Chris Tuscherer has admitted that he probably would have stopped the fight with Gabriel Gonzaga after taking a heavy groin shot – if Oregon athletic commission officials had been able to tell him that would have been a no contest not a loss.“Between the doctor and the referee, no one could tell me a straight answer on, if I couldn’t finish, what would be the result? So I was out there and didn’t know what to do,” he told MMA Junkie.
“I asked the doctor many times what would happen if I can’t continue. ‘Is it a no-contest? What happens here?’ And the doctor and the ref couldn’t tell me. They kept passing the buck on to each other out there, so no one could tell me what was going on.”
Tuscherer took a thunderous misplaced inside leg kick from Gonzaga right in the groin, and says it was “the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt in my life”. At one poin the thought his testicles had been knocked inside his body, as happened to Mirko ‘CroCop’ Filipovic against Alistair Overeem in DREAM.
In fact, the pain was so bad that not only did Tuscherer spend some time vomiting into a bucket, he also briefly passed out. That was the moment when cameras caught him apparently tussling with the doctors while he was on the floor.
“I was passed out for whatever amount of time it was,“ he recalled. “And what I remember is that I thought I was on the ground fighting. That’s the part where you kind of see me going wild there. That was me coming to and thinking I was still fighting, and basically whoever was in front of me was who I was going after.”
Having been through such an ordeal, there can be no disputing that Tuscherer was at a significant disadvantage by continuing to fight. But he says it was the lack of information from the in-cage officials that prompted that decision.
Tuscherer says “a few of the UFC guys on the night of that fight [said] that the Oregon State [Athletic] Commission didn’t really know what was going on, that it was the first time [the UFC] had been out there,”
“All I was wondering was if it’d be a no-contest,” he said. “Would that have been the deal? I think my mind would have thought a little different that way.
“I would have thought to myself, ‘Hey, we’re not fighting on some small show here. This is a huge fight. I’m fighting a guy who’s a top-10 heavyweight in the world. I’ve got to be a 100 percent if I’m going to be out here’.”
As it was, he continued the fight for fear that refusing to do so would have put a loss on his record or had Gonzaga losing by disqualification, something he did not want to happen. In the end it was irrelevant as Gonzaga battered him as soon as the fight recommenced and took the TKO win.
Tuscherer is unhappy about the circumstances of the loss but does not blame the UFC. He just wants another chance to prove himself.
“I’m hoping they’ll give me another shot so I can prove again that I do deserve to be out there,” he says.
