One mistake that has plagued the sport of MMA more than most is the eye poke. The offense has not only delayed many fights, but also ended them prematurely. It’s been a problem in the sport for years and there seems to be no sign of things slowing down.
Appears on the Podcast ‘Triggernometry’White said that while the UFC can make efforts to reduce the number of incidents, it is not something that will go away completely (h/t MMAfighting).
“We’ll 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 there.”
“It’s not like we’re going to come up with some damn invention that no one can poke at again. That’s just not going to happen.”
The most recent example of an eye poke ruining a fight was the heavyweight title fight between champion Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane at UFC 321. Gane found early success against Aspinall, but he poked the champion in both eyes. Aspinall was unable to continue and the fight was ruled a no contest.
White believes the answer to reducing eye pokes is for athletic commissions to hand out harsher consequences to fighters.
“It’s not good to be stabbed in the eye by someone,” White said. “We’ve tampered with gloves, we’ve tried to do all these things. I think the big story is that if there were tougher penalties, guys would be a lot more aware of it.
“Because you always have these guys where you throw punches and I block your punches [with my hands out and fingers extended] and then you get a guy reaching out to catch something and the other guy comes up, it’s going to happen. It doesn’t happen as often as it seems. I can’t remember the number… it’s like a hundred or something, my eyes are pricking over thousands of fights.”
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