Patrick Cote’s manager speaks
Check out these snips from Patrick Cote’s manager, Stephane Patry, on his fighter’s expected 6-8 month recovery from a torn meniscus due to the UFC 90 fight with Silva:
For him to be six to eight months off with that kind of surgery means that there’s a lot of work to do in his knee.
Patry revealed that this is actually an old injury, suffered some six weeks out from Cote’s fight with Drew Mcfedries in January of this year. Cote had the knee put back in place, but the knee was never the same. He continues.
We knew for a year that he needed surgery, but the timing wasn’t right. Patrick wanted to go as far as he could with his knee because his career was going so well. Then three weeks before Silva, he called me from Boston (where Cote was training with Mark DellaGrotte). He was crying. He said ‘Man, I think we have to pull out. My knee, I just busted my knee.’ So he came back to Montreal. We went to see the specialist. The specialist put the knee back in place and told him: ‘Listen, you need that surgery, Patrick, and you need it now.’ And Patrick was like ‘Man, I have a title shot in three weeks. I can’t do that to the UFC. I can’t do that to myself, to my big chance. I’m not fighting a grappler, I’m fighting a striker. So can you do something?’”
Cote apparently got a cortisone shot to numb the pain, and continued on with the fight. The reason being he was fighting Silva, a striker, therefore the risk of injury was lower. However, if Silva was a grappler, they may have pulled out of the fight to reduce the risk of further injury. The fans however, were ruthless and booed both fighters endlessly.
While I feel Cote deserves a rematch, it likely will never happen due to these reasons:
a) Silva’s professional career winding down; he has five fight left on his UFC contract and he intends on riding off into the sunset at that point.
b) Silva’s desire for the big “money” fight. With all due respect to how amazingly tough Cote is, he’s not a big name like Rampage Jackson, Forrest Griffin, Michael Bisping, etc.
c) The negative reaction of the fans in Chicago. The UFC tends to cater to what the fans want, and they likely do not want a rematch.
Credit: Canadian Press
