Hard-Nosed Boxer Will Perform His Own Surgery, Thank You Very Much

There's tough, there's boxer tough, and then there's Keyser Soze "shoot your family in the face to prove you value nothing" tough. Then there's cruiserweight fighter Juan Carlos Robles. After putting his motorcycle in a ditch, Robles recovered from a broken right kneecap, a dislocated right elbow, and a broken right forearm. But the one thing he couldn't recover from was gnarly road rash on his pinkie finger that wouldn't heal and threatened to stall his boxing career. Since he didn't have insurance for a medical amputation, he did what any one else would do. He grabbed a chisel, a 15-pound weight and ... you probably know the rest:

He went home, put towels over the kitchen table and blocked off a working area with several two-by-fours. He put gauze around the area and twisted soldering wire around his right pinkie to slow the flow of blood. "Then I put a wood chisel on it and dropped a 15-pound weight on the chisel," Robles said. "The piece shot out about six feet like a missile."

The doctors were impressed by his amateur surgery, the wound healed perfectly, and Four-Finger Juan went back to beating people up for money. The only down side is that he was rejected from reality-boxing show "The Contender," because producers were concerned that he might murder the other contestants in a blind rage. And like that ... poof! He's gone. • Just hanging on by a thread [Washington Times]