By MMA has a new nice Canadian guy in Team Alpha Male welterweight Mike Malott who followed up his debut victory at UFC 273 with an announcement he would be donating his show money to the healthcare costs of Alpha Male boxing coach Joey Rodriguez’s 15-year-old daughter who is battling Stage 3 Lymphoma. The genuinely heart-wrenching story has led to an outpouring of support from the community, including an offer by Dana White to cover Malott’s donation, fans in the arena handing him cash as he left and an influx of donations to a GoFundMe set up for the family which has raised over $100,000 toward a $50,000 goal.
“I could use this money, but they could use it a hell of a lot more than I could,” said Malott in an emotional post-fight media scrum, making an astute observation that is somehow true of a family simply seeking to care for a sick child in the second-richest nation in the world.
Without the donations, Rodriguez and his family may have been faced with the not-actually-a-choice decision of whether to put themselves into unrecoverable debt to provide the healthcare their child needs, but thankfully thanks to the kindness of those affected by Malott’s moving speech, the issue is now totally fixed and we can all feel great that things are going to be okay, for this one family, providing costs don’t continue to grow and exceed the level of donations received by the time everyone not directly affected has moved on.
