From Combat Press
Scars are memories. If a person has any notables scars, they will often be able to recite exactly what happened to cause the permanent disfigurement of their body. Some scars are minor but still tell a story. Others scars are more noticeable, and their stories leap off the body. Those are the stories that people want to hear.
Martin Nguyen (Facebook.com/KMATopTeam)
Martin Nguyen bears a scar on his right pectoral, and the story is one he tells knowing all too well that it was that scar that caused him to sit on the sidelines for almost a year.
Nguyen was poised to make his ONE FC debut in Singapore at ONE FC 16: Honor and Glory against Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ace Bruno Pucci, but he didn’t. The scar tells the story of why he was forced out of that bout.
“It’s time to turn this bad-luck year around,” Nguyen declared to Combat Press. “About three weeks before the fight, I was getting prepped up and my scar had split back open, so I had it stitched up and I wasn’t training for a week. Then, finally, when coming back to training, it started swelling up—the one side of my chest—and it was like I had an actual D-cup boob on one side of my chest and an A-cup on the other [laughs]. So, I was thinking, before my pad session I might leave work early and go to the hospital to see what’s up. It didn’t look normal at all. So I went to the hospital and the doctor said that they were going to have to operate the next morning.
“After the operation, a couple of hours later, I woke up with a massive hole in my chest with all this gauze hanging out of it, and I was like, ‘It’s not covered up?’ and the nurse was saying they couldn’t cover it up [because] the skin was too tight there on my chest. So they had to let it grow from the bottom up and said it was going to take a minimum of a month and a half to two months to recover, and that put me out completely.”
It was a long road from there, and the long layoff took its toll on the 25-year-old. When the offer came to fight Rocky Batolbatol on Nov. 7 on short notice at ONE FC 22, Nguyen’s answer was no surprise.
“I thought it was the end of the world. I was really excited [to fight Pucci] and I was just thinking, ‘Why does this have to happen to me?’ I just wanted to get back into training. Every time I’d go into training, I’d watch the boys train. And it motivated me more and I couldn’t do nothin’ to help them. They had fight prep that I couldn’t take part of as well. I just felt bad and I was down,” Nguyen revealed. “My wife and family were there for me helping me get back up, and so was Fari [Salievski] and my coaches and the staff. Everyone was trying to pump me back up and I just wasn’t in it, you know?
Read the full article HERE.
