At UFC 252 this past weekend (Sat., Aug. 15, 2020), Marlon Vera handed Sean O’Malley his first-ever defeat in mixed martial arts (MMA), stopping him in the first round of their Bantamweight co-main event. Earlier in the fight, “Sugar” suffered a leg injury and was ultimately stretchered to the locker room.
Soon thereafter, O’Malley’s critics took the opportunity to kick him while he was down, with former UFC “champ-champ” Henry Cejudo slamming the up-and-coming star for not having it in him to continue on with the injury.
Ben Askren followed suit, bashing “Sugar” on a recent appearance on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show, saying that O’Malley was simply looking for a way out of the fight. Furthermore, being stretchered out of the Octagon only proved that Sean isn’t as tough as he’s pumped himself up to be.
“What that says to me and the fact that he let them cart him out ... if they tried carting me out with an ankle injury I would have fought someone over that,” Askren said. “You are not putting my ass on a stretcher because I got an ankle injury.
I got one other good leg and I am going to hop all the way to the back so leave me the ‘F’ alone,” continued Askren, who then went to declare that “Sugar” allowing it showed a sign of “weakness.”
“Absolutely, yeah,” he added. “In life you have failures and you have struggles and you are going to learn from them. Obviously, he hasn’t lost big in his life to this point so he probably haven’t experienced those really hard things.
“That’s part of it,” he continued before comparing O’Malley’s injury to that of Maycee Barber. “Get up, rub some dirt on it and hop yourself to the back. You got a coach, Maycee Barber was tough enough and put her arm around me and Mark and hopped to the back and she was in so much pain.”
Moments later, one of O’Malley’s coaches responded to Askren’s criticism, revealing that Sean was actually refusing to go out on a stretcher but was ultimately forced to.
“He was trying to say I don’t need a stretcher like three times, they enforced it,” wrote Tim Welch on Twitter.
On the bright side, O’Malley’s MRI results came back negative and showed no signs of major damage, which means the 25-year old could get back into the swing of things sooner, rather than later.
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