Kurt Pellegrino would tell you about fighting with a head injury – if he could remember

Kurt Pellegrino

The first six seconds. That’s what Kurt Pellegrino remembers from the first round of his January 2008 fight against Alberto Crane.

Crane’s shin, by way of a head kick, removed the rest of the round from Pellegrino’s memory at UFC Fight Night 12 in Las Vegas. The way Pellegrino sees it now, of course it was a kick to the face that put him on the mat.

“During my pre-fight interview, I actually said kind of like what Ronda Rousey said (before her loss to Holly Holm),” Pellegrino told MMAjunkie at a recent concussion symposium. “I said, ‘The only way I can lose is if he kicks me in the face.’

“At that moment, I didn’t know I was kicked in the face. I don’t remember pretty much anything. All I remember is that I was on the floor with my arm wrapped around his leg, (and he was) breaking my shoulder, but he couldn’t break it, because I didn’t know it was in harm’s way.”

While Crane worked on damaging Pellegrino’s shoulder, blood poured from a huge cut on Pellegrino’s face, a cut Pellegrino was unaware of.

“I was touching something. I didn’t know if I was drooling, or what,” Pellegrino said. “I was wiping it on his butt, and I was thinking, ‘What’s going on here?'”

By the time Pellegrino worked himself free, the seat of Crane’s white trunks was smeared with Pellegrino’s blood.

Kurt Pellegrino

Despite the fact the two were fighting in front of almost 2,000 people, Pellegrino didn’t know what was going on. All he knew was there was some man trying to punch him in the face.

Around that time, Pellegrino began to be bothered by something in his mouth. He chewed whatever it was, hoping to dislodge it. He was successful, spitting what he thought was gum onto the canvas.

It wasn’t gum. It was Pellegrino’s flesh – flesh that had been flapping around the inside of his mouth as a result of Crane’s kick. After he spit out that chunk of flesh, Pellegrino started to get his wits back. His punches regained some snap, and he knew he was hurting Crane.

When the round ended, Pellegrino told his cornerman, Raphael Chaves, that Crane’s punch early in the round hurt him. The problem was it wasn’t a punch – it was that kick.

As Pellegrino sat in his corner, he recognized Chaves. He recognized referee Herb Dean. But the other man, he had no idea who he was or why he was there.

“I know you get two people in your corner,” Pellegrino said. “I know if there’s a cut, a doctor comes in. And you get one corner, and the referee’s there if something bad happens, so there are always three people. I know that now and I knew that then. I’ve always known that. But in this situation, it was Chaves, and some old man that I never met in my life. I didn’t realize who he was, nor did I know what he was doing.”

He was tending to the wound below Pellegrino’s lip, a cut that was so bad they had no choice but to slather it in so much Vaseline that Pellegrino tried to alert Dean it needed to be wiped off because it was far too much to fight with. Dean told Pellegrino it was okay, which struck Pellegrino as odd.

With a little more than three minutes left in the second round, Pellegrino ended the fight with strikes and celebrated his win with his corner.

Pellegrino still didn’t know he had been kicked in the head and that the kick left him with a huge hole in his face. He found out the ugly reality during his interview with Joe Rogan when the camera zoomed in on the cut.

During that interview he also found out it was a kick, not a punch, that had done the damage to his face – a kick that also caused him not to realize he had fought two rounds, not one. After the interview was done, Pellegrino headed to the hospital.

“When I went to the hospital, no doctor checked my head,” said Pellegrino. “No doctor asked if I had a headache. They just gave me stitches and pain medicine for my lip.”

It wasn’t until he got home and watched the video of the fight that he realized there had been a Round 1. The only time Pellegrino remembered was the 1:55 he spent fighting in Round 2. The first round, as far as he knew before watching the tape, never happened.

It wasn’t long after returning home that Pellegrino felt intense pain on the left side of his brain. He also discovered he was sensitive to light and needed to wear sunglasses at all times or sit in a dark room to get any relief – classic symptoms of a concussion.

The pain in his head lasted for a few weeks. He had to wear the sunglasses for almost a month before his sensitivity to light disappeared. As soon as the pain went away and the stitches were removed from his face, he went back to training.

During that time, the only medicine he received was the Advil and Tylenol he bought at CVS.

These days, the retired Pellegrino is still approached about that fight.

“In the beginning I was like, ‘Yeah, right! Never die,'” Pellegrino said. “But the truth of it is, I had no idea what happened. I have no idea how I got back up. It had nothing to do with me being super tough or just the will to win. It was pure luck because I couldn’t tell you, if you asked me what happened in Round 1 – I could never tell you. I can only tell you now because I watched it.”