T.J. Dillashaw doesn’t want to give up hope on ever competing again, but he’s not sure he’ll even be able to get back to grappling again due to his continued struggles with the shoulder injury that effectively ended his MMA career.
The now 38-year-old former UFC bantamweight champion retired from competition back in 2022 following a loss to Aljamain Sterling amid continued issues with his shoulder after multiple surgeries. After that fight, Dillashaw revealed that he “probably dislocated” his shoulder 20 times during his training camp.
Now nearly two years removed from that fight, Dillashaw is still struggling with his shoulder after another surgery that currently limits his mobility even more than before.
“I can’t even raise my arm up in the air yet,” Dillashaw said on the Jaxxxon podcast when asked about going for his black belt in the future. “I don’t know if my shoulder’s ever going to be the same again.
“It’s f*cking depressing. As a competitor, you have to be delusionally optimistic, but that’s also what got me in this position too.”
Dillashaw battled shoulder problems throughout the latter part of his UFC career, which is why he ultimately decided to hang up his gloves. In the aftermath of that decision, Dillashaw has continued seeking help from doctors to hopefully patch him back together again, but he’s rarely received much good news.
From muscle grafts to using cadaver parts, Dillashaw has endured plenty of of invasive surgeries in attempts to fix his shoulder, but he’s nowhere close to being fully healed.
“It’s just gotten worse and worse from each surgery,” Dillashaw said. “I had a massive surgery. I went to the world’s best specialist and it’s like he’s never seen anything like it. It looked like a bomb went off in there. He removed my lower trap and put it in my shoulder, removed a piece of my lower trap and replaced two of my rotator cuffs with it. He removed a piece of my lat, replaced my front rotator cuff with that. A cadaver bone graph in there. So there’s a lot of healing to be done.
“I’m hoping that maybe just me staying after my [physical therapy] is going to make it better, better, and better. This is my third surgery since my last fight and it’s not looking good. I just had a MRI done on Saturday. I’ll probably figure out next week what that f*cking looks like.”
At his peak, Dillashaw was one of the top pound-for-pound fighters in the sport and arguably one of the best bantamweights in history.
He lost two years of his career after he tested positive for recombinant human erythropoietin — better known as EPO — but Dillashaw still managed to return with a win over Cory Sandhagen back in 2021 to receive another title shot.
After coming up short against Sterling and the continued problems with his shoulder, Dillashaw retired from the UFC, but he kept trying to repair the damage so he could potentially compete again.
Sadly, it appears Dillashaw really is done with fighting and now he’s just battling for quality of life.
“It’s depressing,” Dillashaw said. “Going from being a professional athlete to having one arm. It’s a tough pill to swallow.”
