What’s wrong with Jimmy Crute’s leg?
Unfortunately for inquiring minds (like me), “The Brute” doesn’t know. And thanks to a mandatory quarantine in Sydney, where the Aussie will stay shacked up until further notice, I’m not sure anyone else knows, either.
“I think I did a bit of damage to my LCL, I think that’s what they said it looked like when I fell,” Crute told Submission Radio. “But it’s just gutting because I didn’t get the opportunity to go out on my own terms. The perineal nerve just gets better by itself, but I feel like I’ve done ligament damage. I’ve blown an ACL, so I sort of know what the ligament damage feels like. But yeah, I’ve got to get a scan. I can’t get a scan until I get out of hotel quarantine, so yeah, it’s frustrating. I’m stuck in here, I don’t know what’s wrong with my knee, I don’t know how long I have to have off. But yeah, we’ll have to wait and see.”
Crute, 25, was hit with a punishing leg kick in the opening frame of his UFC 261 pay-per-view (PPV) curtain jerker opposite light heavyweight veteran Anthony Smith. “The Brute” fought valiantly, but could not keep from rolling his ankle with every step.
“He hit me with this leg kick that hit me in the perineal nerve and just took out my whole bottom leg,” Crute said. “Like, I couldn’t feel. Literally, it just felt like my leg had been dipped in fire, and then it went numb and I couldn’t feel anything in my leg. And then I kept rolling my ankle. But as soon as that happened, I just thought, oh well, I guess we’ll just have to grapple now. I knew the feeling in my leg would come back. With that nerve damage, it only lasts for about a minute or two. So, I knew that if I just grounded him, hopefully by the end of the round I could get some feeling back in my leg and we could go for the second. It took a little bit longer to get the feeling back. I think I literally started walking again normally like 20 seconds after they called the fight. So, it was really frustrating.”
Referee Keith Peterson gave Crute an opportunity to answer the bell at the start of the second stanza, but a few steps forward was all it took for “The Brute” to trip over his own dead leg, calling a halt to the action and awarding a technical knockout victory to Smith.
”I had no idea they weren’t going to let me go,” Crute continued. “Even when I stood up and I was limping, there’s been times before where people have hurt their leg and limped around and come good, and they’ve given them the benefit of the doubt. I think they should have. I think they should have let me go out. I definitely wanted to. I feel like if I would have gone out in the second, I would have put him away. But in terms of what I felt straight away when I got him to the ground, yeah, there was a bit of urgency to finish him. But there’s urgency to finish him anyway. I wanted to get him out of there because I couldn’t feel my leg obviously.”
No word yet on whether or not the promotion is interested in a Crute-Smith rematch.