Snake Eyes! Hooker ‘Took A Risk’ Coming Back Too Quickly

After re-breaking his surgically repaired arm, Hooker admits mistakes may have been made.

UFC Austin is slightly less stacked then it was yesterday after Dan Hooker was forced to withdraw from his co-main event with Bobby Green due to an injury.

Now we know what specifically happened to “The Hangman” — he re-broke his arm in training. Hooker suffered the original break in a hard fought decision win over Jalin Turner in July. He underwent surgery to surgically repair the bone, but may not have waited long enough before returning.

“[In] sparring yesterday, copped a bit of a kick. Got sent to an x-ray. She’s custard,” he told Submission Radio in a new interview. “Yeah, it just broke in the same place and it kind of is what it is.”

“I took a risk. I obviously came back a little quicker than… yeah, like, it’s all on me, brother,” he admitted. “I rushed to come back, I wanted to fight. I knew the risk of coming back that quickly, and we rolled the dice and we come up snake eyes, baby.”

“I blocked a thousand kicks in the last couple of months and just one hit on the right spot and it just … yeah. It is what it is.”

Hooker has admitted in the past that he doesn’t always make the best career decisions. One of those was agreeing to a last-second replacement fight with Islam Makhachev. Another was a desperate-looking drop down to featherweight. After that he agreed to let the guys at City Kickboxing manage him and stop him “from doing dumb s—.”

Welp.

“Everyone was kind of kicking their can down the road and telling me to wait, and I pushed it, I hurried it along. I forced it,” he said. “It’s on me. I’m just hungry. You know what I mean? It happened. It happened again. It’s the double-edged sword of being obsessed with something. Sometimes you hold it so tight that you crush it.”

“It’s either broken in the exact same spot. Which means that just the bone didn’t fuse properly, the bone was never fused properly and it was inevitable that this was gonna happen again. Or it’s a new break. So, it’s like, depending on the thing depends on what it is.”

So what’s next for Hooker?

“I’ll be back. UFC 300 in five months,” he said. “That’s a good target. Everything happens for a reason. That one wasn’t meant to be. Yeah, UFC 300 on five months. Speaking with the surgeon, that’s a comfortable target for three months of rehab and the training camp. So, onto the future.”

Just a little bit of math: the initial break happened in July. He re-broke it four months later. Admitted he rushed. Now he’s saying he wants to come back in … five months? Calm down, Dan Hooker!