Randy Caballero Details His Surgery and Ring Return
By Steve Kim
After capturing the IBF bantamweight title this past October against Stuart Hall, Randy Caballero was set to defend his crown on February 27th in front of his hometown fans against Alberto Guevara at the Fantasy Springs Casino in Indio, California. Instead, that fight was scrapped as Caballero underwent surgery on his right foot.
This past Friday night he was on crutches as he attended the fight card at the same venue which was supposed to hold that event.
Caballero explained to BoxingScene.com - "I had a cyst inside my bone so they went and scraped everything out and they replaced it with a donor bone. So the doctor told me - and I just took off my stitches a couple of days ago - to stay off my feet for another five weeks and then after that we start going to therapy and hopefully I'm back in the ring soon.
"They say another three months to be off, it could be sooner."
Time is on his side. Caballero - who has a mark of 22-0, 13 KO's - is still just 24 years old.
In the past he would just work through the lingering pain he had felt for years.
"I've always had problems with my feet, I have flat feet," he explained. "So people would say - 'you have a lot of problems with your feet,' which I thought was it. So always just fought through it, I just let it go, I iced it and it felt better I'd have people massage my feet and it would feel better. Finally this training camp it caught up to me. I wasn't running, I wasn't sparring. My conditioning was there, I was doing other things but I didn't feel comfortable walking into a fight, in my hometown, defending my title I just won."
"It wasn't the right thing to do so me and my dad sat down and talked about it and I think we made the right decision. At the end, we had to get surgery."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com
