Merab Dvalishvili’s coach John Wood has told of how the bantamweight champion tricked one of America’s strictest commissions into letting him fight through an injury.
Heading into his UFC 311 showdown with Umar Nurmagomedov, defending champion Dvalishvili suffered a string of injuries including a back problem and a severe cut on his right shin. The latter failed to heal for months and ended up getting infected as he continued to train through it.
Eventually, he told media following the fight, it managed to heal to a reasonable proportion by midway through fight week. However, Wood notes that during medical checks through the week, he had to hide the injury through a sleight of hand trick.
Merab Dvalishvili tricked California commission to hide injury before last fight
While going through medical testing for his fight back in January, Merab Dvalishvili was required to show off any injuries or problems he had been having. His arms, hands, body, head, feet and legs would all have been looked at by a doctor to make sure he was cleared.
However, when it came to his legs, he didn’t want to cause alarm by showing just how bad the cut on his shin had become. So when he showed his left leg, he used the doctor being distracted by something else to manoeuvre around and when asked to show his other leg he just showed the left again.
Wood told the hilarious story on Submission Radio, saying: “The big thing was I didn’t think he was even going to get cleared by the commission after they’d seen his leg. Obviously it worked out great, watching him in sparring and how he was performing in the room gave me all the confidence that he could do it.
“All the way to the day before the fight we didn’t know if the commission was going to take a look at that leg and clear him. Luckily, he pulled the old pant trick and showed them the same leg twice and they bought it.
“We were sitting back there, I was sitting across from him literally s—-ing a brick because I didn’t know what was going to go on. They were like ‘hey let’s check your leg’ and he had sweatpants on so he pulled up his pant leg on his good leg.
“He pulled it back down, guy looked at the paper and looked back up and said ‘let me see the other one’ and he shows him the same one! I started laughing… I would have given it a 50/50 or even more than a 50/50 [that the fight would have been cancelled].
“Just because of the way it looked, it still had kind of an open wound, you can see his leg to this day is still scarred up like crazy. But fighting is crazy, man. Fighters do crazy things and that’s how we get paid.”
Merab Dvalishvili is currently battling a broken toe
It has become commonplace for the bantamweight champion to suffer some sort of injury during camp. He tends to let people know during the camp as long as it isn’t too severe, and last week he shared footage of his broken toe heading into UFC 316 next week.
He is facing Sean O’Malley in a rematch and will need his footwork to be impeccable in order to deal with a striker that accurate. But Wood seems confident that it won’t be a problem, saying earlier in the Submission Radio interview that he would keep anything too severe to himself.
“Guys, if he’s posting something it’s really not that bad and he’s not going to be bothered that bad,” Wood insisted. “I’m sure he broke his toe but every camp every fighter, even Sean says it, is banged up and there’s a level of just injuries you go into fights with.
“That’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s going to be and that’s the way it always is. It’s just one of those things that obviously Merab likes to post about a little more than everybody else. It’s alright though, he’s all good.”