Mere hours before the start of the UFC 192 weigh-ins, welterweight contender Johny Hendricks checked into a Houston emergency room with a kidney stone and an intestinal blockage. And with that, Saturday evening's co-main event featuring Hendricks and Tyron Woodley was no more.
Hendricks and his team later acknowledged that the issues resulted from Hendricks' steep weight cut, which he has previously said averages about 25 pounds, per Dave Doyle of MMA Fighting.
Ariel Helwani of MMA Fighting first reported Hendricks' forced withdrawal from UFC 192. It wasn't the first report of its kind, though, and with an arms race of sorts underway to achieve the largest size advantage possible, it won't be the last.
The knee-jerk reaction in the wake of the announcement was to blame Hendricks, and hey, that's understandable.
But as most reasonable humans understand, things have nuances. It's not always an "either...or" proposition. Hendricks' withdrawal is one of those things. There's plenty of responsibility (and blame) to go around.
It's not the first weight-cutting problem for Hendricks. At UFC 171 he needed a second attempt to make weight for his title fight with Robbie Lawler.
Per Doyle, Hendricks has said that, during his college wrestling days at Oklahoma State, he ballooned up to 218 pounds before undertaking his cut. That's the kind of tough-it-out approach that science never supported and fighters are increasingly abandoning.
Hendricks also doesn't seem like one who's amenable to learning his lesson. At his last fight at UFC 181, he said afterward he pondered retirement because his cut was so bad.
He has been open before about having a poor diet (the fact that he owns his own steakhouse doesn't help anything on this front) and what seems to be the sort of boom-and-bust cycle engendered in the wrestling game where Hendricks got his start.
That culture should certainly continue to shoulder some accountability in the debate, seeing as how the pervading grin-and-bear-it mindset, still so common in that sport, so frequently causes these drastic, reckless cuts.
Also in on the blame here is the UFC, which hasn't done much to date to curb dangerous cuts. Kudos to the promotion for adopting a ban on IV rehydration—which, as it happens, takes effect for the first time here at UFC 192—but if Hendricks' behavior and comments of other fighters are any indication, it won't curtail cuts but rather just make them more dangerous by taking away an important rehydration tool.
The fans share the blame as well. We expect bigger, want bigger. As with brain trauma, if our lust for power and violence isn't tempered by safety concerns, we'll keep getting this.
From my uninformed perspective, it seems like Hendricks was hanging out around his steakhouse too much and going through his weight cut in the old tough-it-out sort of way. He did not control his weight until it was crunch time, and like a student cramming for an exam, he was walking a fine line.
The news also spurred UFC President Dana White to announce that Woodley may now receive the next welterweight title shot—something this fight at UFC 192 was supposed to determine. White went on to note that Hendricks is "a middleweight as of now," given this latest mishap, per Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports.
But in the meantime, until the combat sports culture changes and its fans and athletes start taking this more seriously, we'll have more canceled fights, more ER visits and worse.
