As a teenager, like many young men around the world in the 90’s, I would go crazy watching videos of the early UFC events. (Okay, you have an idea how old I am.) One thing I would often notice are the really weird ears UFC fighters would have. They seem to have really strange crumpled, lumpy or otherwise misshapen ears.
At first, I thought they were some kind of ear defects, but I quickly realized that they were something that there was something about those ears that was related to grappling.
Freestyle wrestling isn’t a big sport where I grew up. At 14 years old I was a Judoka. I was crazy about grappling. But ears like that? No, I had never seen those in my Judo club. What were they?
I later learned what they were… cauliflower ears.
Cauliflower ears are what you get when your ears get constantly crushed, rubbed or hit. Every time your ears get smashed up, pockets of blood and other fluids pool inside your ear (the external part sticking out of your head) causing lots of the stretchy connective tissue in it to die. As they die, tougher fibrous tissues form in your years as the ear tries to heal itself. Over several years of repetitive damage, the result is the scary-looking cauliflower ears we are so familiar with now.
Not everyone gets, cauliflower ears. As I mentioned, no one in my Judo club had cauliflower ears. Basically you can get cauliflower ears in combat sports that have a lot of grappling and contact. Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Judo included. Some article even list Boxing and Rugby as sports that can give you cauliflower ears (Cauliflower ears from boxing and rugby. Uhmmm.. Do they really? Mostly no, despite what that popular website said.) However, it is wrestlers that get a lion’s share of cauliflower ears.
But when I was in college, I took up freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, along with MMA. Oh… very, very quickly I discovered where cauliflower ears come from, and why they develop so much more prevalently in Wrestling compared to other grappling sports.
In wrestling there is just so much smashing up of the ears, especially with the ferocious battles for head control, that it goes far beyond what you would have in BJJ or Judo. If you’re new to wrestling, you’re going to have the first couple of weeks or months with your ears feeling as if they were raw and swollen all the time.
I did start wrestling comparatively late, and the level of Wrestling as a sport where I grew up isn’t as advanced as in the US or other wrestling crazy countries. I didn’t develop those really misshapen ears. My ears do look a bit normal from the outside, but they are much lumpier and harder than how they started out.
Strangely, my right ear is lumpier and harder than my left. I would expect that defending from wrestling headlocks or head control would make my left ear lumpier and harder than my left, as your opponents stronger right arm usually has direct contact with the side of your head. Maybe it’s from these years defending all those rear-naked chokes, rather than head locks or head control from wrestling. In any case, I am proud of my slight hardness and lumpiness of my ears.
The lesson here is – if you see someone with cauliflower ears… beware. That man has paid his dues.
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For the past two weeks my right ear has been feeling swollen and a bit “raw” on the cartilage on the top of my outer ear canal. It was red in that area as well but that seems to have subsided.
My wife already informed me that cauliflower ears are unattractive to her and does not want me to have them. Although they’re basically a “badge of honor” to most combat athletes it seems to me that I may have to breakdown and by some ear guards just so my won’t always say “eeewwww” everytime she looks at me having cauliflower ears. :-/
I agree absolutely with you about cauliflower ears being a badge of honor, but I guess it’s all about compromise. Good luck with the swollen ear, Damon.