UFC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis recently appeared on Realer Sports on New York City’s HOT 97, ahead of his fight on Saturday with Gil Melendez at UFC 181 on Saturday, live on PPV.
Host Peter Rosenberg asked Pettis, a renowned kicker, if the horrific leg break that Anderson Silva suffered struck fear into him.
“Not really,” said Pettis. “It was kind of an amateur mistake. I mean, he kicked a check, and that’s like a basic kickboxing move. I mean, he’s probably done that a million times in his life, and that was just the wrong time to do it – the wrong angle, the wrong pressure. But that doesn’t really make me kick differently.”
“I think it looked ugly. It was nasty. But that’s like saying in basketball when somebody twists their ankle, or breaks their ankle, ‘You can’t dunk like that because he did it that way.’
“So it’s not even a factor.”
Pettis has not fought in over a year, as he himself suffered a leg injury, in this case in practice, while checking a kick. Pettis suffered a partial posterior cruciate ligament tear in his last fight, took two months off to recover, and then tore it completely when he returned to training.
“My injury happened in my title fight, vs. Ben Henderson,” said Pettis. “I checked a kick, and just the wrong pressure. He hit my knee, in the right spot, tore my PCL. It’s like a common injury – what happens with car crashes when your knee hits the dashboard.
“The recovery wasn’t bad. Simple surgery. Recovery went perfect. It was just the time off. I mean you had to take time off – no kicking for six months. And my life was full of kickboxing. I’d been kickboxing my whole life, so I just had a year of just finding out a lot about myself, man.”
What do you think UG? Were you afraid of the Silva leg break?
The use of the term “amateur mistake” could be taken as pejorative, but in a later interview with Globo, Pettis explained that that was not the case.
“It was taken out of context,” said Pettis, as transcribed by Fernando Arbex for BE. “I said that it was a basic kick, not an amateur move. I said that it was a basic kick, which Anderson probably already did a million times, and they caught a piece of my quote and the headline showed me saying that was an amateur mistake. I’m sure that he already kicked someone’s legs millions of times and had never broken his own leg, than that was what I was talking. That was my train of thought.
“The question was if today I kick differently because of Anderson’s injury and I said that I don’t, because he got hurt performing a basic kick. Anderson Silva is an idol, I respect him a lot, he’s my favorite fighter in the world. I would never disrespect him. Anderson was always a guy who I sought inspiration.”
