John Wood helped mastermind Dvalishvili’s unanimous decision victory over the previously undefeated Umar Nurmagomedov at UFC 311, but revealed that an injury scare during fight camp nearly cost Dvalishvili the chance to defend his belt in Los Angeles.
“He got his leg cut up on our bleachers,” he told Submission Radio.
“He was walking by the bleachers and literally – you’ll see the pictures come out, I’m sure, in the next few days – cuts all over where he left it.
“(He) kept training through it, eventually got it stitched up too late and the stitches busted. And then he restitched it, and then just his whole shin became infected. And it was a concern of even getting cleared for this fight and the infection, the staph infection, it was gone. But the skin we were really afraid of to the point where we got the commission to approve getting it wrapped.
“I was like, ‘No. I’m not going to show any kind of weakness, I don’t care. It’s fine. If it breaks open, it breaks open.’ So we had that, and basically he couldn’t use that leg for the entire camp.
“Then dealing with being on antibiotics and all that kind of s**t. And then his back, you know? He said it the other day, the UFC Embedded (crew) came by or the Countdown (crew), and he was out doing his workout in the street and he jumped up the wrong way and then pinched a nerve – pinched the vertebrae and couldn’t walk for a week.”
Remarkably, Dvalishvili was recovered sufficiently to make it to fight night in LA, where he turned in one of the great title-fight performances to hand Nurmagomedov the first defeat of his career as he came back from two rounds down to defeat the Russian contender by unanimous decision after five breathless rounds at Intuit Dome.
Wood said that, despite all the chaos that led into fight week in California, any concerns he may have had evaporated when he saw the champion locked in and focused on the job at hand on fight day.
“It was a complicated camp,” he admitted.
“But all in all, with all that being said – and I told this to Merab – it didn’t matter how good he looked in his sparring, how good he was performing in the gym told me what I needed to know, and I just needed to make sure that his mind was on board when he got into that cage.
“That is something about Merab that you cannot teach – it is just in him. He knows how to lock in the day of the fight. Everything changes.
“Once the weight cut’s done, he’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have a blast.’ He just switches into, ‘I am going to go out there, fight my ass off and have fun.’ Once I saw that in the morning for the shakeout, I was like, ‘Oh man, it’s going to be a great night.'”
https://youtu.be/LTKK8iBipOY
