Triggernometry<\/a> podcast. \u201cWe\u2019ve messed around with gloves, we\u2019ve tried to do all these things. I think the big talk is if there\u2019s harder penalties for doing it, guys would be a lot more conscious of it.<\/p>\n\u201cBecause you always have these guys where you\u2019re throwing punches and I\u2019m 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\u2019s going to happen. It doesn\u2019t happen as much as it seems. I can\u2019t remember the number \u2026 it\u2019s like a hundred or something eye pokes over thousands of fights.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
White admits that Aspinall\u2019s immediate reaction after his fight ended probably didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t ever want a fight to end like that,\u201d White said. \u201cThen the problem is and I think Tom took it a little too hard but you\u2019ve got all of these people [saying] \u2018he quit!\u2019 It\u2019s easy to sit on the couch or sit in the chair and watch somebody get poked in the eye and go \u2018oh [you quit]\u2019 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.\u201d\\<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will definitely figure something out,\u201d White said. \u201cIt\u2019s like bad decisions, bad referee calls, I mean it\u2019s never going to go away. It\u2019s always going to be here.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like we\u2019re going to create some f*cking invention that nobody can get eye poked again. It\u2019s just not going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Aspinall is still healing from an eye poke he suffered in his fight against Ciryl Gane that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-316730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}