The Blue Collar Brawler, 100% On-The-Record

I just spoke with Jesse Barbot.  In a brief but wide-ranging conversation he shared his thoughts (“100% on-the-record”) about his head injury, his recovery, and his future.  In an effort to keep the focus on Jesse I’m going to publish here his comments, minus my questions.

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Well, I remember everything.  I remember the fight, I remember talking in the corner between rounds, I remember being down and getting carried out on a stretcher.  They took me first to the Mahnomen hospital, and there we had to make some decisions.  We decided to go to Fargo [North Dakota], to Meritcare Hospital, and I remember the ambulance ride, too.  My brother was riding up front and my wife was in back with me, and it was the bumpiest ride of my life!  In Fargo they gave me some options, but what they ended up doing was a pretty major surgery to relieve a blood clot in my head.  It hurt so much, when they put the mask on me to put me to sleep, I remember thinking “Thank God,” because the pain was finally going to end.

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They put 47 staples in my head, and my little one didn’t really know what to think – It was right around Halloween, too.

Afterwards, when things seemed to be going pretty well, I could think and knew all that was going on around me, but I couldn’t speak.  I was having a seizure!  I was talking on the phone to my Mom, she had been visiting me and had just left and it just…That was a bad experience, not something I would ever want to experience.  As a result of that, I had to go back to the hospital, away from rehab, and that set me back a ways.

But it’s been great, I’m making a full recovery, everything’s going to be back to normal and I’ll be able to do all the things I used to do.  I’m supposed to be going home tomorrow night!  I’ll be the same old me that you used to know, you know my job is that I’m a route driver, and I’ll be able to work and live a normal life.  I’ll just have to be careful around my head.  Of course my boxing career is over.

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It’s so great, with all the modern medical knowledge, all my medical care has been spot-on.  My medical care has been phenomenal.  It’s true that I’m really lucky this didn’t happen years ago, because it might have been a really different story.  Right now I’m in a ward with a lot of people who have head injuries, and it really changes how you think about life.  Some of them are worse off than me, of course, but I’m here with people who are going through the same thing as me, and I get to see them getting better every day.  It’s really, when I think about it, a rewarding experience.

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Absolutely not, this does not change how I feel about combat sports.  I won’t box anymore, but there’s a lot of ways to be involved in a sport without participating.  Coaching, for instance, and representing fighters…I want to stay involved in the sport and keep plugging away at it.  I’ll be back in the gym coaching my little boxing team in Fargo soon.  I won’t be able to make it to our first competition, in Grand Forks this weekend.  Actually I won’t rule it out completely, but I probably won’t be able to make it.

I look at it this way.  Boxing is a great sport and it’s changed a lot of lives.  This happened to me, but look at all the people it hasn’t happened to.

I thought it was a pretty close fight, I know I was down a couple of times in the fifth.  My style of fighting has been brawling – I’m the Blue Collar Brawler (laughs) and I think I just can’t take the same shots I used to.  My style of fighting doesn’t really lend itself to a long career.  Even my dad told me that a couple of shots didn’t look like they should have put me down, or would have put me down in the past, but they did.

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I won’t be heading back to work for a while, the neurosurgeon is the one who decides when I can start driving.

I actually have excellent insurance.  I have good insurance, my wife has a good job, and my boss – the business I work for – has been really good to me so far.  The medical bills haven’t started coming in yet, and until you see those you don’t know what kind of situation you’re really in, but I have good insurance and I’ve been well taken care of, and I think we’re going to come out of this okay.