VIDEO | See the street fight that left UFC lightweight Jared Gordon with 21 stitches on his fingers

Whole fight here: pic.twitter.com/1MRPiBkXnq

— Jared Gordon (@JFlashGordonMMA) July 30, 2018

UFC lightweight Jared Gordon lost his last fight, succumbing to first-round punches from Carlos Diego Ferreira in February. To say he wasn’t 100% for this fight, however, would be a gross understatement.

Two months before his fight, he was involved in an insane and totally unexpected fight with two gang members — GS9 crips — in NYC.

Apparently, Gordon was waiting to get his hair cut outside a barber shop. He was with a friend, and one of that friend’s former jiu jitsu students. As they chatted, two gang members walked up, spat on the former student, and cracked him with a totally unprompted punch. Gordon then bailed on his cup of coffee and let one of these attackers feel what it’s like to tangle with a UFC fighter.

See this violent fracas in the post above.

“That’s when I jumped him,” Jared Gordon told BloodElbow (via MMAMania). We all started fighting. My friend starts fighting the other kid, and they bumped into me and the kid I was fighting. We hit the storefront window, and the whole thing came down on us.”

In the end, Gordon and his friends opted not to press charges, keen to avoid a prolonged legal situation. They were also told that they might have to spend the night in jail themselves.

“I was like, ‘Fuck that, I’m not going to jail for the night,’” Gordon said. “I’ve been to jail too many times. The cops said, ‘We’re just going to let it go then.’ It’s not worth the headache. You have to hire a lawyer and go through the whole process. Fuck that.”

While this fight didn’t produce any legal fallout, it did cause Jared Gordon some serious injuries. When he fell through the glass of the storefront with his adversary, he badly lacerated his fingers, which required north of 20 stitches. The wounds then reopened in training, which meant further stitches — and that’s not even where the trouble ends. From there, he slipped on an escalator and had to see a surgeon once more to get his fingers fixed up.

Needless to say, it’s amazing he still fought in February.

After video of his street fight surfaced on the net, Gordon also shared photos of his fingers after the fact. To say they were in bad shape would be an understatement.

Some shot of my hand and timeline leading up to my fight pic.twitter.com/md2lINpo8r

— Jared Gordon (@JFlashGordonMMA) July 30, 2018

Some more pics: pic.twitter.com/wQMUxnM6IU

— Jared Gordon (@JFlashGordonMMA) July 30, 2018

So why did Jared Gordon fight in spite of these injuries? Because he didn’t want anybody to think he was withdrawing due to weight-cutting issues.

“I have never brought this up before, because I am not one to make excuses and I don’t want to make it look like I am making excuses,” he said. “I took the fight because I didn’t want to pull out. I had missed weight before in my first fight, and this was my third fight — the last thing that I wanted to do was pull out and have it look like I was having weight cutting problems again or make it look like I am unreliable.

“I had a terrible training camp because I couldn’t spar or wrestle or do jiu-jitsu,” he said. “All I did was run and shadow box and kick the bag for the whole fight camp, because I had one hand. Hats off to Diego; he did what he had to do. Nothing against him. But, I just think that if the fight camp didn’t go down the way it did, [the fight] would be different. It is what it is.”

What a story from Jared Gordon.

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 7/30/2018.