Turns out it wasn’t a knockout, but rather swelling in the brain that triggered a shut down.
That’s according to former UFC light heavyweight champion Glover Teixeira, who was cornering Barcelos in the “Sin City” headliner. Teixeira accompanied his fellow Brazilian to the hospital and was part of the lengthy recovery process, which lasted until Wednesday afternoon.
“It was different because it wasn’t a knockout,” Teixeira said on the Overdogs Podcast. “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.”
“[Raoni’s father] 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.”
“That’s going to be a conversation he’ll have with his family and everyone else,” Teixeira said. “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.”
