After suffering a controversial loss in his last fight at the July 19th Ultimate Fight Night in which with just 90 seconds left in the fight Anthony Johnson suffered an inadvertent poke to the eye which resulted in a detached retina. Johnson is now on the road to recovery after having undergone surgery to repair the injury. “I had laser surgery to reattach my retina and I got stitches in my eyeball right now,” he recently told MMAWeekly.com. “The laceration on my eye was from one end of my eye to the other.”
“I wasn’t really big on the whole appealing the fight anyway,” said Johnson after his manager Ken Pavia had been working on an appeal of the outcome. “Every single champion has a loss on his record. I’m trying to see myself as the bigger and better guy. If he’s the champion one day, I’ll accept an ‘L’.
“Everybody was hating on Mazzagatti because of the call, but he was on the side I was blocking on, so he actually didn’t see the guy eye gouge me. All he saw was the uppercut… he called what he thought he saw and I respect him.”
Of course he’s not happy with the decision. “I was disappointed because I did lose like that… when it should have been a no contest or a DQ. He saw what he thought he saw, so I’m not hating on him about it.”
But Johnson is already looking to the future instead of dwelling on the past, planning a return to the Octagon before winter comes. “The doctor said I can be cleared in September to fight, but I don’t want to fight in September. I’m just going to wait until October and get my eye right.”
