A clash of veteran between Gunnar Nelson and Neil Magny at UFC 318 in New Orleans on July 19th has been scrapped after Nelson suffered a hamstring injury.
“I won’t get into any crazy details about the injury but I’ll tell you it’s a two-part injury, so there is a tear in one of the muscles in the hamstring, which is a Grade 2b injury,” Nelson said on Instagram. “It’s not too bad, so it’s possibly something that we could have worked with.
“However, the second injury is on the tendon inside the muscle, which is a full thickness tear, so a Grade 4c injury and that’s a more serious one. Basically, I’m absolutely useless when it comes to any type of grappling scenarios. I’m not able to wrestle or grapple or kick and apparently it will be another eight weeks at least until I can comfortably have any type of grappling training at full speed. At least eight weeks.”
So the 36-year-old Nelson will have to wait a while longer to attempt to bounce back from a disappointing decision loss to Kevin Holland back in March, but since he doesn’t have to go under the knife he is still hopeful that’ll be able to return before the end of the year.
“The good news is I won’t have to do surgery so I’ll hopefully be good to go at the end of the year or late this year, so that’s my plan,” Nelson said. “That’s the aim. I’m optimistic that I’ll get this sorted in a few months, in a couple of months.”
