After watching this disturbing GIF, will Rory MacDonald be the same after UFC 189?

Watching this moment now, it feels like wandering into someone else’s nightmare and standing there, a spectator, horrified but captivated.

There’s Rory MacDonald (18-3 MMA, 9-3 UFC), seconds after a Robbie Lawler (26-10 MMA, 11-4 UFC) left hand had convinced him to clutch his face and take a seat in Saturday’s UFC 189 co-main event, and it’s clear the pain and confusion is just beginning.

In the above GIF (via gfycat.com), his face is a blind mask of blood. It’s dripping down his chest, his forearms, his calves, staining his skin with dark, heavy splatters as he tries with great effort to haul himself into a sitting position.

His head wobbles like a newborn’s. His body won’t behave, and the only thing he can do is put a hand to the broken parts of his face, though there seems to be more broken face than there is hand.

This wasn’t just cosmetic damage. This was life-altering damage. This was the kind of fight in which people pat you on the back and ply you with platitudes about what a warrior you are, all while you’re in the hospital wondering if the doctors will be able to put everything back where it was.

That’s the kind of fight Lawler vs. MacDonald II was, a staggering display of will as much as of technique, and the full cost has likely yet to be paid.

That’s true of both men, to varying extents. Even as Lawler celebrated his dramatic, come-from-behind victory via fifth-round TKO, he did it by talking out of a mouth that looked like someone’s failed attempt at a jack-o-lantern. His upper lip seemed to have taken an unplanned turn toward his right eye. His nose seemed like it couldn’t decide whether to swell up or flatten out. And he was the winner.

Rory MacDonald

Because he was the winner, the cameras were mostly fixed on Lawler while MacDonald struggled to come up for air in the immediate aftermath. It’s in this moment that we see the brutal reality of the situation.

We see the man struggling to sit up as his blood spills everywhere. We see him straining to regain control of his head. We see cageside officials trying in vain to help, one of them sticking a lump of gauze into the bloody snarl where his nose ought to be, like someone slapping a Band-Aid on an ax wound out of a lack of better ideas.

Then his body gives up the struggle. He pitches back and goes down again.

This would be hard to watch with a regular person. But somewhere in this little loop of pain, you remember that it’s Rory MacDonald, a tough SOB if there ever was one. He appeared to fight most of this bout with a broken nose. To return him to a state of childlike helplessness is no small task, which makes it all the more unsettling once we see what that actually looks like.

According to UFC President Dana White, it wasn’t one of those things that just looks worse than it is, either. At the post-fight press conference, White said officials had asked MacDonald what year it was after the bout. Not what month or what day. Not which of the Vegas strip casinos he happened to be bleeding all over. They asked him to locate himself in time in the broadest way possible.

“He didn’t even know what year it was,” White said.

It’s the kind of thing we might joke about in this sport after a particularly bad beating – he hit him so hard, he didn’t know what year it was – or at least it’s the kind of thing we might have joked about until we actually saw it.

Seeing it, though, makes it not so funny anymore. Seeing it also makes it hard not to wonder, how is MacDonald ever going to be the same again after that? How could he be? How could anyone?

For complete coverage of UFC 189, check out the UFC Events section of the site.