The broken left hand suffered by Daniel Straus in the first round of his fight with Patricio Freire at Bellator 145 didn’t negatively affect his performance that night, but the resulting surgery and rehab kept the featherweight champ out of the cage for all of 2016.
Straus will finally return to action for the first time since November 2015 against the man he last faced, Freire, in the Bellator 178 headliner at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., on Friday night. The evening’s main card will be televised on Spike at 9 p.