Former two-division world titlist Carl Frampton has been diagnosed with fractures in both hands following his win against Tyler McCreary.
Frampton dominated McCreary, knocking him down twice with body shots and winning a 10-round shutout decision in their junior lightweight bout on Saturday night on the Top Rank Boxing on ESPN+ card at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
Frampton said after the fight that he believed that he had rebroken the same left hand that he broke in a freak accident in August when a concrete pillar in the fight hotel's lobby fell on it and forced a fight later that week to be canceled. Frampton also said he injured his right hand against McCreary.
It turned out that Frampton, of Belfast, Northern Ireland, broke both hands, which he found out for sure following a visit with hand/wrist specialist Dr. Mick Hayton in Manchester, England, on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Frampton detailed his hand diagnosis on social media. He suffered an "acute" fracture of the fifth metacarpal in his left hand in the same place he suffered the fracture in August. Frampton said he rebroke it in the first round against McCreary.
Frampton (27-2, 15 KOs), 32, suffered a fracture at the base of his third metacarpal in his right hand during the seventh round.
"I'll be back with a bang in 2020," Frampton said.
Once his hands are healed, the plan for Frampton, a former featherweight and unified junior featherweight world titleholder, is to challenge junior lightweight world titlist Jamel Herring in the spring in Belfast.
"We're monitoring the situation with his hands," Top Rank chairman Bob Arum told ESPN. "Certainly by March, April, May, he will be able to fight. I'm not the doctor, but this is what they've told me. Frampton's people told me they're like hairline (fractures) and those, if you do the right exercises, will heal quickly."
Arum said there are no plans for Frampton to have any kind of tune-up fight coming off the hand injuries and instead he would go directly into the title fight with Herring, who was ringside for Frampton-McCreary. Herring and Frampton were in the ring with each other after the bout and both expressed interest in the showdown.
Herring (21-2, 10 KOs), 34, of Coram, New York, won a 130-pound belt by unanimous decision over Masayuki Ito in May and then outpointed mandatory challenger Lamont Roach on Nov. 9 in his first defense.