Nothing, it seems, can stop Cory Sandhagen and Umar Nurmagomedov from locking horns.
Sure, it’s a year from the originally scheduled contest — 364 days counting Leap Day, to be exact — but the UFC and the two noteworthy bantamweights are all on the same page that these two need to go to battle, as they will Saturday in Abu Dhabi as the headliner for the latest UFC on ABC (3 p.m. Eastern).
“They still wanted me and Umar doing a No. 1 contender fight, so they asked for it,” explained Sandhagen during a Tuesday video call with The Post. “I was kind of like, ‘Hey, I think Umar should get a win beforehand or at least have a fight.’ I feel like that would be a fair thing to ask.”
That fight, a Nurmagomedov victory over unheralded newcomer Bekzat Almakhan in March met that criteria, setting up the rebooking of what both fighters have said this week will decide the next challenger for the championship at 135 pounds — once titleholder Sean O’Malley and Merab Dvalishvili take care of business Sept. 14.
Of course, if all had gone according to plan, the dust would have settled on Sandhagen and Nurmagomedov last August, but the cousin of UFC Hall of Famer Khabib Nurmagomedov withdrew a few weeks out with a shoulder injury.
Sandhagen, ever even-keeled, held no ill will at the time and accepted a short-notice clash with Rob Font, whose strength as a boxer differed from Nurmagomedov’s more well-rounded skill set.
That didn’t stop Sandhagen (17-4, 10 finishes), the former interim title challenger and staple of the bantamweight top five, from cruising to a clean sweep of the scorecards in their five-round main event in Nashville, Tenn.
“Clean” applies to the unanimous 50-45 scores Sandhagen receives and not the fact that the cost of victory included what he described as a “really rare” full tear of his right triceps in the first few minutes of the fight.
Instead of keeping upright and fighting strength against strength in another of Sandhagen’s typical crowd-pleasing clashes, the noted kickboxer relied heavily on a dimension of his game rarely on display: his grappling.
It wasn’t pretty watching, essentially, a one-armed man go to work in the less-vaunted element of his game, but it got the job done, and Sandhagen “absolutely’ believes his performance on the mat would have been much more dynamic if healthy.
“Man, if I would have had two arms in that fight, it would have been stopped, for sure,” Sandhagen says. “No offense to Rob Font because I actually, really like Rob — I think he’s a good guy — but, man, if I have two arms in that fight, I won with one, and I won every round and barely got hit.”
Injuries are a reality in sports, and to some extent the goal in combat sports, but the triceps tear was the most severe of Sandhagen’s career.
Sandhagen wasted no time going under the knife, getting an MRI exam the next day and having surgery to repair the muscle tear later that week — followed about eight weeks later by an arthroscopic surgery to remove “floating bones” that caused bursitis weeks before the Font fight, setting the table for the injury.
Three months from the initial operation passed before he became less worried about reinjuring the arm, and it wasn’t until around February when he no longer needed to think about it.
“It feels great. I did a really great job rehabbing it. I stayed healthy the whole time,” the 32-year-old said. “I think that a big piece of healing your injuries is not being a fat, lazy slob while you’re hurt.”
By that token, Sandhagen says he worked frequently on kicking, working his left-hand, and improving his footwork as he allowed his right arm to recuperate.
“I kind of just did everything that I could do without one arm,” says Sandhagen, who has won three in a row since dropping a decision to Petr Yan for the interim title in a Fight of the Night bonus winner in October 2021.
Sandhagen’s current run of success includes a win over Marlon “Chito” Vera, who in March lost to O’Malley in a challenge for the title.
Clearly, the injury threw a monkey wrench into any scenario for Sandhagen to vie for the crown rather than the man he clearly defeated the previous March, but the Colorado native acknowledged that O’Malley specifically wanted to avenge the only loss of his pro career.
With that out of the way after the champion won what Sandhagen referred to as “a giant mismatch,” the path is paved for the winner of Saturday’s contest against Nurmagomedov (17-0, nine finishes) to be next in line, possibly early next year.
Sandhagen is content to wait that long — though he admits he has no idea how he would handle his next move if the outcome of September’s championship fight leads to a rematch — but isn’t overlooking Nurmagomedov, a Russian who is yet to be tested by the top names at 135 yet intrigues the American.
“His style is really what interests me the most; him being that well-rounded was fun to try to figure out,” says Sandhagen, one of the more analytical minds at the upper levels of the sport. “Very challenging, but very fun to try to figure out. I think him coming from a really good team and then him also just being one of these mythological monsters that the Dagestani guys are kind of getting turned into is really awesome.
“I want to see how I stack up against that. Like I’ve said, man, a big purpose for me to do this is to see how great I am, and I want to see how great I am compared to a guy that has a really unique, good style of striking but also comes from one of the best grappling camps that you can come out of.”