Chandler: I don’t want to fight in NY again
Michael Chandler: “New York is a cool city, but I don’t want to fight here ever again. It’s a little bit amateur hour, man.”
Former two-time Bellator lightweight champion Michael Chandler lost his title at Bellator NYC on Saturday in Madison Square Garden. It was arguably the weirdest moment of a weird, weird night. Chandler was winning, but his ankle was turning horribly.
New York State Athletic Commission referee Todd Anderson took it upon himself to give Chandler a time out for the doctor to inspect the injury. Chandler stood up from his stool, took steps at the doctor’s direction, and when he sat back down, an official had removed the stool, leading him to collapse on the floor. Fight was over, and Brent Primus was awarded the belt in a fight he was losing.
During a recent appearance on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, Chandler was not impressed.
Nothing’s broken, said Chandler, as transcribed by Dave Doyle for MMA Fighting. I went straight to the ER, the doctors at Bellevue ER, I got in, they X-rayed it, nothing broken. It’s a good thing. I could be just getting out of surgery right now with a rod in my leg. Luckily, I’m not.
The unfortunate part of the situation was, that ref called for the doctors to come into the cage 15 seconds after I just dropped him. On one leg.
I looked at three doctors in the eye and said, ‘This thing better be broken.’ If you’re going to stop this fight in front of all of these people, with all the hard work I’ve put in, with all this on the line, and that belt, this thing better be broken.
If you lined up 100 people right now and said ‘Hey, watch this clip, is that man right there fit to fight,’ 90 percent of them would say ‘No, he was stumbling all over the place.’
New York is a cool city, but I don’t want to fight here ever again. It’s a little bit amateur hour, man. It’s different. They don’t know what they’re doing in MMA as much as they should. We’ve had five fight cards and every single one of them has been some crazy controversy going on.
I would have finished [Primus]. If this was the 18th century, and we were in the middle of a field, and it was me and Brent Primus, and I had one leg to stand on, I win that fight 100 times out of 100. That’s the funny thing.
Later, he added: I’m still the champion. Let’s be honest. An injury took me out of the fight. Brent Primus can wear his Hugh Hefner jacket and wear that fake belt around his shoulder.
