Jake O’Brien Won’t Back Down

The timing couldn’t have been worse for Jake O’Brien. Fresh off the biggest win of his young mixed martial arts career over Heath Herring in January of 2007, the Indiana
native had an unbeaten record, a victory over a perennial heavyweight contender, and was a couple of wins away from being in contention for the title.

He was also dealing with ‘stingers’, a nerve injury usually seen on the weekly injury reports in the NFL, and something he had been experiencing since his days wrestling for Purdue. But while he would usually work through the pain, which was then followed by numbness in his arms, eventually it got to be too much.

“The injury was something I always had, it just kept getting progressively worse to the point where every time I’d shoot in for a takedown I’d lose feeling down my right side and my right arm was completely useless,” said O’Brien. “Being stupid I would try to keep going on it – I’d just rest, let the feeling come back, and go again. That’s why it got as severe as it was. I just kept trying to push through it instead of taking time off. Finally it got too bad and I had to have the surgery.”

O’Brien was forced to withdraw from a UFC 72 bout in Ireland against Tom Murphy, and he then went in for a surgery which doctors told him would only improve his injury, not make it worse, but as with any medical procedure, the risk was there that he could possibly never fight again. Needless to say, he didn’t want to hear about that possibility, not at 22, and not with the world at his doorstep.

“In my mind I was gonna fight either way,” he said, but he went through the surgery, which was successful. He still had to wear a neck brace for a month and then rehab the injury though, and it wasn’t easy for him to sit on the sidelines while the UFC heavyweight division moved on without him. By Thomas Gerbasi

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