get up. It pretty much shot out the back the second I put my elbow down and went to pull in that single leg. That was excruciating pain.”
“When they went to slide it in, it was sitting very particularly. So they had to do an X-ray to see how to pull it back in, what direction to yank your arm when they reset it. Because if you pinch certain nerves then it can shut the whole arm off and it’s just really damaging. So I’m in the hospital for an hour and fifteen minutes, my arm starts turning blue and when I see my fingers turning blue and just things being weird and the pain was excruciating. It just gave a different perspective for me.
“This was enough pain to teach me something and get me to kind of say, okay.”
Dominick Cruz retires with a record of 24-4 over 17 years. He won the WEC bantamweight title in 2010, defended it 4 times as it became the UFC bantamweight title, and then was out for three years with injuries. He returned to win the title back in 2016, defending it once before losing to Cody Garbrandt in 2016. He returned after another three year injury break to take on Henry Cejudo for the title in 2020, losing via second round TKO.