This past February, Jared Gordon saw his five-fight win streak snapped by Carlos Diego Ferreira at UFC Fight Night 126 after coming up on the wrong end of a first round technical knockout loss.
And while people are quick to flame a fighter for revealing he or she didn’t go into a fight at 100-percent, Gordon tells the tale of just how bad his left hand was busted up after a series of rather unfortunate and bizarre events that you have to see to believe ... literally.
Speaking to Bloody Elbow, Jared recalls a wild, unexpected street fight he got into with two alleged gang members on the streets of Queens, N.Y., while waiting his turn at a barber shop two months prior to his fight. According to Gordon, he and a friend were outside visiting with one of his buddy’s former jiu-jitsu students when two men approached the young man, spit on him and took a swing.
It was then that Gordon — who was simply enjoying a nice cup of coffee — sprung into action.
“That’s when I jumped him. We all started fighting. My friend starts fighting the other kid, and they bumped into me and the kid I was fighting. We hit the storefront window, and the whole thing came down on us.”
After taking care of the thugs, Jared and Co. were questioned by police and viewed the footage together. Once informed of the lengthy legal process that would ensue if he chose to press charges — which included him and his friend spending the night in jail — Gordon opted to just let it be.
“So I was like, ‘F-ck that, I’m not going to jail for the night,’” Gordon said. “I’ve been to jail too many times. The cops said, ‘We’re just going to let it go then.’ It’s not worth the headache. You have to hire a lawyer and go through the whole process. F-ck that.”
According to Gordon, a Rikers Island corrections officer who witnessed the fight confirmed that the two men involved in the fight were members of the GS9 crips in New York.
As a result of the shattered window glass falling on him, Gordon suffered deep cuts on three fingers that required a total of 21 stitches. With the footage now released, he felt he needed to tell the truth as to what actually went down. Still, it only got worse from there — after returning to practice a little under two weeks later, Gordon said his wounds opened back up, requiring further stitching.
But, it didn’t end there.
One week later, Gordon revealed he slipped on an escalator at Grand Central Station during a rainy day. As a result, his wounds opened up yet again, prompting another trip to a plastic surgeon to have it — and an infection on the cuts — taken care of once again. Gordon also took to Twitter to post pictures of his injuries, along with subsequent timelines of when they occurred.
Some shot of my hand and timeline leading up to my fight pic.twitter.com/md2lINpo8r
— Jared Gordon (@JFlashGordonMMA) July 30, 2018
Some more pics: pic.twitter.com/wQMUxnM6IU
— Jared Gordon (@JFlashGordonMMA) July 30, 2018
Gnarly.
As for why Gordon didn’t speak of it before, he says he didn’t want to pull out of a fight and wanted to proceed with his obligations. When asked about the injury after his loss, Gordon chalked it up to a simple old injury and never spoke about the wild brawl or the subsequent injuries.
“I have never brought this up before, because I am not one to make excuses and I don’t want to make it look like I am making excuses,” Gordon said. “I took the fight because I didn’t want to pull out. I had missed weight before in my first fight, and this was my third fight — the last thing that I wanted to do was pull out and have it look like I was having weight cutting problems again or make it look like I am unreliable,” he added.
“I had a terrible training camp because I couldn’t spar or wrestle or do jiu-jitsu,” he said. “All I did was run and shadow box and kick the bag for the whole fight camp, because I had one hand. Hats off to Diego; he did what he had to do. Nothing against him. But, I just think that if the fight camp didn’t go down the way it did, [the fight] would be different. It is what it is.”
Anyone interested in seeing a do-over between Jared and Carlos based on these revelations?