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UFC women’s strawweight Cortney Casey remembers grabbing her head and seeing lights, and someone touching her back.
“Then I heard noises, and I was trying to blink my eyes and try to get the lights to go away, and I stood up,” Casey told MMAjunkie.
She heard her cornermen telling her to take her time. A doctor came into the cage and asked if she could continue to fight. She said she could, even though it would take her several minutes to recover.
Minutes earlier, she had been scooting toward Claudia Gadelha’s legs after a takedown when the onetime title challenger suddenly threw a kick. The audience gasped, reacting to what appeared to be a blatant foul – kicking a downed opponent in the head.
The reaction shifted, however, when replays of the sequence were aired in the arena. From certain angles, it looked as though the strike hit Casey just above her hairline. From others, it appeared to do nothing more than graze her hair. The crowd immediately booed.
The one in the cage this past Saturday night at Sao Paulo’s Ibirapuera Gymnasium said no matter what the videos show, the strike connected with her head.
“I don’t need to watch them,” said Casey, who lost a decision to Gadelha at the FS1-televised UFC Fight Night 100. “I was there – I got kicked in the head. At the end of the day, that’s what happened.”
The reaction from the fans was, to put it lightly, not pleasant. But the one from the event’s UFC-backed commission was simply startling. They accused her of faking.
On Tuesday, the Brazilian MMA Athletic Commission, or CABMMA, said as much. In an unusual move, the commission announced that Casey tried to use the situation to her advantage when she went to the canvas and clutched her head after taking the kick, and that’s why Gadelha wasn’t penalized.
Claudia Gadelha and Cortney Casey
In an email to MMAjunkie, the commission’s COO, Cristiano Sampaio, said the fight’s referee, Fernando Portella, made the determination that Casey had not been illegally kicked after stopping the bout and watching replays of the sequence on the monitors in the arena.
“Not only the referee had that impression, but also the table and other assigned officials working at the event shared the same thoughts when seeing it from different angles,” Sampaio wrote.
Casey will concede that Gadelha beat her fair and square in the octagon. She’s resolved to improve her skills for her next fight. But she won’t say she didn’t get kicked in the head.
“It hit right on my hairline,” she told MMAjunkie on Monday while in transit to her home in Hawaii. “Her shin hit me square on the hairline.”
In the two days following the bout, she thought about taking a picture to prove her case. But she admitted the only visible damage was a small lump on her head where she claims Gadelha’s shin made impact.
“It’s literally like I have a dot on the top of my forehead,” Casey said. “Even if I did take a picture, they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, that’s from one of the punches.'”
Sampaio claims that between the replays and the cageside doctor’s check on Casey, the evidence proves she’s the one who acted improperly.
“The doctor which evaluated the athlete in the cage affirmed to the referee that she was fine, no sign of any possible trauma due to the kick, which in his view made him believe the kick did not land,” he wrote. “In that sense, we believe Cortney took that time to rest and benefit herself.”
The official said that while Casey was writhing around, the referee weighed her behavior against the illegal strike and reasoned that the two factors had essentially canceled each other out, resulting in no point being taken away from Gadelha.
“If (Casey had not taken that time), a point would have been taken off,” he wrote. “For a situation such as this one, it could even have been understood by the referee as she was giving up on the fight. But, to avoid any possible controversy, he decided to just not deduct the point and restart the fight. But if the kick had clearly hit (not mattering the intensity), it would have been two points deducted. And if it had hit and she had not come back, Gadelha would be disqualified.”
Instead, Gadelha (14-2 MMA, 3-2 UFC) swarmed in after the restart and landed a flurry of punches before finishing another takedown. When the final scorecards were read, she was the winner by unanimous scores of 30-27.
Backstage, Casey (6-4 MMA, 2-3 UFC) said, her Portuguese-speaking cornermen had a conversation with the commission. The two sides agree they had a discussion about Gadelha’s intent. But they left with different impressions about what it amounted to in the end.
Casey said her cornermen argued that Gadelha specifically targeted her head. Regardless of where the strike landed, they felt that should’ve been factored in to the referee’s decision. But to Sampaio, the argument actually validated CABMMA’s position that the strike hadn’t really landed.
“They were more in the line that ‘it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hit, the point should be deducted either way,'” he wrote. “In that sense, we also concluded that it didn’t hit.”
Despite Gadelha’s post-fight apology for the sequence of events, Sampaio wrote that she and her team afterward “confirmed that the kick did not hit. She apologized because she threw the kick, and not because it hit Cortney.”
Claudia Gadelha and Cortney Casey
In fact, Gadelha seemed to waver on what had actually happened. In an interview conducted backstage by the UFC, she said, “I was going to kick her body. I figured she would get up and the kick would hit her body. But she did not get up and the kick ended up catching the top of her head. If I had done anything wrong, the kick would have landed clean. I want to make it clear that it was an accident.”
At the post-fight press conference, she said she didn’t do anything wrong.
“I don’t think the kick landed,” Gadelha said. “I was expecting her to get up. She pretended she was going to get up but she sat back down, so I threw the kick anyway. That’s why I said sorry.”
Casey is not upset with Gadelha, whom she believes has blatantly fouled other fighters in past bouts. She’s upset, however, at how the incident was interpreted. She reasons that if she really wanted to get out of the fight, she would have simply signaled to the doctor that she couldn’t continue.
“But I shook it off and finished the round,” Casey said.
Since the bout ultimately went to the scorecards, the issue is somewhat of a moot point. Given CABMMA’s position that an illegal strike didn’t occur, though, she likely would have lost the bout via TKO. Even if it had been ruled an accidental foul, she would have lost by decision had the fight been scored on the preceding rounds.
It was in Casey’s best interest to continue, whether or not her chances of winning had been diminished by the kick. She said never occurred to her to do anything other than to press on. She had taken the fight with the onetime title challenger to advance her career. Casey said she prides herself on taking any fight requested of her, short-notice or not.
For this one, she had signed the bout contract one day before being involved in a car accident that had left her temporarily hospitalized.
“I’m just there to do my job, to put on a show for all the fans, and that’s all I want to do,” she said. “I don’t want people to look at me any differently. I don’t want my character to be judged. I just want to people to look at it from both sides.
“I know what happened. She knows what happened. If she didn’t kick me in the head, she wouldn’t have stopped and put her hands right on me and said she was sorry. She wouldn’t have started the round saying she was sorry. She wouldn’t have after the fight said she was sorry, and then in the green room say she was sorry for kicking me in the head. Then when big brother and all the cool guys are there, she’s going to say she didn’t kick me in the head or thought it didn’t land? She knows she landed it.”
The result is still the same as far as Casey’s professional career. After a pair of wins against Cristina Stanciu and Randa Markos, she is now 2-3 in the UFC, a precarious position for any fighter’s career. She needs to go back to the drawing board and retool her fight preparation.
She might do well to stop taking fights under less-than-favorable circumstances, too. A car accident is no way to begin a training camp. But that’s part of what she thinks makes her so well suited toward fighting. She’ll do it regardless of what’s going on in the background.
The fact that it came back to haunt her in ways she couldn’t control, that’s a hard pill to swallow.
“I don’t make excuses for anything,” she said. “That’s what hurts the most, people thinking I was looking for a way out. I don’t understand why people are getting mad at me.”
For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 100, check out the UFC Events section of MMAjunkie.
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