In another twist to the Cerrone vs. Lauzon saga, Joe Lauzon was ready and able to fight come Saturday night after a video sent by a fan fixed his knee.
When they say there’s a YouTube tutorial video out there for almost any problem, they’re not kidding.
Joe Lauzon injured his knee stepping off the scale at UFC Austin over the weekend, canceling his much-anticipated fight against Donald Cerrone for the second time. It was a freak accident that had “J-Lau” worried he’d be unable to walk for months. Fortunately, a fan reached out via Instagram with a YouTube tutorial video on how to pop that sucker back into place.
“So you can’t make this up, but my knee works again,” Lauzon said in a video uploaded to Instagram on Saturday night. “Someone sent me a video maybe an hour ago on Instagram about like, ‘This sounds like something I deal with with my knee. You should check out this video.’ And it was 100 percent, everything was exactly the problem I was having.”
“It was called a ‘tib-fib’ dislocation. So basically the bones in my leg were dislocated, that’s why we couldn’t get it back. So I did the exercise in the video and it popped back in. It’s insane, my leg fully works, I’m able to to hop, walk, jump. I literally could not put socks on, I couldn’t lift my foot off the bed, I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t put any weight on it, I couldn’t do anything the last day and a half. I had to try and hobble and I couldn’t even hop on one foot because I couldn’t take my foot shaking. It was horrible.”
Lauzon said he reached out to the UFC to see if they could get the Cerrone fight back on, but it was too late.
“I wish I had this video yesterday or this morning before our fight got called off,” he said. “We contacted the UFC, we tried to make it, to see if Cowboy was still around we could still fight. But it was too late. I think he’s at the fights, but the UFC said we couldn’t do it, so it sucks. Sorry to everyone again, this whole entire situation super sucks. I don’t now what’s going to happen. We’ll see.”
What sucks is Lauzon had UFC doctors and Performance Institute specialists working on his knee all Saturday morning to no avail. It’s one of those situations: if you don’t have a proper diagnosis of the problem, you can’t fix it. Once the issue is identified, it’s an easy fix. Unfortunately that easy fix came several hours too late to save the Cerrone vs. Lauzon match-up.
With this being the second time this booking has fallen apart, there’s a good chance we’ll never see these two battle. Following the event, UFC president Dana White commented on the bout, saying “That thing’s getting like Tony and Khabib. No, I will not book that fight again.”
Tony Ferguson vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov was booked and fell apart a shocking five times over the years. We’re only up to two on this fight. And sure, they were both wacky call-offs (Cerrone’s withdrawal at UFC 274 was on account of a sketchy taco), so a curse isn’t out of the question. But with both Cerrone and Lauzon ready to go, we implore Dana White: let them scrap at 170 pounds in two or three weeks. Let’s get this done!