After a world championship career which was unfortunately blighted by injury for much of it, Dominick Cruz has finally hung up his gloves.

The former two-time UFC bantamweight champion confirmed in recent days that he was calling time on his 28-fight professional career after he sustained a dislocated shoulder in preparation for what was intended to be his final bout against Rob Font scheduled for later this month, in what was the latest of a career in which he sustained severe knee and groin injuries (to name but a few) that forced him to the sidelines for extended spells.

And according to Cruz, he knew pretty quickly that this one was not going to end well.

“I had one dislocation about eight weeks prior to this recent one that I posted and that one kind of set the stage that I’m on a different kind of timeline than just age, which I didn’t really add to the equation,” he said on the Anik & Florian Podcast, as noted by MMA Fighting.

“It was more just like I feel good, I’m still fast, all these things. So then your shoulder falls out and then you’re like, OK, I rehabbed it for six weeks straight and then I went and sparred with Jeremy Stephens and a few other pro boxers just to see where it was really at after the rehab I had done and I did really well, I felt really good, nothing messed with me at all.”

“It was a basic thing I’ve done a million times,” Cruz said of the injury. “You’re on your back from half guard, you get up on your elbow, and then you reach to a single and you use your elbow to get up. And when you post on the ground like that with somebody on top of your head, it just pretty much shot out the back the second I put my elbow down and went to pull in that single leg.

“The difference with this one from the first one was the first one was only out for maybe three minutes, it was a nice quick slide back in. That was excruciating pain, but it was so quick.

“Whereas this second one, they went to pull it in and it did not go back, it just stayed where it was at and all the muscles locked down on top of the nerve and for about an hour and a half, from driving through traffic to the hospital, to getting to the hospital and then needing to get an X-ray-because it’s not like the movies where you just slide a shoulder back in every time, it doesn’t always work that way-so the second time it didn’t work that way.

“It’s still painful, I have a lot of rehab to do, but is that worth more than what I’m getting paid for this last fight? Definitely,” Cruz said. “Now, if they offer me a couple of mil or something, I don’t know, I might have showed up, and gone with a 50 percent arm and maybe done that, but you’ve got to figure out what your arm’s worth.”