(True story.)

Rousimar Palhares‘s reputation for unsportsmanlike leg-breaking, terrifying aggression, and general insanity is well-documented, and well-deserved. But now that he’s being blamed for leg-murders he didn’t even commit, we felt it was time to step in to defend him.

This morning, as part of their Blood Week series, Deadspin linked to a photo of a man on a table, with his femur sticking out of his leg. If you really, really need to see it, just hit the “next page” link at the end of this post. [Ed. note: Don't actually do that.] As Deadspin writes:

Click through to see what happened to Isiah Ordiz’s femur after he wouldn’t tap out of a heel hook from Rousimar Palhares. I cannot stress this enough: this is a Faces of Death-level photo and you will wish you hadn’t seen it.

Immediately, my bullshit sensors went off. I researched an entire article about Palhares’s assholish history of leg abuse two years ago, and there’s no way I would leave out something this gruesome and dramatic, if there was any record of it on the Internet. The fact that this is surfacing now makes it suspect to begin with. Surely us MMA fans would have already heard of it?

So just to be sure, we swung by Palhares’s database entries on Sherdog, MixedMartialArts.com, and Wikipedia. None of them include a fight against Isiah Ordiz. In fact, none of them even include an entry for any fighter named “Isiah Ordiz.” This has all the marks of an urban legend, and like every good urban legend, it’s spreading like wildfire through the Internet because it’s so easy to believe. (“Of course Rousimar Palhares broke that man’s leg. What else could have happened to him, except that he had a run-in with MMA’s most infamous leg snapper?”)

Except it didn’t happen. So let’s kill this rumor before it spreads any further. Thank you. And again, you really don’t have to click that “next page” link if you don’t want to…

Update: There is a grappler by the name of Isaiah Ordiz, but there’s no record that he ever competed against Palhares, or that the guy in the photo is actually him. The photo has been circulating for weeks with no mention of Palhares.

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