Botched weight cuts and injuries usually contribute to fighters failing to make weight before the fight. For Matt Brown, one very odd situation caused the one and only failure to make weight over the course of 15 years.
Brown is one of the only old-school veterans left in the UFC. Having fought under the promotion’s banner since 2008, ‘The Immortal’ routinely made weigh – except for that one time in 2014.
In an episode of MMA Fighting’s The Fighter vs. The Writer podcast, he recalled the incident.
Brown was scheduled to headline a Fight Night card against Robbie Lawler in a welterweight title eliminator at that time. But on the scales, prior to the fight, Brown weighed 172.5 lbs or 2.5 lbs over the 170 lbs welterweight limit.
The 41-year-old veteran explained how that came to be:
“I go in, get weighed in, half-pound over,” Brown recalled. “While I’m sitting in the back, this guy comes up, posing as one of the doctors there. And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you out there, I’ve seen you cutting weight…’ And he said, ‘You can’t cut no more weight. You need to rehydrate.’”
“I was like, ‘OK, if I have to, you’re the doctor telling me.’ He’s like, ‘I’m not gonna let you cut no more weight.’”
At the time, Brown had no clue that the person in question wasn’t a real UFC doctor. As he began to rehydrate, UFC president Dana White came up to him.
“Dana comes over, like, five minutes later and he goes, ‘Hey, did somebody just tell you not to cut weight?’ I said, ‘Yes, some doctor.’ He goes, ‘That dude’s not a doctor. I don’t know who that guy is.’ I guess he had told somebody else that missed weight also.”
“We meet with Dana in the back and I said I can still go cut the weight. I just put on an extra two or three pounds with this water. And he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’re not taking your 20%. Robbie was there, he was cool with it.’ And that was that.”
“I’m a professional, I’m gonna make the weight, guaranteed. I’ve never missed weight in any other time of my life.”
Lawler later beat Brown by decision in a barnburner fight. Both fighters also earned an extra $50k each from the Fight of the Night honor.