Sean Brady is opening up about the reason he was forced to pull out of his November 7th fight against Gabriel Bonfim at the Meta Apex in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Brady and Bonfim were set to headline the UFC Fight Night event, but word came out yesterday (Thu. Oct. 29th) that Brady was withdrawing. Now the top welterweight contender has revealed the reason: a bad staph infection in his knee that he’s still battling.
“So last week, Tuesday, I practiced in the morning,” Brady explained on his YouTube channel.
“Everything was going completely fine. By nighttime, I was gonna do my next workout. I jumped on my bike. My knee was a little bit swollen afterwards. By nine at night, I couldn’t walk … I knew it was an infection. I knew right away from dealing with [past staph in] my arm and my leg, the feeling that you get, it’s just different. It’s just a different pain. Like, I could barely walk.”
“So Wednesday morning, 6 a.m., first thing I do, I go to the hospital. And they start drawing blood, doing everything. They have to wait for a bacteria to grow, so it takes, like, two days for it to grow. So I had to obviously stay in the hospital, I was there for three days … My knee had a staph infection. That’s the first needle they pulled out of my knee. So they pulled, like, 30 [needles]. They were draining my knee every day.”
Brady came with receipts in the form of multiple photos of the staph infection and fluid being pulled out of it.
“The original thought was I’d get in there, get some IV antibiotics, go,” Brady continued. “Get out of there in a day. And obviously, that just didn’t happen. Like, it just wasn’t getting better. This is Monday, October 26. My knee is still blown up. I have to go get it drained again. And the fear is that I’ll get it drained, and it’ll just keep filling back up.”
“Like, I just … I can’t fight in two weeks. It’s just not an option.”
Brady was clearly frustrated, but even more frustrated after trying to get his fight shifted back a few weeks so he could still compete more than once in 2026.
“I’m like, ‘Yo, is there any spots on the December 12 card? Is there any way I can get on that?’ It’s full,” he said. “I was trying to just be like, I just need a couple more weeks, just to let this s–t clear up, and then I still wanna fight. And then they have October. They have November 21. It’s in Qatar. That’s full. They don’t have a card November 28 because that’s Thanksgiving. And then they have a card December 5, which is in Saudi Arabia. Full. And December 12 is full.”
“Then they don’t have another card until the Dallas card [on January 16], which is what I’m hoping to get on, whether I get a new opponent, whether they find Bonfim someone, or if they just push it. That’s what I want.”
For now, Brady is just focusing on getting rid of the staph in his knee.
“The infection’s still in there,” he said. “Like, literally, I can’t train. I can’t. I don’t know. I couldn’t … I’m sure I couldn’t cut weight. How would I cut weight? There’s just no way around it.”
UFC Vegas 124 moves ahead on November 7th with a heavyweight main event between Waldo Cortes-Acosta and Johnny Walker.
