Paige VanZant dropped the 115-pound weight class to compete in the promotion’s newly-created flyweight division, and unfortunately, her debut fight didn’t exactly go as planned. As Paige VanZant broke her arm against Jessica Rose-Clark and lost the bout via unanimous decision on (Jan. 14, 2018) in St. Louis, Missouri.
Paige’s coach and former MMA Fabiano Scherner insist that even though she said she had broken her arm, he couldn’t even notice a difference. Scherner spoke with MMA Fighting to reveal why he didn’t encourage her to stop the fight.
“I was asking her to stay away from the clinch and keep the distance to use her boxing and kickboxing, and she said, ‘My arm is broken. She wasn’t feeling any pain, so I thought it could be a fissure, that sometimes hurts as much as a fracture. She said she fractured it in the first round, but she didn’t remember that the spinning back fist was in the second round.”
“Everything that happened in the second round led me to believe that it wasn’t a serious injury because the way she continued fighting, you couldn’t notice it. I went back to the corner and asked the other coaches if they thought it was really broken, and they couldn’t give me a concrete answer. I kept telling her to hit with the right hand, and when I saw that she wasn’t throwing punches, I knew it was more serious than I thought.”
The coach said i notice that Paige VanZant wasn’t throwing right hands in the third and Scherner still decided against throwing in the towel as PVZ didn’t look to be in any pain.
“I let the fight play out because at any moment she… She wasn’t using her right hand, but I was looking at her face and she didn’t appear to be in pain or anything like that, so I thought it was serious but that she could continue,” he said. “I didn’t think about throwing in the towel. We spoke about it after the fight and I saw the X-ray, I apologized to her for making that call, and she said, ‘It was the right call because I wanted to go back and continue fighting. I would be disappointed if you had stopped the fight.’ I think it was the right call because she really wanted to go back.”
Do you guys think the fight should have been stopped? Do you guys think her loss should be blame to her coach as he let her fight with a serious injury?
