Sean Sherk Forced Into Retirement Due to Hip Replacement Surgery

Hip replacement surgery sounds like something that an older person would need, right? Not in the case of now former UFC Lightweight Sean Sherk, who announced yesterday that he was retired from the sport of Mixed Martial Arts due to hip problems. Apparently he has had hip problems for the past few years, but kept it under tight wraps. He initially just needed surgery to repair them, but now it looks like he’ll need to have complete hip replacement surgery, which means the end of his career.

This also answers the question as to why a guy with wrestling like he has stopped going for takedowns.

“Now that I’m retiring I can tell the truth,” he says. “I know it’s always been one of the top questions. Obviously I couldn’t say anything because otherwise opponents would pinpoint that stuff, but I had MRIs done [ahead of the Penn fight] and found out that both of my hips were torn and that I was going to need surgery. The doctor basically told me at that point in time, ‘if you have surgery on this you’ll never be 100 percent again – you’ll lose your mobility, you’ll lose your quick twitch and some of the explosion, and you’ll lose some of the agility.’

“And to me it just wasn’t worth it, so I said, you know what, I’ll just deal with the pain. I said, I’ll just deal with this as long as I can. And that’s what I did. Gradually over the years my hips got worse and worse and worse. About two weeks ago I was told I needed hip replacement surgery. So that was the deciding factor right there. I went from needing surgery to fix torn labrums to needing total replacement.”