When the referee comes to visit you in the hospital so he can apologize, it’s a pretty good sign that you didn’t have a great night.

Still, UFC featherweight Gavin Tucker (10-1 MMA, 1-1 UFC) isn’t complaining. In fact, he’s glad that referee Kyle Cardinal didn’t stop Rick Glenn (20-4 MMA, 2-1 UFC) from thumping on him at UFC 215 in Edmonton on Saturday night, or so he would have us believe.

“Stop blaming the ref for a bad call,” Tucker wrote on Facebook. “That man let me go out on my shield.”

He also let Tucker suffer through four broken bones in his face, including fractures in his jaw and orbital bones. He didn’t know that at the time – it’s not like he has X-ray vision – but what he should have been able to see was that, as of about the middle of the second round, Tucker was no longer in this fight.

Cardinal should have stopped it there. When he failed to, Tucker’s corner should have stopped it before the third. Instead, everyone with a responsibility to look out for his safety let Tucker get beat up for five more minutes, and for what?

I found myself asking a similar question later in the evening, when Gilbert Melendez’s corner talked him out of quitting on the stool before the third round of his pay-per-view main-card opener. Melendez (22-7 MMA, 1-5 UFC) had suffered a very obvious and visible leg injury early in the fight with Jeremy Stephens (26-14 MMA, 13-13 UFC). It clearly hampered his ability to move and defend and, at times, stand.

And yet when Melendez told his corner that he thought he was done, they talked him out of it. They told him he was fine. They told the doctor to pay no attention to the man with the ice pack on his shin. They told Melendez he could do anything for five minutes.

Of course, you go out there with limited mobility against a knockout artist like Stephens, one of the things you might do is hobble right into a concussion. Melendez didn’t, which is as much a testament to his poise and experience as his toughness, and in the end he managed to hear the final horn.

He still lost, of course, and he wasn’t able to do much but survive in the final round. Surviving might have been enough to help him net his $50,000 share of the “Fight of the Night” bonus, but it’s hard to say whether that’s genuine admiration from the UFC or just pity.

We have this strange attachment to pointless suffering in combat sports. Maybe it’s part of the morality play aspect of watching two people battle in a cage. We think that they are teaching us about how to suffer with strength and dignity, and to some extent maybe they are. Or maybe they’re just accumulating damage in the service of a lost cause.

The fact that both these fights happened on the same night in Edmonton helps to drive home a certain point. It’s the same Canadian city where, some three months ago, former UFC fighter Tim Hague died after being knocked out in a boxing match.

There was another fight where there seemed to be no real reason to continue after a first round in which Hague hit the deck four times. But again, combat sports love finality and hate even the tiniest shred of doubt. We often seem to feel that it’s easier to keep going than to stop and explain why.

And you can understand why the fighters want to keep going. Fans aren’t kind to those they deem a quitter. Plus, all that training for one night – and one paycheck that doubles with a victory – who can blame you for wanting to give yourself every last chance?

But then you look at Tucker, who was 10-0 with a promising future before he got his face broken in several places, all to prove what we already knew or suspected, which is that he’s a tough guy who can withstand some pain. It didn’t do him or his career any favors to take that extra five minutes worth of punishment. It was pointless and dumb and dangerous.

Same with Melendez, whose corner no doubt thought they were doing him a favor by talking him through a low point so he wouldn’t hate himself in the morning. Then again, in 10 years covering this sport, I’ve seen a handful of fighters get talked into continuing by well-meaning cornermen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those fighters win, but I have seen a lot of ugly fights that only got uglier.

There’s definitely a place for this mentality in sports like MMA, where you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t know how to get hurt, recover and overcome some adversity. But there’s a difference between fighting through the pain and being someone’s punching bag.

There are times when the pursuit of some minor moral victory will come at the expense of actual victories later on, the same way refusing to tap to a joint lock only earns you more time in surgery and rehab, when you could have been training and fighting and learning instead.

Seems to me we could do a better job of understanding and recognizing that distinction, and not valorizing empty risks that only serve to reinforce a point that’s already been proven. We get that UFC fighters are tough. You don’t make it to this level if you’re not.

But there’s a point where tough gives way to stupid. There are already enough ways for this sport to send you to the hospital. We don’t need to go looking for new ones.

For more on UFC 215, check out the UFC Events section of the site.