Johnny Eblen has detailed how Sean Strickland demanded that he spar hard of their ill-fated session that led to a horror injury.
Strickland became a two-time middleweight champion by handing Khamzat Chimaev his first defeat at UFC 328 in Newark last month. The Chechen was undefeated and entered the fight as an enormous favorite, but struggled making the 185lb weight limit and ultimately succumbed to the American.
After producing two of the best upsets in UFC history, is it time to provide Sean Strickland his flowers? 👑
What made the victory all of the more impressive for Strickland was the reveal after the fight that he had suffered a shoulder tear during a last-minute spar with PFL star Eblen. He ended up competing with a Type 2 AC Joint Separation, Prolonged Type 5 SLAP Tear, a Partial Rotator Cuff Tear and Tendinosis.
Johnny Eblen opens up about ill-fated spar with Sean Strickland
It’s standard fare for Sean Strickland to spar hard all of the approach to fight night, and Newark was no different in that regard. Johnny Eblen was one in every of his elite partners at Plinio Cruz’s gym in Latest York where they trained, and ended up inadvertently causing a gruesome injury just days from the fight.
Speaking with Bloody Elbow ahead of his return at PFL Austin on July 18 against Impa Kasanganay, Eblen insisted that “You’ve got accountable it on Sean because he gets mad at me if I’m going too light.”
“He’s the form of guy who’s notorious for sparring on fight week and we were sparring fight week. I wanted to provide him an actual look because if I don’t and I pull back he’ll get upset and be like ‘hey man, you’ve got to attempt to fight me’.
“So it’s what it’s, I blame it on the place we were training at. We weren’t in a cage, they’ve wall mats on the concrete wall that aren’t very forgiving.”
Eblen insists that Strickland played it off as if he had suffered a mere tweak, and promised that he would get it checked out after some physical therapy. It wasn’t until the post-fight press conference that he revealed the severity of his injury.
“He didn’t make an enormous deal out of it,” Eblen added. “He was like ‘yeah I believe my shoulder, I sort of tweaked it’. It was within the last round of sparring on the Tuesday and the primary round I had been sort of going light.
“I could tell by Sean’s body language that he was about to say something to me so I turned it up just a little bit to provide him a greater look and the primary 4 rounds went great. It wasn’t until the fifth round after I shot a double leg, we bumped into the wall and he hit his shoulder.
“I didn’t really notice anything was up, we kept sparring and we finished the round. At the top he just mentioned ‘I believe I tweaked my shoulder in that last round but I’ll be good after I get PT’. The entire week he didn’t really mention it, I’d have done the identical s—.
“I didn’t know the severity of it and he didn’t really know either. He told us he got it checked out and it was a small separation, so nothing big. But after the fight he got images and stuff with a SLAP tear and an entire bunch of other stuff occurring.
“He didn’t mention how bad it was or complain about it because in his head he was pondering ‘I’m going to fight regardless’.”
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