JRE MMA Show #89 with Rafael Lovato Jr.

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Three, two, all right. What's up, how are you, brother?

Rafael Lovato Jr. (0:05)

I'm doing great, it's great to be back.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

Great to see you, man. Congratulations on winning the title.

Rafael Lovato Jr. (0:09)

Appreciate that.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Fantastic achievement, I mean, beating Gagard Musasi, who's, you know, top flight, one of the best in the sport, for sure. Yeah. And to beat him and win the Bellator Middleweight title, that's gotta make you feel happy.

Rafael Lovato Jr. (0:21)

It was surreal, it was something else. And when you hear the story about everything, man, it takes it to another level.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Yeah, well, this is why you're here. We're here to talk about that.

And I guess you should probably just explain what's going on.

Rafael Lovato Jr. (0:39)

Well, I guess I'll just kind of take you through the order of events here.

You know, that was my 10th fight, fighting for the Bellator title. And in all my other nine fights previously, it was never required for me to get a brain scan done. Just due to the different states that I was fighting in at the time, the commissions there didn't require it. In the US it's California and New York, and then Europe requires a brain scan. We were originally scheduled to fight in January at the Forum in California, the same event that just happened this past Saturday night.

And so we were gonna fight 2019 at the Forum in January, and that fight got postponed. Musasi was injured, and we eventually got rescheduled to fight in June in London. So I already had a brain scan scheduled for December to get approved for that fight in January, but I got the news about the fight getting canceled, like the week of that scan a couple days before. So I canceled it, and I said, I don't need to go get that done now.

And so fast forward, I basically stayed in camp the whole year, training with that fight on my mind all the way from November, when I started the first camp for the fight in January, into the new year, waiting for the new date.

And it was March that I got the word that we were going to fight in June in London. And so, I was basically training all year and I just picked right back up into camp. And fast forward on into the very beginning of May, I was already a good month into the serious camp, and I was just getting ready to fly to Brazil, Cotichuba, to get into the hardest phase of camp. I was going to be there for three weeks. And I had to get my MRI done, and I wanted to get it done before I went to Brazil, just to check it off the list. So this was actually the week I had two good buddies of mine, Jake Mapes and Sam Alvey were in Oklahoma training with me. And we had a great week of training. Everything's going really, really well. And it's Thursday. And so I go get my brain scan done to get that done before I went to Brazil. And I'm in there and we get through the whole process and the machine is done. It's not operating anymore, but they haven't called me out of the room yet. And I could kind of just sense something was going on. So finally, they say, okay, come on out. And the radiologist with really no candor or like an easy soft way of saying it was like, dude, have you seen your brain before? There's some stuff in here you need to see. And he pulls me into the room and shows me on the screen. He's like pointing out these look like little balls.

Obviously it looked like something was wrong. It didn't look like a normal scan, but I'm not, I don't know.

Joe Rogan (4:25)

Balls like?

Rafael Lovato Jr. (4:26)

Like shades of discoloration according to the scan itself. You could see that it wasn't normal. And he didn't even know what it was at the time. And he was like, let me look this over tonight. And I had my paper to get signed off that everything looks clear and normal. And he was just like, he asked me if I had any concussions and if I've had any issues. And I said, no, no. And he's like, well, this doesn't look right. And you shouldn't be doing what you're doing. I'm like, okay, so are you gonna sign this paper? And he's like, no. And he's like, come back tomorrow and I'm gonna give you some more information.

So I go back Friday and he tells me that, you know, he did some research and he believes that I have a disease called cavernoma.