Tanner Boser once witnessed his brother tumble 100 feet down the side of a mountain, so how scary could a fight be?
Boser caught up with Fightful ahead of his bout against Andrei Arlovski at UFC Vegas 13. The Canadian heavyweight reflected on the harrowing experience of seeing his brother tumble down the face of a mountain.
"I screamed 'No!' when he was falling like that's going to solve anything," Boser recalled. "We thought he was dead..."
Boser, his brother and a couple of friends were hiking a mountain. After reaching the first mountain peak, the group decided to traverse two mountain peaks in the distance.
"You could get there by following the ridge up top. Probably not advisable. We did it, got to the third one and decided to try and go down the face of the mountain. There was no trail or anything like that. It was really steep and it got kind of sketchy," he explained. "Everyone fanned out a little because you can't exactly follow people. Rocks are falling behind you. When it gets to be difficult, everyone begins choosing their own path because it's a matter of opinion what you think is good. My brother stood up a little too straight and started sliding on the shale."
"Then he started falling and tumbling for 100 feet down this mountain. We thought he was dead," Boser recalled. "He was unconscious. Me and one of my friends got down to him. Right before we got down to him, he sat up. 'Okay, he's alive,' I thought. I got to him. He's still completely out of it. Under one of his kneecaps, you could put your fingers underneath his knee. His other ankle was clearly broken. My friend took a shirt off and wrapped it around [my brother's] knee so he couldn't see it."
Boser and his friends lied about the severity of his brother's injuries, telling him the shirt wrapped around his knee was to prevent a scrape from getting infected.
"He believed us because he was so out of it and in shock. We had to climb back up this mountain face that we went down. He kept saying, 'I'm tired I just need to rest.' I'm like, 'No, no no.' Because shock is going to start setting in or he's going to pass out. We kept pushing him to go. It took so fucking long to get up the face of this mountain. I had my hand on his ass, kind of pushing him because it was really steep. When we got up there, we have him so much Advil. We had to go back to the first peak," he said. "There is part of the path that has porous rock. You have a good grip. But if you fell you would die. You would fall to your death. I'm holding his backpack and he would freak out. If you have ever been in a fight or flight situation, you get extremely aggressive. He'd shout, 'Don't fucking grab that.' I kept lying and he would believe it over and over because his brain wasn't retaining memories."
"We got all the way down the mountain," Boser continued. "He collapsed. I got my truck. We had to pick him up deadweight to put him in the truck. He used everything and his body just gave up there."
Boser and his friends quickly transported his brother to a nearby hospital.
"When we brought him to the hospital and explained where we were, they didn't believe us," the athlete said. "They said, 'We have to airlift idiots like you guys out of there all the time. There is no way he climbed out of there.' Well, he did."
UFC Vegas 13 takes place on Saturday, November 7 from the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, Nevada. The ESPN+ card is headlined by Thiago Santos vs. Glover Teixeira. Keep up with Fightful for your fight night coverage.
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