The UFC middleweight was scheduled to face Gregory Rodrigues at UFC 283: Teixeira vs Hill in Brazil, until a minor undisclosed injury hindered Tavares’ training camp. Despite the injury, Tavares was still going to make the walk on fight night, until news reporting his injury was leaked a couple weeks before the fight.
Now with his injury circulating between both camps and the UFC, Tavares, for obvious reasons, felt it wouldn’t be a smart decision to enter a bout against “Robocop” with Rodrigues already knowing his injury. Tavares eventually withdrew from the bout and took the time to recover properly before putting his name back in circulation for a middleweight bout later in the Spring.
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“The injury itself wasn’t too bad,” Tavares said. “Honestly, we were still going to fight, we were still going to go down to Brazil but what ended up happening was a matchmaker called my manager to check on me like, ‘Hey, is Brad okay? I heard he’s out.’ We called him like, ‘What do you mean,’ and he said, ‘I just got off the phone with Gregory’s team and they got word that you’ve been injured and you’re out of the fight.’ We never said that. We never announced it. We were still going to go but, at that point, we knew somebody had leaked my injury to the other team so we’re like, ‘Now it doesn’t make sense.’ It’s one thing to fight injured, but to go across the world and fight injured when your opponent knows about it, that doesn’t make sense.”
Throughout his career up until late 2018, Tavares fought two to three times a year, and was coming off his first loss in five fights to none other than UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya. His health took a turn for the worse shortly after, however, when he required three surgeries over the next three years, which hindered his ability to fight as frequently as he desired.