‘Everybody needs to man up… including Dana White’: Henry Cejudo goes off about UFC’s ongoing eye poke debacle
Henry Cejudo is about to step in the octagon for the final time at UFC 323, and he hopes to leave the competitive side of the sport with more strict guidelines in place for eye pokes during fights.
Cejudo faces Payton Talbott at Saturday’s pay-per-view event in Las Vegas. It will be the first appearance for the former two-division champion since losing a technical decision to Song Yadong in the main event of UFC Seattle in February — a fight that went to the scorecards after Cejudo suffered a nasty eye poke from his opponent.
In a year of eye pokes stopping fights prematurely, and very few penalties being dished out, Cejudo has had enough.
“I think everybody needs to man up,” Cejudo said during a media scrum on Tuesday. “Dana White, the Nevada State Athletic Commission, the referees, and just make a f*cking decision, man. That’s bullshit. If we’re being warned in the back, alright, I’m going to start taking my warning, I’m going to start sticking you in the eye, too. I get a warning. Everybody just needs to f*cking man up and step up, and make this thing official.”
One of the more memorable eye pokes took place in the main event of October’s UFC 321 fight card when Tom Aspinall put his heavyweight title on the line against Ciryl Gane. While the challenger was looking pretty good early on, Gane poked Aspinall in the eye that caused the bout to be stopped, and left Aspinall with injuries he’s still working through.
Cejudo just wants to see things change, not just for the purity of sport and rules being in place, but to make sure other fighters in the future don’t deal with life-changing vision issues.
“Dude, somebody could lose an eye,” Cejudo explained. “Bisping. I mean, how many… these dudes are deformed for life, dude. That sucks. You know what I’m saying? “It sucks, one, that it happened to me, and two, Bethe Correira, there’s a lot of people that have eye issues that you guys don’t even know about.
“So it starts here, and I think it needs to be immediate. And if not, I think people need to be held accountable for that stuff. If I also lose an eye, dude, oof. Can you imagine that? ‘Oh yeah, good job. You’re a warrior.” Oh, OK. Who’s going to give me my eye back? Like everybody needs to step up. Everybody, including Dana White.“
