Yair Rodriguez returned to Mexico in 2019 fresh off his triumphant, last-second knockout of “The Korean Zombie,” Chan Sung Jung. All week in Polanco the music was festive and talks of a title filled the air as he got ready for a tailor-made main event against Jeremy Stephens.
On fight night it was a raucous scene at the Mexico City Arena, even as Mexican fighters Brandon Moreno and Alexa Grasso dropped decisions just before Rodriguez made the walk. It was his night, after all. He would right the ship. There was an expectation in the air.
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So when Rodriguez inadvertently poked Stephens in the eye just 15 seconds into the action, in what was the first real exchange, there was instant frustration to what felt like a constant interruption to positive flow. As Stephens walked around holding his eye, Brian Ortega got up from his seat and whipped the crowd into a frenzy, the way Fireman Ed does with Jets fans in New Jersey.
As a minute passed, the boos rained down stronger. It was deafening.
Another minute went by, and amid the mounting chaos, Stephens told referee Herb Dean, “He got me good.” The doctor came in and peeled Stephens’ eyelid back to shine a light into the socket, and Stephens couldn’t keep it open. The towel remained on the eye. By the three-minute mark of the five-minute recovery period, the chants were coming down in throes of incredulous denial. Four minutes, the thought was, “This can’t be happening.”
On the broadcast, Michael Bisping was already preempting the “he quit” narrative by saying Stephens spent months training for the fight, and he wouldn’t come all this way just to look for a way out and waste everybody’s time.
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In the arena, Bisping’s voice of reason wasn’t heard, and those on media row began to close their computers for the expected fallout. At the five-minute threshold, Dean came in and, seeing Stephens still could not open his eye, he waved off the fight. He might as well have signaled the troops to fire at will.
Bedlam.
Jeremy Stephens stands in his corner after an accidental eye-poke from Yair Rodriguez in Mexico City.
(Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
I can still remember Bisping ducking under the broadcast desk to avoid getting pelted with flying debris and errant beers. It was the most anticlimactic main event I could recall in that moment, because thousands of paid customers would be hitting the exits with a collective case of bolas azules.
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Fights ending with no resolution have never gone over well.
I couldn’t help but think about that when Tom Aspinall walked around the cage in Abu Dhabi at UFC 321, holding his eye with a panicked look on his face. The automatic response for anyone watching is, “Shake it off — get back in there and fight.” But when fingers go deep into the sockets like that, whatever people paid in pay-per-view prices is no longer of immediate concern.
Aspinall couldn’t continue, and ever since an argument has raged. He is a quitter. No, he’s not. He wanted a way out. No, he couldn’t see.
“I saw the highlights of the fight, or the lowlights,” former UFC fighter Matt Mitrone told Uncrowned this week. “And honestly, there’s two schools of thought, right? Good for you if you opt to continue. You’ve got giant balls if you go. But the bad part is you’re fighting at a disadvantage.”
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The reason I asked Mitrione is because you might recall he took one of the nastiest eye-pokes on record against Travis Browne at a UFC Fight Night event in Boston in 2016. When I texted him, his reply was, “I consider myself the gold standard of eye-gouge recipients.” His eye swelled up to freakish proportions as it became a target for further abuse once he decided to continue in the fight against Browne.
Eye injuries rarely appear worse than Matt Mitrione’s in 2016 at the TD Garden in Boston.
(Boston Globe via Getty Images)
“At the very least, your depth perception is off because there’s blood flow, there’s swelling, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going on,” he said. “On top of that. I was seeing double, and I even told [the referee and cageside doctor] I was seeing double. I can’t see.”
Inexperience with a situation like that didn’t help Mitrione in the moment. Tough-guy values were the norm. Even though his vision was compromised, he carried on.
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“The only reason I continued, to be totally honest, is because I didn’t know what my options were,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me talk to my corner. They wouldn’t let me have any kind of conversation to kind of really get an explanation of what was happening. And so instead of losing the fight because of that, I didn’t know what was happening. I was like, ‘Well, f*** it, man. I might as well just keep going, I guess.”
Seeing it happen nearly a decade later, Mitrione is one of the few who can fully empathize with the situation Aspinall found himself in. If he continues, he satisfies the public’s wants, yet if he loses — and in Aspinall’s case, gives up his UFC heavyweight title — there won’t be an asterisk placed on the fight to say an eye-poke was involved.
It’s just an L.
“In my opinion, I think Aspinall made the right decision,” Mitrione said. “All he gets [if he continues] is a loss on his record. If he fought and had huge balls, if he was at any disadvantage, there’s no extra money from the UFC. There’s nothing else on his record.”
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In Stephens’ case, he had to deal with the consequences in the moment, and he heard that nasty Q-word plenty in the subsequent weeks. It didn’t matter that he’d had 45 fights before Rodriguez stuck him in the eye, a certain kind of person saw him as a quitter. It didn’t help that Rodriguez himself accused him of faking the injury.
Stephens would end up losing the rematch against Rodriguez a few months later and six of his last seven fights as he was ousted from the UFC.
For Mitrione, he didn’t get called a quitter because … well, he went out there and took his licks from both Travis Brownes (as the double vision made it appear). He lost that fight to the Brownes, and it was the last time he’d ever appear in the UFC. He says if it happened to him today, the way it did with Aspinall, he would have done the same thing the champ did.
“One hundred percent,” he said. “Tom’s no fool, man. He’s at top of his game. He’s making great money. He knows exactly what he’s up to. He’s no fool.
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“For him to be like, ‘Absolutely not, man, I’m fighting at a disadvantage now — no dice.’ And on top of that, go and think about this: Aspinall probably had to get that fight to the ground to have a much better chance of winning, because Gane is so damn good at standing. So for that, his depth perception on his shots and everything else, bro, that’s all going to be almost neutral after that, if he had any advantage in that position.”
Tom Aspinall has seemingly not gotten the benefit of the doubt from some within the MMA community.
(GIUSEPPE CACACE via Getty Images)
As for the more nuanced argument that an eye-poke with that kind of severity should be deemed an automatic foul, resulting in a point deduction or — if a fighter can’t continue — a disqualification to the offending party, Mitrione says it’s worth discussing.
“I don’t think that’s a bad conversation to have,” he said. “I think a disqualification — I mean, if it happens twice, I think that should be automatic. I think that having a slap on the wrist and having the person that was affected, if he continues, he’s hamstrung, he’s at some of a disadvantage to not have any point taken away.
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“Then again, a point taken away is really not that big of a deal, because chances are, if you’re standing up, his depth perception with the wrestling is going to be affected. And if you’re standing up, then his depth perception of where your strikes are coming in are going to be affected — losing a point isn’t that big of a deal, especially if you have knockout power. So really, it’s not a bad conversation to have.”
