145 pound fighters better work on their rolling heel hook defense, because Ryan Hall is returning in 2025 after a litany of injuries put him on the shelf for three years.
Watch out, UFC featherweight division: Ryan Hall is on his way back to competing.
Hall is an elite level grappler and IBJJF world champion known for his nasty leg locks. In the UFC he is known as that weirdo who spammed Granby rolls endlessly in an attempt to grab heel hooks. The gameplan was odd but effective — he went 5-1 in the UFC with it, beating Artem Lobov, Gray Maynard, BJ Penn, and Darren Elkins.
He did not beat Ilia Topuria with it … “El Matador” sent him to the shadow realm with a blistering KO when they fought in 2021. After that, Hall earned one more win over Darrick Minner before disappearing for three years.
Now in a new interview with BJPenn.com he describes what’s kept him off cards, “Basically the most serious string of of unfortunate health stuff that I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
One of the weirder fights in the modern UFC era
Also Joe Rogans commentary this fight was atrocious he was drooling for Ryan Hall pic.twitter.com/I6tfGDO1Os
— Homelander MMA (@HomelanderMMA) March 13, 2023
“I’ve had 21 general anesthesia surgeries since my last fight,” Hall said. “Hold on … 19 since that fight. There were two prior. So yeah man, it’s kinda been a bit of a journey.”
“I got fallen on, tore my ACL, had to fix a plantar plate that was torn under my foot, got fallen on again, had to have a tightrope surgery — the one that Pat Mahomes and a couple of other people have had. The ACL got infected, had to have a couple of emergency septic arthritis [surgeries]. The tightrope, I was actually allergic to the hardware they put in me somehow, so that had to be re-done.”
“The big one recently is I had a torn shoulder,” he added. “I had a 270 degree tear in my labrum, my torn rotator cuff, big old cyst in my shoulder that was causing weird nerve stuff too. Getting that all fixed as well, you know, has has been huge.”
“Finally on the back end of it, and doing a heck of a lot better,” he concluded.
With all of Hall’s stretches of inactivity you’d think he’s just too fragile to compete in the rough and tumble world of MMA. But he clarified that this was the first stretch of serious injuries he’s ever had over a lifetime of combat sports competition. It all started leading into the Topuria match.
“I went 15 years completely bulletproof,” he said. “I ended up getting fallen on and tore my hip right before that fight and I didn’t know how much that really affected me … About half the surgeries that I had more than half the surgeries that I had were actually, ‘Oops. We screwed that one up. Sorry, dude. Let’s run it back. Didn’t mean to goof up’ … I had 6 elbow surgeries, 5 knee surgeries.”
Now he’s with a new doctor who fixed his knee properly and took care of his shoulder. He’s looking to make a comeback in 2025, although the exact date and even weightclass is in question. There’s a chance he could drop from featherweight to bantamweight. Hopefully he won’t have the same issues securing a fight.
“I’ve been in the UFC for 9 years, and I had long stretches of time where nobody would fight me,” Hall said. “This is the third separate two-plus year period during my time in the UFC of no fights. This one was on me, though, because that’s just injuries. The other two were nobody would fight.”
“I had fight after fight after fight get declined or fight after fight fall through. And then it turns out that your only loss is [to Ilia Topuria] under really difficult circumstances. I had a bunch of injuries going into that fight … he’s a great fighter anyway, and the only fight I lost is [to] the current champ.”