You should take everything that you see on Twitter with a grain of salt. And you should take everything that you see on Twitter on April Fools' Day with a mountain of salt, if that's even a correct continuation of the idiom.
But some things are too hard, too serious, too indigestible to come off as an April Fools' prank headline. Take, for instance, what occurred in an MMA fight at CFFC 94 on Thursday night between Khetag Pliev and Devin Goodale.
Sorry, come again? That's right: Pliev's finger came off in the middle of the match, and the fight stopped when the referee noticed he was missing his left ring finger (via Marc Raimondi of ESPN). I'm not sure why the referee was the one that stopped the fight — if I was the victim of a literal finger dismemberment, I might ask for a pause in the action myself — but Pliev said that he had wanted to continue fighting.
"In the second round, he caught my glove with one hand and held it," Pliev said. "I felt my finger snapped. He kept pulling my glove and my finger snapped. We kept fighting. When the second round was finished, I see my [bone] was out in the open."
A picture was snapped by a fan watching the event who was just as bewildered as anybody. WARNING: If you choose to follow the link to the tweet, be prepared for NSFW language and a gruesome image.
MMA reporter Aaron Bronsteter had a slightly different summation of the events, saying that it was Pliev who noticed his finger was missing between rounds. Color commentator and former wrestling star CM Punk described the action as follows: "It wasn't a compound fracture, a break, it wasn't a dislocation, a break, a laceration. His finger was just gone. It's gone."
It appared that it was, as CM Punk so eloquently noted, gone. Event promoter Rob Haydak said that officials looked all over the cage, and there was even an announcement made to people at 2300 Arena in Philadelphia asking them to look around for the missing finger (via Raimondi). Eventually, the missing finger was found, lodged inside Pliev's glove, and he was taken to the emergency room at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital to get his finger reattached. Pliev later posted on Instagram, letting his followers know that he was okay and that his finger was back in place.
Pliev says he will appeal the fight result, calling out Goodale for the illegal grabbing of his gloves. What's more is that Pliev wanted to keep going even after the injury.
"I wanted to keep fighting, because I felt like I had this guy," Pliev said. "But the doctor saw that and stopped the fight."
Haydak saw the same thing, saying that Pliev "didn't even flinch" and was getting ready to keep going before they sent him to the hospital.
No April Fools' pranks here. Just your average MMA headline.
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