Backlash around injury announcements a puzzling phenomenon

It’s been a rough week for the UFC and its fighters. On Monday, MMA Fighting broke the news that both Frankie Edgar and Gray Maynard were injured, canceling UFC 130’s lightweight championship main event. On Thursday the UFC announced that Brock Lesnar had a recurrence of diverticulitis and was forced out of his UFC 131 matchup with Junior dos Santos. And on Friday, it was revealed that light-heavyweight champ Jon Jones would not need surgery on an injured thumb, but was still sidelined from training until mid-June.

While the news was bad enough on its own merits, it came with its own accompanying baggage: backlash. The phenomenon is nothing new, but it remains as puzzling as ever. Do these men and women who get in a cage and fight for a living really have anything to prove about their courage?

On one hand, it’s easy to understand why the sport’s followers would be disappointed when fighters are forced out of action. In the event when an entire match is canceled — as in the instance of Edgar-Maynard — it’s even clearer. We always hope for the best fights, and are disappointed when they don’t happen. But on the other, the accusations that are casually lobbed at fighters afterward are often over the line and border on downright hysteria.

People need to realize that fighters — especially the top-level ones — do not make these decisions in a vacuum. They speak to multiple doctors, their management team, and the UFC brass beforehand. When fighters withdraw from a fight, they lose their fight purse, sponsor money, the possibility of a win bonus, nightly bonus, and in the case of major fighters like Lesnar and Jones, they miss out on a small fortune in pay-per-view money. Sitting on the sidelines is an amazingly costly decision that penalizes them much more than time. Still, they often get accused of ulterior motives, or worse, of faking it.

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