Now that Joe Riggs has been picked up by Bellator, we may never see the highly anticipated Nick Diaz vs. Joe Riggs rematch from the impromptu hospital brawl they were involved in just hours after UFC 57. In the first bout, Riggs grabbed the unanimous decision over Nick Diaz (while some still claim that Diaz won). Later that night, Diaz felt the need to initiate the sequel to their UFC 57 fight by going after Joe Riggs in the emergency room at the hospital. Since it’s such a ridiculous story, I’ll let Joe Riggs tell you what happened that night.
“We were like going to get a room, and like he is always popping off, talking smack. I go down toward his end of the hospital to find a doctor so he could watch me pee in a cup for the boxing commission, and he comes talking smack. I’m like, go back to the WEC. You’re bush league. You just got beat up. That’s two in a row. You’re out. I was just standing around talking [expletive] to him. He was like, that’s it, and comes out of his room. I had my hands down. He starts coming up to me. I just never in a million years thought he’d throw a punch. He threw a right hook and hit me right in the chin. I mean it hit me right on the button. I seriously can’t say that I was knocked out, but I kind of went down to a knee. Then we just fought and scrambled. I put him against the wall and just Thai clinched and started kneeing the [expletive] out of him. His nose was bleeding. I kept kneeing him, and they broke us up. That’s all that happened.”
Strikeforce saw the blatant rawesomeness in that story and decided to match them up at Strikeforce: Carano vs. Cyborg for the vacant Strikeforce welterweight title. Things were good, everyone was beating their chest in exhilaration and Riggs mysteriously disappeared into some hospital ward due to an ‘allergic reaction to an undisclosed drug’. Just a few weeks prior, Josh Barnett was caught juicing by the CSAC and forced the collapse of an entire organization. While everyone speculated, Nick Diaz intentionally missed his CSAC urine test because of a prior obligation a ROOR glass bong. The MMA world suddenly turned into my sophomore year of college.
MMAWeekly knocked on his hospital door to see how Deisel was doing an apparently, all of this occurred from an allergic reaction to an anti-depressant called ‘Effexor’ which apparently has the ability to ‘Eff’ up your central nervous system:
“It started shutting down my central nervous system…I got out of bed, and I couldn’t walk. I thought I was dying. So I went to the hospital and they gave me some medication to reverse it and I felt fine immediately, but they kept me in the hospital for two weeks to keep an eye on me.”
Damn. We’re just happy Riggs is alive and now that he’s with Bellator, Joe Riggs vs. Dan Hornbuckle sounds like the greatest fight that could be assembled in a circular cage with a gray mat (that’s if Hornbuckle goes up to middleweight). [Source]
