Tim Sylvia update

Bomber · 05-10-2007, 04:48 PM

Tim Sylvia Update
By Steven Marrocco

Four-time UFC heavyweight champion Tim Sylvia is currently recovering after undergoing back surgery yesterday in Ohio. FCF spoke to him shortly before he underwent the surgery, where he shed some light on the nature of the injury, his fighting future, and recent critics of the UFC.

Sylvia

“I hurt it about three or four weeks out from my fight with Randy,” Sylvia says of his back. “It was bothering me real bad, I thought I had some disc problems and after the fight it got really bad and I went in, had an MRI, and I had three bulged discs.”

Sylvia was uncharacteristically rigid in his takedown defense against soon-to-be-champ Randy Couture, giving up takedown after takedown in their five round affair. Yet with all the limitation he felt in his movement, Sylvia felt no pain.

Afterwards, when the adrenaline subsided, it hit him. “It hurt really bad, I was limping around and my butt was killing me,” Sylvia says of his post fight moments in the locker room.

Trainer Pat Miletich could only watch in dismay as it became clear he had underestimated the injury. “He said he didn’t realize how bad I was hurt until he saw me perform out there,” Sylvia says of their post-fight assessment. “He said he wished he knew how bad I was so he could have pulled me.”

Sidelined from hard training, Sylvia had attempted to alleviate the injury with cortisone shots, but eventually decided on going under the knife. Of primary concern was one of the bulged discs that was pinching his sciatic nerve. The nerve caused the pain in his rear and legs.

“They’re going to put me under and go in with some surgical tools and cut the bulges off the discs, that’ll free up the nerve,” Sylvia says about the procedure.

As uncomfortable as that sounds, his doctors expect him to recover fully in 4 weeks, whereupon Sylvia will resume his regular training regimen. When asked if he would amend his training techniques to accommodate his injury, Sylvia dismissed the idea.

“I want to get back to training, start doing some cardio, drop some weight,” he says of his plans after surgery. “I’m about 290 right now, so start my diet on Monday and start dropping weight and get down to fight shape. “

In the mean time, Sylvia will meditate on his next opponent, which he declined to name. After recent criticism of the UFC surfaced again in the build-up to boxing mega-fight De La Hoya vs. Mayweather, he weighed in the dysfunction between the two sports and their practitioners. Interestingly, his comments mirrored many of the criticisms MMA sustained in its rise to prominence.

“We’ve already surpassed boxing,” Sylvia says. “Everybody in boxing, pretty much 85 percent of the guys are thugs and scumbags. You’ve got your great guys like De La Hoya that are great representatives of boxing, but other than that, most of them just act like thugs and gangsters, and not very many of them are educated. A lot of them are just street fighters and they end up in there because without boxing they’d be in prison and kill somebody.”

While Sylvia most likely won’t get to settle his differences with boxers in the ring (or cage), his road back to the title will not be easy. With the spectrum of heavyweights expanding under Zuffa’s acquisition of Pride, Sylvia will have more than enough to worry about.

Full Contact Fighter Gear, Ultimate Fighting (UFC), Mixed Martial Arts

ge master · 05-10-2007, 05:59 PM

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