Dana White argues ‘harder penalties’ likely the best solution for eye poke problems in UFC
Tom Aspinall is still healing from an eye poke he suffered in his fight against Ciryl Gane that brought his first defense as undisputed UFC heavyweight champion to an unceremonious end back in October.
While the eye poke was called and the action paused, the referee didn’t immediately penalize Gane for the foul and the fight was ultimately declared a no-contest. In the aftermath of that situation, there have been calls for changes to the way eye pokes are handled in fights but UFC CEO Dana White doesn’t believe that it’s a technical issue as much as fighters just need to be dissuaded from the practice leading to those particular fouls.
“Getting poked in the eye by anybody isn’t good,” White said on the Triggernometry podcast. “We’ve messed around with gloves, we’ve tried to do all these things. I think the big talk is if there’s harder penalties for doing it, guys would be a lot more conscious of it.
“Because you always have these guys where you’re throwing punches and I’m blocking your punches [with my hands out and fingers extended] and then you get a guy that reaches out to catch something and the other guy is coming forward, it’s going to happen. It doesn’t happen as much as it seems. I can’t remember the number … it’s like a hundred or something eye pokes over thousands of fights.”
Unfortunately the spotlight is much brighter when an eye poke ruins a main event like what happened at UFC 321 when Aspinall was unable to continue after he was fouled.
Referees have sole discretion on the penalties handed out during a fight with options like point deductions or even disqualifications at their disposal to use as a deterrent.
White admits that Aspinall’s immediate reaction after his fight ended probably didn’t help his cause in the court of public opinion but nobody is faulting him for not being able to continue after he got poked in the eye.
“You don’t ever want a fight to end like that,” White said. “Then the problem is and I think Tom took it a little too hard but you’ve got all of these people [saying] ‘he quit!’ It’s easy to sit on the couch or sit in the chair and watch somebody get poked in the eye and go ‘oh [you quit]’ or get punched and knocked out. You go home, you recover, you get back in the gym and we get back out and start fighting again.”\
Like it or not, White says that eye pokes like all fouls in the UFC are going to happen no matter what changes the promotion makes in an attempt to fix the problem.
But fighters facing stiffer penalties for committing those fouls might be the only real solution, although White cautions that the problem is never going to truly just go away.
“We will definitely figure something out,” White said. “It’s like bad decisions, bad referee calls, I mean it’s never going to go away. It’s always going to be here.
“It’s not like we’re going to create some f*cking invention that nobody can get eye poked again. It’s just not going to happen.”
