For the next year, Clark tried to figure out if she could fall back in love with the sport, and with Fitzgibbons, she did just that. Clark got herself a new therapist and a sports mindset coach, and by the time she signed a bout agreement to face Sarah Alpar, it was full steam ahead for “Jessy Jess.”
Not a whole lot went wrong in Clark’s TKO win against Alpar last September. Clark’s performance was indicative of all the work she put in the previous year, and it was all happy days when she got her hand raised that night in the UFC APEX. Sure, the bumps and bruises that come from a fight would hurt later, but an unpleasant surprise revealed itself when she got an MRI on her knee. Clark felt a little bit of instability in her leg after the fight, but nothing really to catch her attention, and after the scan, she saw she tore her anterior cruciate ligament.
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“It just felt kind of wrong,” Clark told UFC.com. “It just felt off, and then after the fight, it still wasn’t painful at all. It was just a little bit of instability, and then I got the MRI, and I was like, ‘Oh, s**t. Guess who gets to have surgery?’”
Naturally, frustration came in waves. Clark had just gone through a major injury recovery when she hurt her foot in 2018, an injury that lingered throughout fight camp leading up to her loss to Kianzad. Against Alpar, Clark looked healthy and fluid, and a torn ACL was the furthest thing from rebuilding any sort of momentum in her career.
