Michael Bisping heavily disagrees with Jon Jones calling UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall a quitter.
Jones went off on Aspinall (15-3 MMA, 8-1 UFC) for being unable to continue against Ciryl Gane after getting poked in the eye during their heavyweight title fight at UFC 321. The bout was ruled a no contest towards the end of Round 1.
Jones called Aspinall overrated, and accused him of quitting numerous times throughout his career by also referencing his torn ACL against Curtis Blaydes in July 2022. Bisping came to his fellow Brit’s defense.
“We knew a few days after the fight with Ciryl Gane that he still couldn’t see,” Bisping said on his YouTube channel. “To say the man’s a quitter, it’s not really fair. Then he talked about the Curtis Blaydes fight. He said, ‘Oh, but with Curtis Blaydes, he didn’t even try to continue. He just went straight to lying on the floor and clutching his leg and howling in agony.’ … To say that he didn’t try to fight through it, it’s not how these things work. You throw a kick, something happens in your knee, something breaks, something tears – just because the guy didn’t continue fighting doesn’t make him a quitter. The man was in a tremendous amount of pain. It was done. It was over.
“Then of course Jon Jones points to another early loss in Tom’s career going back to June 2015 and he got submitted via a heel hook. If you watch the video, yes, he tapped pretty quickly. He was caught in a heel hook. When you’re caught in a heel hook, you’ve got two choices: If the heel hook is in and it’s proper, you’ve got to tap, otherwise they’re going to blow out all the ligaments in your knee, and there’s a good possibility that you never fight again, you’re certainly going to be walking funny, you’re going to have surgery, you’re going to be out for a year, and you may never fight again. Do you call that being a quitter or do you call that being smart?”
UFC CEO Dana White recently confirmed that Aspinall and Gane are expected to run things back as soon as Aspinall is cleared to fight by doctors.
