The former UFC middleweight champion Robert Whittaker suffered one of the most gruesome injuries that the MMA world has seen in some time in his loss to Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 308.
However, just one month on from that fight, "The Reaper" is already back to feeling good as he addressed the injury during a recent episode of his podcast.
Whittaker was submitted in the first round by Chimaev and with his quick tap suggesting that there was an injury, a viral photo showed a graphic rearranging of his teeth.
The UFC veteran recapped the experience, what went wrong and why it went wrong on the latest instalment of his MMArcade podcast:
“His forearm goes straight across the bottom teeth and they move straight away. Then the squeeze after it, they were gone. They just went straight back in. Everyone and their friend saw the photos."
Two aspects of the injury came out after the fight and put Whittaker's fans and supporters at ease.
The first was that despite how gruesome the injury looked, it likely wouldn't be that big of a task to fix it with fairly minimum recovery time required.
Whittaker himself revealed after the fight that it was caused by a long-standing issue he's had that was long overdue some attention.
“I’ve always kind of had bad bottom teeth,” Whittaker said. “I’ve had missing teeth for 10 years plus. So I’ve always been kind of shot because they’re not stable. They’re not a full circuit, they’re like half. Over the years, trauma whatever, I don’t know. It was something that needed to be addressed by every dentist was always ‘Try to keep your real teeth. Keep your real teeth.’ I should’ve got rid of them years ago.
“But the Dricus [du Plessis] fight... they got pushed in a little bit when I fought Dricus. I had to address that, they had to be pushed back, I had a cast in there, let them settle, yada yada yada, move on. Then when I fought Ikram [Aliskerov], I had all these infections. I had to get four root canals. And I think the teeth had just had it. I think they had just had enough. Enough is enough. [Laughs]. I don’t think there was anything holding the teeth there anymore."
In the end, it is the loss that has become the bigger setback for Whittaker rather than the injury, with him even joking that Chimaev did him a favour by getting rid of those teeth once and for all.
Though he's not looking to jump right back inside the Octagon, he hopes to return in and around the half way point of 2025.
“My teeth just went straight in and I couldn’t fight out of it. I could feel my teeth in the middle of my mouth. I was done. And hats off to Chimaev. Guy had a plan, went in there, executed it for whatever reason, got the W.
“It’s upsetting. I don’t like losing like that, but it is what it is.”
