Khalil Rountree Jr convincingly beat Jamahal Hill on the scorecards in the main event of UFC On ABC 8 this past weekend in Azerbaijan, and he’s since revealed he actually suffered a knee injury just a few weeks before the fight.
“I’d say about halfway through training camp, when I was training jiu-jitsu, is the first time I felt some discomfort in my knee,” Rountree said on his YouTube channel. “Just from training with bigger guys and doing four sessions a day, on top of running, and jiu-jitsu, and pads, that’s when I first started feeling the discomfort. It only grew from there until one day I woke up and it was really hard for me to walk and even stand. So I got it checked out and ended up having a torn meniscus.
“Once I found out what the injury was, I think it was only about three weeks away from the actual fight day. So it was obviously stressful, but I had amazing, positive support to keep going and not let it affect my mental, and to do whatever I could to push through it, and to take challenges and things like this as motivation. Use the obstacle as motivation.”
In the end the injury healed enough that it didn’t affect his performance on Saturday, and in fact it was Rountree who was the one inflicting nasty damage to Hill’s lead leg with his low kicks during the fight, which caused visible swelling and severely limited his opponent’s mobility in the later rounds.
“Initially, I was devastated, [that] I wasn’t really able to train how I wanted to, but it was kind of a blessing in disguise, because tonight I came into the cage really fresh, because I haven’t been able to spar in three weeks,” Rountree said.
Rountree also credited the fans for helping to motivate him, as they continue to show him more support than ever before after earning plaudits for his battling performance even in defeat against Alex Pereira last year.
“The positives about having so much fan support was that it’s nice to feel appreciated for what we do,” Rountree said. “Fighting, and committing your life to fighting, is not an easy job. So to see the reactions of people just genuinely appreciating that and genuinely excited to see us, it’s pretty motivational. That really helped keep me in a positive mindset this week, just knowing there were people that were more than excited to have us visit their country and watch us perform and do what we love. So, I’d say for the first time, I really was able to draw energy from the fans and use it as motivation to stay focused and do my job.”
