The bitter story of how I got my scar and a lesson in wearing proper sparring gear:
I was training for a fight and, after 2 hours of training, there was a bit of time left and the instructor said to grab a partner and do some light sparring.
I started to do some light sparring and, without my shin and instep on, we were pretty much doing light boxing (I thought). Then out of nowhere my partner makes a big move for a jab and Flying Knee. It looked like his hip was moving for a jab/cross so I went down for a liver shot (admittedly with my head too low because I was tired) and found myself saying ‘hello’ to his knee. I wasn’t knocked off my feet and the action continued, until we realised that my face exploded like a Jose Canseco smashing a tomato.
I muttered an f-bomb, walked out of the ring and quietly went to the washroom and cleaned up with the help of a guy at the gym. With my new gauze-based hat on, I drove myself to the hospital, got some stitches and that was it. 
(Here’s where the bitterness begins) Throughout my time training at this particular gym, the partner I was sparring with that day, was consistently trying to ‘show off’, perhaps because he’d never had any fights and he could tell that he was sparring with someone that had or maybe just because I was a new guy at his gym but he couldn’t have been more friendly while I was training there. An example of him ‘showing off’ is that, one day, we were working on clinch control and throwing light knees. During this drill he threw an elbow to my head. I politely asked, “are we throwing elbows?” and he said, “oh; no”. We continued and he threw another elbow to my face, so I asked him again if he wanted to throw elbows. He again said no, and I was just so annoyed because I’ve trained for a long time and I’m completely fine training this clinch work with elbows and knees, but let me know so we can both work and use the same techniques.
In the partners defense, he's a great guy (other than the hot-dogging) and I'm sure he wasn't thinking 'I'm going to throw a knee and scar up this guys face' so I wasn't upset with him when it happened, just annoyed because it shouldn't have happened.
(The lesson of safety) I was obviously very annoyed by my day which also had to do with lessons I’ve learned at top Muay Thai gyms over the years and that is that knees and elbows aren’t involved in sparring when fighters don’t have any headgear, knee pads or elbow pads on, for many reasons.
The obvious first reason is that it’s easy to get cut with the bone-on-bone of knees and elbows. Top gyms also require gear during sparring because, other than knees and elbows packing a lot of force, sometimes when fighters throw kicks they can often mistakenly make contact with their foot to their partners knee or the point of their elbow from blocks, which unnecessarily puts the fighter out of commission with injuries.
- Coming up is a blog regarding scar treatments and a great product that I found that works great on old and new scars....
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