UFC: During that long layoff, how difficult was it to not fight and deal with an injury?
GN: It’s tough. I took a little bit of time after my last fight, and then I’m ready to go. I’m hungry, and it took a little while to find an opponent as usual. But then we had an opponent, Neil Magny, great opponent. Really excited for that, and then four weeks out or something, I blew my knee. For a little while, I thought I’d be still OK. I’d just wrestle through it, and it’d be all right. But as soon as I saw the doctor and got the MRI, he basically said — I knew I was never going to be even close to 100 percent, but I still thought I could wrestle through it and get the fight going and deal with it after the fight — the doctor said to me, ‘You’re going to be fighting for a few more years, aren’t you?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the plan.’ Then he said, ‘Well, let’s do the surgery on Monday.’ Because he told me I would most likely start ruining the cartilidge inside my knee if I didn’t get the surgery right away, and that’s an injury for life. You can really mess up your knee and your future for that matter when it comes to health.
