Last Saturday’s UFC event was probably one of the strangest shows in a long time. It could’ve been the final haunting by the ghost of UFC 151, or it could’ve just been one of those nights where nothing goes as planned. Sometimes these things happen in MMA. We saw multiple fights end early, and Gian Villante and Ovince St. Preux. Villante was poked in the eye, and when the referee asked him if he could see, Villante said “no, I just got poked in the eye.” That’s a truthful and accurate statement. However, that statement also ended the fight.
In MMA there is no five minute recovery time for getting poked in the eye. You either have to gut it out or tell the ref the truth, which could end the fight.
Dana White spoke on this at the post fight media scrum:
“He should have had a doctor come in,” “You stop the fight. You send the guy to a neutral counter. You have a doctor come in a check him out, and the doctor determines whether he can go on or not. That’s what should have happened.”
“The guys said, ‘can you see?’ He said, ‘I can’t see,’ so he stopped the fight. He said I can’t see because I got poked in the (expletive) eye. Give me a minute. But apparently, what Joe Silva (UFC matchmaker) was telling me, there’s no poke in the eye rule here,” explained White.
“If you get kicked in the groin you get five minutes to recover from it. There’s nothing in the rules about a poke to the eye because in boxing there is no poked in the eye. Guys don’t get poked in the eye anymore in boxing,” said White.
“What needs to happen is that ABC (Association of Boxing Commissions) needs to get together and we need to come up with a few things,” “We really need to revamp some rules and regs.”
Thankfully, eye poke recovery wasn’t the only rule White noticed needs changing:
“Obviously the eye poke thing is a big deal. We need to talk about that. And the other thing is this three-point thing where you can’t get kneed if you have your finger on the ground. That’s not what the rule was meant for, so I think we’re due.”
Now the only question is if an eye poke rest period will truly help the situation, or do we need to give Joe Rogan a few million bucks to develop some new gloves?
