Raoni Barcelos’ longtime friend Glover Teixeira was in his corner this past weekend in Las Vegas and revealed the diagnosis for his health scare during his UFC Vegas 121 main event clash with Raul Rosas Jr. According to former UFC light heavyweight champion, Barcelos suffered a swelling in his brain before it eventually shut down as a “defense mechanism.”
Barcelos was up on the scorecards going into the fifth round but went unconscious for no apparent reason before the two-minute mark, and Teixeira said on his Overdogs podcast he thought it was “strange.” Barcelos was immediately transported to a local hospital for emergency care, and Teixeira feared for the worse.
“It was different because it wasn’t a knockout,” Teixeira said. “If it had been a knockout, we’re used to that. A fighter takes a shot, gets knocked out, okay, let’s take him to the hospital, all right. But this was something that happened out of nowhere, and we started thinking about all kinds of things. Could it have been his heart? Could it have been something neurological? They went in and ran the tests. There was some swelling in his brain, so it was a traumatic brain injury, and maybe that swelling caused him to black out. It was the body’s defense mechanism. ‘Let’s shut this down because this guy isn’t going to stop.’ His mind was stronger than his body, right? He didn’t want to give up.”
Teixeira was standing next to Raoni’s father Laerte Barcelos in the corner at the Meta APEX, and they initially thought the 39-year-old bantamweight went out due to a clash of heads.
“Laerte is an extremely stoic guy, [saying] ‘Yeah, we have to see. I don’t know if it was an accidental headbutt that we didn’t see,’” Teixeira said. “It looked like it might have been an accidental headbutt and then he went down, but we didn’t know. And seeing him being taken out on a stretcher at that moment, man, it was the most desperate moment in MMA. I saw everyone’s faces, Hunter’s face, the concern. I was worried too, but I kept looking at everyone’s faces. You find yourself looking for the expression of the UFC doctor.”
Herb Dean was the referee of the fight, and Teixeira criticized him for being late to stop the fight, only stepping in after Rosas Jr. decided to stop punching the Brazilian veteran. Teixeira was also in Alex Pereira’s corner for the Cyril Gane match at the UFC White House title bout this past June, when “Poatan” criticized Dean for allowing illegal strikes to the back of the head, and wonders if maybe it’s time for Dean to retire from refereeing.
“Of course, that’s going to be a conversation he’ll have with his family and everyone else,” Teixeira said of Barcelos’ future in MMA. “He needs to undergo all the proper tests to find out what happened, whether it really was a result of the trauma from the fight. It’s a decision that has to be made with a lot of care and caution.”
