Turns out it wasn’t a stroke, but rather brain swelling that triggered the shutdown.
So said former UFC light heavyweight champion Glover Teixeira, who headlined “Sin City” in the Barcelo corner. Teixeira accompanied his Brazilian teammate to the hospital and was part of a long recovery process, which lasted until Wednesday afternoon.
“It was different because it wasn’t a knockout,” Teixeira said on the show The Overdogs Podcast. “If it had been a knockout, we’re used to it. A fighter punches, knocks out, okay, we’ll take him to the hospital, okay. But it happened out of nowhere and we started thinking about all kinds of things. Could it have been his heart? Could it have been something neurological? They were some kind of brain swelling. There was brain trauma. The injury and maybe it caused the swelling, that it was the body’s defense mechanism. His mind was stronger than his body, right? He didn’t want to give up.”
“(Raon’s father) is an extremely stoic guy, (saying) “Yeah, we’ll have to see. I don’t know if it was a random bump that we didn’t see,'” Teixeira said. “It looked like it might have been an accidental headbutt and then he went down, but we didn’t know. And to see him being carried out on a stretcher at that moment, man, it was the most desperate moment in MMA. I saw everyone’s faces, Hunter’s face, the worry. I was worried, too, but I kept looking at everyone’s faces. You find yourself.”
“It’s a conversation he’s having with his family and everyone else,” Teixeira said. “He needs to undergo all the necessary tests to find out what happened, whether it was really the result of trauma from the fight. It’s a decision that needs to be made very carefully and cautiously.”