After breaking his surgically repaired arm again, Hooker admits mistakes may have been made.
UFC Austin is a little less well positioned than yesterday after Dan Hooker had to withdraw from his co-main event with Bobby Green due to injury.
Now we know what exactly happened to “The Hangman” – he broke his arm again in training. Hooker suffered the original layoff in a hard-fought decision win over Jalin Turner in July. He underwent surgery to surgically repair the bone, but may not have waited long enough to return.
“[In] Yesterday I did a little kick during sparring. Was sent for an x-ray. She’s awesome,” he told Submission Radio in a new interview. “Yeah, it just broke in the same place and that’s how it is.”
“I took a risk. “I obviously came back a little quicker than… yeah, it’s all on me, bro,” he admitted. “I rushed to get back, I wanted to fight. I knew the risk of coming back so quickly, and when we rolled the dice we came up with snake eyes, baby.”
“I’ve blocked a thousand kicks in the last few months and only one hit in the right place and it’s just… yeah. It is what it is.”
Hooker has admitted in the past that he doesn’t always make the best career decisions. One of them was agreeing to a replacement fight with Islam Makhachev at the last second. Another was a desperate-looking move down to featherweight. Afterwards, he agreed to let the guys at City Kickboxing manage him and stop him from “doing stupid shit.”
Welp.
“Everyone threw their can down the street and told me to wait and I pushed them, I sped them up. I forced it,” he said. “It’s on me. I’m just hungry. You know what I mean? It happened. It happened again. It’s the double-edged sword of being obsessed with something. Sometimes you hold on to it so tightly that you crush it. “
“Either it’s broken in exactly the same place. This means that the bone simply didn’t fuse properly, that the bone never fused properly, and that it was inevitable that something like this would happen again. Or it’s a new break. So it depends what it is.”
So what’s next for Hooker?
“I’ll be back. UFC 300 in five months,” he said. “That’s a good goal. Everything happens for a reason. That shouldn’t have been. Yes, UFC 300 in five months. After consulting with the surgeon, that’s a A pleasant goal for three months of rehab and training camp. So, let’s move on to the future.”
Just a little calculation: the first break occurred in July. Four months later he broke it again. Admittedly, he was in a hurry. Now he says he wants to come back in… five months? Calm down, Dan Hooker!
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