EXCLUSIVE | Mike Perry recalls deceiving doctors before UFC debut

On November 10, on the main card of UFC Denver, “Platinum” Mike Perry will collide with Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone in a welterweight matchup that has fight fans drooling.

Interestingly, the pair were briefly linked to a fight back in July. At the time, Perry was booked for a UFC 226 fight with Yancy Medeiros. When Medeiros withdrew from the fight with an injury, Cowboy was briefly discussed as a replacement opponent. 

In Perry’s eyes, however, Cowboy probably knew he wouldn’t get the fight when he offered to step in. At the time, after all, he was still pretty beat up from a five-round battle with Leon Edwards.

“He knows the deal with suspensions and he had just fought two weeks prior and his eye was stitched up,” Mike Perry said on the latest episode of BJPENN.COM Radio, speaking of Cowboy’s UFC 226 offer. “Or in fact, it wasn’t even two weeks, he still had the stitches in his eye.”

That said, Perry knows that fighters will sometime attempt to bypass medical issues in an effort to get the opportunities that excite them. That, after all, is just what Perry did ahead of his 2016 UFC debut opposite Hyun Gyu Lim.

Ahead of this fight, Mike Perry sustained a cut above his eye that required stitches. Then, just before he met with UFC doctors, he removed the stitches himself and told the doctors that the cut was much older than it actually was.

“I made my UFC debut and I got six or eight stitches above my eye where my ‘Platinum’ tattoo is,” he said. “Before I had the Platinum tattoo I got sliced with an elbow in training. Like ten days before my debut. I pushed. I had stitches, and I took them out right before I went to get checked by the doctors in Vegas for the fight. And [laughing] I told them that the cut was a couple months old or they wouldn’t let me fight.”

“I practiced so much for the next ten days on protecting that eye that I didn’t even get hit in that sucker in the fight,” he added.

Who do you think will come out on top when Mike Perry and Donald Cerrone collide in Denver?

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 8/24/2018.