Love & War<\/a> podcast, Dillashaw explained why he was comfortable competing with a serious injury and why he still thought he could win.<\/p>\n\u201cSo anyways, the point of the story was that I\u2019d dealt with adversity and got wins,\u201d Dillashaw said. \u201cI dealt with my shoulder against Garbrandt and got wins, I dealt with my knee against Sandhagen and got wins.<\/p>\n
\u201cAljamain Sterling to me was the weakest champion that had been and I don\u2019t mean that disrespectful, just like he\u2019s got some holes in his game that I felt like I could exploit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though Dillashaw was less than 100 percent heading into his UFC 280 co-main event clash with Sterling, he was confident Sterling didn\u2019t present enough of a threat on the feet for him to be worried as long as Dillashaw could keep the fight standing.<\/p>\n
However, in the lead-up to the Sterling fight, Dillashaw\u2019s injury woes persisted.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hitting mitts with Tyler Wombles and I\u2019m doing this bag drill where I\u2019m slipping and hitting a left hook and I threw a little bit too wide and instantly just felt a tear,\u201d Dillashaw said. \u201cAt that time, it wasn\u2019t compromised and coming out of the socket, it was just like I couldn\u2019t lift my arm to the best of my ability. It was like I couldn\u2019t really strike with it that great but I was like, I\u2019m fighting Aljamain Sterling. If I was fighting someone like Petr Yan, yeah, maybe I probably wouldn\u2019t take the fight because his striking is good. Aljamain, I was going to hold on my feet. My grappling wasn\u2019t affected. I was doing great in grappling.<\/p>\n
\u201cFour weeks before the fight, I sublux my shoulder. \u2026 I\u2019ve dealt with this before. It\u2019s not a problem, right? But then it just got worse and got worse and then I flew out to Abu Dhabi two weeks before the fight and I started losing weight and that\u2019s when it got really bad. I would just be doing grappling matches with Juan Archuleta, like wrestling around, and it would dislocate. It\u2019s way too late to pull out. I just trained for months for this fight and, to be honest, I don\u2019t want to go back and get another shoulder surgery and just all this shit, so I\u2019m like, I\u2019m going to take the fight.\u201d<\/p>\n
On paper, Dillashaw was a difficult matchup for Sterling. The two-time bantamweight champion was known for his wrestling acumen, which could help to neutralize Sterling\u2019s grappling, and he was considered the superior striker in the matchup. However, Dillashaw\u2019s shoulder slipped out of place again during the fight and that erased any chance of Dillashaw pulling off a miracle win.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to my doctor and I asked him, \u2018Hey, teach me how to put this back into socket,\u2019\u201d Dillashaw said. \u201cAnd so he did it and that\u2019s why when it came out in the first round, I was able to defend him off my back, did alright, sat back in the corner, boom, put it back in before the doctors got in there and then I was like, \u2018No, I\u2019m good. Don\u2019t worry about it.\u2019 Just thinking I could get the knockout and be like that insane, awesome story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"T.J. Dillashaw\u2019s last fight didn\u2019t go as planned. But he has no regrets about betting on himself. It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-318849","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}