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Leah McCourt wants the world to know how hard Ryan Curtis is fighting.
Two weeks ago, Curtis suffered a devastating injury from an accident in training that has left him in the hospital with a damaged spine and neck. Curtis’ close friend and teammate McCourt has rallied the MMA community in support of Curtis, a one-time Bellator fighter.
McCourt appeared on The MMA Hour on Wednesday to provide an update on Curtis’ condition and to explain what happened in that fateful training session.
“Two weeks ago in wrestling practice, Ryan suffered a traumatic incident,” McCourt said. “From what Ryan’s told me, I believe he was in a body lock position and he had his arm trapped, and his partner hipped in and kind of dumped him on his head. So the arm was trapped, so he couldn’t post, and it was quite a force that it has.
“It basically smashed his vertebrae completely. … The surgeon said the trauma that happened to his spine and his spinal cord and his vertebrae is something you would see from a severe car crash or falling from the likes of a balcony.”
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The severity of the injury was unknown to Curtis’ friends and family until they visited him at the hospital. Only then did it become clear how badly Curtis had been hurt.
“Ryan is the life and soul of any room,” McCourt said. “Anybody that knows him or anywhere he goes, he’s just that guy in the gym that everybody loves, everybody wants to be around. He has just got such an infectious energy.
“We walked into this dark, dark room in the hospital and he was still in the stretcher that he’d been in the night before. There was a backlog of patients in [accident and emergency] and we were like, ‘What’s going on?’ We thought Ryan would be joking like, ‘Oh, I’ve hurt my neck.’ From there, he was paralyzed from the neck down. One of the spinal surgeons came from A&E … he had done the X-rays and MRIs and went into the magnitude of the injury.”
McCourt was careful to lay out the extent of Curtis’ injuries and subsequent surgeries: Two dislocated vertebrae in his spine, C4 and C5, and C5 and C6. Ruptured discs between the vertebrae that then pressed down on Curtis’ spinal cord, which was also dislocated. The situation required the surgeon to remove the discs from Curtis’ spine and replace them with titanium cages. Titanium plates and screws were then placed across the vertebrae to stabilize them.
According to McCourt, the surgeon described it as “the most severe and the most dangerous” procedure he could perform. And it wasn’t over for Curtis.
In a second surgery, two screws were inserted into the dislocated vertebrae and then two rods were attached to those screws. The duration of Curtis’ stay in the hospital is expected to last one month, with five months of physical rehabilitation ahead, and that is just with the hope to stand again. Curtis may require a wheelchair to travel in the future.
Suffice to say, the experience has been heartbreaking for Curtis’ family and friends.
“He has a two-year-old daughter, she’s living at my house at the minute with my mom,” McCourt said. “My Isabel is looking after her and my mom is looking after [Curtis’ partner] Emma while I’ve had to come back into camp and it’s just — how insane that your life can change in a split second and the magnitude of what Ryan’s life was going to be. It’s definitely hard for us all to understand, and we can’t thank the spinal team and the stages in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast for what they did, because so much could have went wrong during that surgery.
“Ryan is still Ryan, it’s still him, it’s his personality, and [if the injury was] any higher up or any mistakes they could have made, then we could have lost him and his personality, who he was. I think the amount of support from the Irish MMA community and from so many different people, so many different seminars, so many donations to Ryan is a testament to who he is and how many people’s lives he’s touched.”
Curtis has competed 10 times as a professional MMA fighter dating back to 2015. He’s compiled a 6-4 record, including a first-round TKO of Luis Gonzalez at Bellator 217 in his lone appearance for the promotion.
Though it will be a difficult climb back to competing inside the cage again, McCourt is confident that her friend will bounce back one way or another.
“He’s the most positive, kind, caring person,” McCourt said. “I’m sure anybody who talks about him will say such amazing things about him, and he’s such a talent, and all he ever wanted to do was to make it to the UFC. He had all the skill, he had the attitude, the charm, everything, and it just really breaks my heart that this has happened to him. I just keep thinking, ‘Why him of all people? Why does this happen to him?’
“But we believe everything is going to be for a reason. He’s going to go on to achieve brilliant things in whatever happens. He could commentate, he could take up a different sport, he could do so much, but there is definitely a long road ahead and that’s why I think I set up that fundraising page, because he isn’t going to be able to work. He has a young family and we don’t know how long, there’s no ending, every day is like a roller coaster. We just try and take it day by day.”
See an update from Curtis and his family below and consider supporting them with a donation to his GoFundMe campaign here.
A former WWE employee filed a lawsuit against founder and current TKO Group Holdings executive chairman Vince McMahon, accusing him of sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation.
On Thursday, Janel Grant filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut against McMahon, WWE and former head of talent relations John Laurinaitis. The lawsuit alleges violations of the Trafficking Victims Prevention Act along with negligence, civil battery and emotional distress after Grant claimed she was a victim of sexual and emotional abuse for years working for WWE.
McMahon, and WWE have not responded with any statement regarding the lawsuit. In a statement to Variety, a spokesperson for UFC and WWE corporate TKO Holdings said “Mr. McMahon does not control TKO nor does he oversee the day-to-day operations of WWE. While this matter predates our TKO executive team’s tenure at the company, we take Ms. Grant’s horrific allegations very seriously and are addressing this matter internally.”
Grant’s lawsuit alleges McMahon and Laurinaitis engaged in “sexual assault and trafficking,” using her for their own pleasure and as a “pawn” to secure talent deals with prospective wrestlers they were recruiting.
McMahon allegedly showered Grant with gifts and promises of work promotions at WWE while carrying on a “relationship” with her. The lawsuit alleges that McMahon also used intimidation and coercion to make threats to her livelihood and her “reputation” if she wouldn’t succumb to his “increasingly depraved sexual demands.”
One particular incident highlighted in the lawsuit claims that Grant was pulled into a conference room at the WWE offices where she was allegedly sexually assaulted by both McMahon and Laurinaitis. Another incident alleges that McMahon defecated on Grant during a threesome and ordered her to “continue pleasuring his friend” while he left to shower off.
McMahon is also accused of sharing sexually explicit photos and videos of Grant “including pornographic content he recorded” with other employees at WWE, including executives as well as “a world-famous athlete and former UFC heavyweight champion with whom WWE was actively trying to sign to a new contract.”
The lawsuit alleges that after McMahon’s wife found out about the relationship he shared with Grant that she was pressured to resign from the WWE and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement amid promises that the WWE founder would “support” and protect her.
Grant was allegedly due $ 3 million related to signing the NDA, but the lawsuit claims McMahon stopped making payments and accused her of leaking information to the press.
“Today’s complaint seeks to hold accountable two WWE executives who sexually assaulted and trafficked Plaintiff Janel Grant, as well as the organization that facilitated or turned a blind eye to the abuse and then swept it under the rug,” Ann Callis, attorney for Ms. Grant, said in a statement. “She is an incredibly private and courageous person who has suffered deeply at the hands of Mr. McMahon and Mr. Laurinaitis.
“Ms. Grant hopes that her lawsuit will prevent other women from being victimized. The organization is well aware of Mr. McMahon’s history of depraved behavior, and it’s time that they take responsibility for the misconduct of its leadership.”
The lawsuit comes just days after TKO announced a massive 10-year deal worth $ 5 billion to move the flagship show WWE Raw from USA Network to Netflix starting in 2025. The transformative deal was a significant increase in broadcast rights fees from the previous deal with NBCUniversal.
WWE effectively sold to Endeavor this past April in a deal that eventually put the professional wrestling outfit under a new company umbrella alongside the UFC. The combined company, now called TKO Group Holdings, counts McMahon as the executive chairman.
McMahon has been at the center of a number of controversies in recent years after he retired and then returned to WWE following accusations of sexual misconduct at the company. This past August, he was served with a Federal grand jury subpoena related to the sexual misconduct allegations, though no charges were filed against the executive.
More recently, McMahon sold off approximately $ 700 million worth of personal stock in TKO — approximately 25 percent of his shares — but he remains in his role as executive chairman.
The pound-for-pound (P4P) debate is a never-ending one in mixed martial arts (MMA), and that’s essentially all it’s good for, really: debate. 2023 was a big year for the talks as we saw two collisions between who most considered the top two in the sport, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Lightweight champion and Featherweight champion, Islam Makhachev and Alexander Volkanovski.
Makhachev wound up victorious in each bout, which resulted in his current placement atop UFC’s official list. Now sitting between Makhachev and Volkanovski at No. 2 is the aforementioned current undisputed Heavyweight champion, Jones. However, if former Middleweight titleholder, Michael Bisping, had it his way, his fellow British champion, Tom Aspinall, would be right in that mix.
“The general consensus is that Islam is pound-for-pound No. 1 and the way he beat Volkanovski was impressive,” Bisping told BetWay. “If you beat No. 1 in Volkanovski, I guess you then become the man. Jon Jones also comes into that conversation. I think Jones is the G.O.A.T., but is he the pound-for-pound No. 1? He beat Cyril Gane last time, prior to that it was Dominick Reyes and Thiago Santos. No disrespect to them but they weren’t the big-name champions like the Quinton Jackson’s, the Rashad Evans’s when Jon established his name. So, for me, the pound-for-pound [best] is either Islam Mackhachev or Tom Aspinall.
“I’ve got Tom right up there as well,” he concluded. “When you look at the skills he’s got and how he’s going straight through everybody. But I’d say Islam’s No. 1, Apinall is No. 2, and Jon’s No. 3 based on current form.”
As an interim champion, Aspinall normally could expect to face Jones in a unification bout for his next time out. Unfortunately, the promotion is sticking to the idea of rebooking Jones’ would-be last fight, a match up with former champion, Stipe Miocic. Therefore, Aspinall is left waiting and wondering who he’ll defend his placeholder crown against in the meantime as Jones recovers and returns to face Miocic.
Kayla Harrison has been an overwhelming favorite in the majority of her MMA fights and it turns out nothing much will change for her debut in the UFC.
The two-time Olympic gold medalist in judo opened as an overwhelming favorite over ex-bantamweight champion Holly Holm as they prepared to clash at UFC 300 on April 13. The fight serves as Harrison’s debut with the UFC as well as the first time she’ll be competing at 135 pounds in her career.
With almost her entire fighting career happening at 155 pounds minus one fight at featherweight, Harrison will have to cut a lot of weight to get down to the bantamweight limit ahead of her debut. None of that seems to be scaring away the oddsmakers after Harrison opened as a 5-to-1 favorite over Holm.
Here are the current odds courtesy of Sportsbetting.ag
Holly Holm +385
Kayla Harrison -500
Technically, Harrison opened as a -375 betting favorite but so much cash came flooding in that the odds changed within a matter of hours. Based on the current odds, it would require a $ 500 bet to win back $ 100 on Harrison at UFC 300.
Meanwhile, a $ 100 bet on Holm would result in $ 385 if she pulls off the upset against Harrison in April.
Harrison signed a deal to join the UFC roster after spending her whole career with the PFL where she was a two-time champion. She’ll now start working her way down to bantamweight with hopes to live up to expectation when she clashes with Holm at UFC 300.
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