UFC Welterweight Alex Oliveira Blown Up By Grenade On Christmas Eve, Is Fine

UFC welterweight Alex Oliveira went home to Tres Rios, south of Rio de Janeiro, to spend Christmas with family. There he was involved in a Christmas Eve altercation at a gas station, involving machetes and guns and an exploding grenade that lodged a handful of shrapnel in his lower leg, requiring surgery.

According to a report from Globo, late Monday night Oliveira went out to put some gas in his mother’s car and found himself at the very station where members of his family were involved in an extremely coincidental escalating confrontation, possibly against the villains of a Chuck Norris movie (translation via Google):

“It was a good night, you know? But there are a lot of people in our family who do not like to enjoy Christmas. I went out to feed my mother’s car, and on the way I saw my aunt in confusion. I told my aunt not to interfere, I just stopped to try to ease the stop. Because when you have a fighter involved in confusion, you know, right? One guy already got a gun in my nephew’s face. Then began a push-push. The guys were with a machete, a knife, a grenade. And they threw the grenade at me. He flew fragments on my leg, on my foot.”

Oliveira was reportedly able to transport himself to “the Emergency Care Unit of the city,” where he underwent “minor surgery” to have fragments OF A GRENADE removed from his lower leg. He is otherwise fine, and was home later that night. There’s a not-gross image of Oliveira’s bandaged leg on Globo, and it seems like he was very lucky that his injuries were so minor—once again I would like to emphasize that he was at a gas station when someone threw a grenade at him, and it exploded. As pointed out by MMA Fighting, Oliveira needed 38 stitches in his head after his fight against Gunnar Nelson on December 8, so he’s having a really terrific month.