LAS VEGAS – As he left the cage at UFC 189 in July following his welterweight title bout with Rory MacDonald, Robbie Lawler’s face looked as if the car he’d been driving crashed into a wall at 80 miles per hour and he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
His face was cut and swollen, and despite the best efforts of some of the world’s elite cut men, blood oozed from several open wounds.
You’d never have known it by looking at him, but he was the winner in what is probably the greatest fight of 2015 and, arguably, in mixed martial arts history.
MacDonald looked even worse.
Those are the kinds of fights that shorten careers and are often felt years later. A man, no matter how tough, can only take so many of those kinds of battles before his body gives out. It would not have been a stretch to believe that both fighters would be out for at least a year after such a grueling battle. But Lawler is back on Saturday, defending his title at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in the main event of UFC 195 against Carlos Condit.
Less than six months after one of the most physically demanding bouts the UFC has ever staged, Lawler is back against another elite opponent. And had he not been injured, he’d have been back a month sooner.
“Robbie Lawler is, without doubt, one extremely tough human being,” Condit said in tribute.
Lawler had originally agreed to defend his belt against Condit at UFC 194 on Dec. 12. But a right thumb injury he originally suffered during a high school wrestling match in 2000 required the bout to be postponed for three weeks.
Now, for a guy who absorbed the kind of punishment that Lawler did against MacDonald and never stopped moving forward, it might seem odd to pull out of a fight because of a sore thumb.
If anyone has earned the benefit of the doubt, though, it’s Lawler.
His right thumb is mangled, and doesn’t sit straight up on a North-South line the way most folks’ thumbs do. It starts up straight, juts a bit to the right, weaves back to the left and then finishes straight up.
It’s a gnarled mess, but it’s one of the hazards of the occupation.
“Obviously after that [MacDonald] fight, it was real sore,” Lawler told Yahoo Sports. “Eventually, it’s going to get taken care of, but it looks like my face looked that night.”
He laughed as he said it, and added, as he stuck his thumb out as if he were hitchhiking, “Obviously, it’s not supposed to look like that, because this thumb doesn’t.”
But it’s not the thumb that is the real concern. The human body is not built to withstand a lot of blows to the head, and in the fight with MacDonald, Lawler took enough for more than one lifetime.
Anyone who saw the new Will Smith movie “Concussion” understands the risk that those in a contact sport take.
Smith played Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who discovered that numerous football players had a disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy that was caused by repeated hits to the head.
Anyone who has had repeated concussions is at risk to develop CTE. It can’t be diagnosed until death, but its symptoms are similar to forms of dementia such as Alzheimer's.
Fighters in the modern age may not be at as great of a risk as football players, who compete on a weekly basis and thus take more shots to the head. Athletic commissions are neutral third parties designed, theoretically anyway, to protect the fighters from themselves. If a fighter has absorbed too many blows, they are supposed to be medically suspended and barred from having contact.
That allows the brain to heal and reduces, though not eliminates, the risk.
The UFC, as well as several boxing promoters, has funded a brain study led by neurologist Dr. Charles Bernick of the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. The goal of the study is to better understand the impact of blows to the head.
Lawler has been fighting professionally for nearly 15 years, but looks and sounds as if he’s just getting started. He said that on the Tuesday following his win over MacDonald, he was back in the gym doing some weightlifting and light exercises.
He said that despite how he looked, he didn’t feel too bad only a few days after the bout, and a week later, was able to do pretty much whatever he wanted.
Lawler was one of the bright young prospects in the early days of Zuffa’s ownership of the UFC, but it took him more than a decade to fulfill that potential.
He learned by trial and error, but the key thing is that he learned. In his early days, he trained in Iowa at a camp where every sparring session was as intense as a fight.
But he learned eventually that there is little need to spar so vigorously and to push the body in training camp. Everything he does is geared toward being at his best for fight night, and that means less punishment absorbed in camp.
Now, if he feels he needs a day or two off, he takes it. He remains among the sport’s hardest workers, but he is working more efficiently and effectively than he has previously.
He faces a conundrum that so many of his peers do: In order to maximize his earnings, he’s got to fight often and against the best fighters in the world on a regular basis. There are no tune-up fights or third-tier opponents in his world.
It’s the Super Bowl every time out. Even the Patriots get to play lesser teams like the Browns every now and then, but for guys like Lawler, it’s always one top seed after another.
Fans love the back-and-forth slugfests and speak of them in reverential tones decades later.
The fighters make the big bucks in those kinds of fights, but that may come at a price years later.
Fighters in the modern era aren’t fighting as often as they did in the past and, consequently, their brains have a chance to recover. And not everyone who endures head trauma winds up with CTE or dementia. No one knows for sure why some people are afflicted and others aren’t, but researchers like Bernick are trying to figure it out.
In the meantime, we praise athletes like Lawler and Condit as warriors and marvel at their toughness. We’re awed by their conditioning and their desire for victory.
We simply hope that the price for that win isn’t too great. The Lawler-Condit match is another in a string of terrific matchups the UFC has made over the last three months. The violence quotient in this fight figures to be high. Enjoy it.
And then pray that no matter how swollen or bloody they may look in the fight’s aftermath, there is no toll to be paid for their toughness down the line.
