(We would have also accepted ‘extreme-constipation’. Photo courtesy of HeavyMMA.)
Breaking away from his usual “fat guy who can throw down” persona, Roy Nelson just looked like your garden-variety fat guy last weekend at UFC 130, wheezing through three rounds, too exhausted to do anything besides absorb blows from Frank Mir. Was it a sign that Roy should finally hook up with a nutritionist and get his BMI in order?
The obvious answer is yes, definitely. Just because you can drag around a barrel of adipose tissue around your midsection and still compete at the highest levels of MMA doesn’t make it a good idea. Nelson is literally weighing himself down in the Octagon, and putting himself at a profound competitive disadvantage; even most 205-pounders in the UFC outsize Nelson at this point. But according to a new report, there was another factor in play on Saturday that made a victory for Big Country even less likely:
Via text messages with Cagewriter, Jessy Nelson said that her husband had walking pneumonia during the first two weeks of May, and that he spent Monday in a Las Vegas hospital. “He described the feeling like someone is taking a big scab off of his lungs,” Nelson wrote.
After consulting with CagePotato Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Wikipedia, we learned that atypical pneumonia, aka “walking pneumonia,” is a pneumonia not caused by one of the more traditional pathogens, and with a clinical presentation inconsistent with typical pneumonia. The infection is generally restricted to small areas of the lungs.
Roy has confirmed the diagnosis on Twitter. He also claimed that he would beat Mir in a best-of-7 series, argued that he’s still a top-5 heavyweight in the UFC (if you don’t include Lesnar), and let everybody know that he used to make more money in the IFL. Great. There’s something else Dana White can be pissed about.