Following his submission win at Bellator 222, Dillon Danis announced that he'd suffered a knee injury just one week before fight night. John Kavanagh has since detailed the injury, explaining how it occurred in the first place.
Taking on Max Humphrey on the event's main card, Danis scored the first round submission but then made his prior injury public. Appearing on Ariel Helwani's MMA Show, Danis' coach John Kavanagh detailed the injury as well as the team's decision to fight regardless. “Yeah, it happened a week out," he said. "Weirdly a common story. The last round of his last spar. In fact, it was the last few seconds of the round.
"He went for the same technique that he won his fight with but he got caught in a kind of a funny angle and he heard a tear. He went and got assessed and it turned out he had a tear of his ACL. I didn’t know whether it was gonna happen or not and then I said ‘I’ll come over anyway’ so I flew in on Tuesday. You’re just kinda like eh, let’s make weight then. Let’s see how the next 48 hours go.
"We made a decision, ‘if you’re going to take it and you lose, then you can’t talk about it because you’re assuming you’re at a high enough level to compete. That always kind of bugs me. If someone loses a fight and they're ‘well I had this injury.’ I think if you win it you can mention it but yeah, he did have a pretty bad tear on the knee. If you actually watch his fight, Jiu-Jitsu guys out there, they’ll see how little he was using his left leg . . . there’s a few positions that he couldn’t do what he would normally do but he still did very well."
That element's hard to argue, with Danis dominating proceedings before securing the armbar finish. As for what's next, Kavanagh is yet to find out if Danis will require surgery as his student is yet to be assessed. “We’re gonna get assessed. I was hoping he would go in today but definitely this week, he’ll get a proper scan and make a decision whether just to rehab it or go for surgery.
"I was really hoping to get him on a run this year and get two or three even before the end of the year. Now that’s in question so we’ll just have to wait."
