Shane Burgos appears to be recovering well after his memorably weird TKO loss against Edson Barboza at UFC 262 recently, which saw him hit cleanly in the third round, but remain upright in his fighting stance for several seconds afterwards, before his body finally gave out on him.
“The weirdest part is I remember everything which is something everyone is surprised about,” Burgos told MMAfighting’s ‘What The Heck’ podcast. “I don’t have any loss of memory when it comes to that. So we’re fighting, I threw the jab, I bring it back to my head and he threw a f*ckin fast overhand right, and I didn’t even see it. It was like, boom, hit me and I was like [still moving around] but I thought, this is weird. It felt like my vision was slowly coming to a tunnel vision, my legs were getting slowly turned off. It was like somebody turning the volume down on the power button on my legs. I was bouncing and dipping down, and when I was dipping down I was trying to come back up fully, and I was slowly getting lower. I’m like, I can’t stand the f*ck up, what the f*ck is going on?
“So my mind was all there, my body just wasn’t. My legs just completely… it was slowly and then [snap] just off and I fell back into the cage. That was it. When he threw the punch, it was just so fast and I thought he just hit me with something and I was like, all right. Then it slowly all shut off. It was weird. I saw some doctor did a review—I didn’t watch it—but I heard they were attributing it to my conditioning and to my cardio, and I guess that’s a compliment. But it sucks.
“Literally, as soon as the fight ended, as soon as the referee stopped the fight [my legs started coming back]—and I definitely went out for a second, I remember waking up being like what the f*ck—I looked up at the ref and was like, you’ve got to be f*cking kidding me. I knew the fight was over and that he caught me with something. I remember laughing in the moment because I was in complete disbelief where I really felt like it was going my way. Like, are you kidding me? It was just a weird feeling, it really was.”
Thankfully, Burgos appears to have experienced no lingering issues despite the scary nature of the finish.
“I just saw a neurologist [a few days ago] and she cleared me,” Burgos said. “She was surprised when I was telling her I had no concussion symptoms whatsoever. I have no nausea, no lightheadedness, no fogginess, no throwing up or anything like that, no memory loss. There were no headaches at all and she was surprised, and I guess I was surprised by that, too.
“But she said concussion symptoms could come seven to 10 days later. She said, ‘After the 10-day mark, let me know and if you’re not having any symptoms then we don’t have to worry about it, but if you are, we’ll have you come back for an MRI of your brain just to be safe. Right now, just lay low, hang out, don’t go too crazy right now. Wait for the 10 days to pass and we’ll go from there.’ That’s what I’m gonna do.”
So, for now, Burgos is just taking things easy, but he’s eager to get back to doing what he does best so that he can banish the bitter taste of defeat.
“I feel pretty damn good. I’m just ready to get back to training. I want to so f*ckin bad but, obviously, I’m taking it safe. I have a family so I take my health very seriously so I’m taking it easy. I’m able to ride the bike and stuff like that so I’ve been doing that basically every day. Other than that, I can’t wait to get back to training.
“Mentally, I’m pissed. I’m really f*ckin irked and annoyed, but it is what it is and I can’t do anything to change it so I’ve accepted it, I’m gonna grow from it and I’m gonna move past it. I’m not gonna sit and dwell on it. But when you ask how I’m doing, the first thing I think of is I’m just f*ckin mad, man. It hurts.”
Burgos has now lost two fights in a row, but overall his UFC record stands at 5-3, leaving him ranked No.13 in the featherweight division.
