If anything, there was dissatisfaction in the air in Abu Dhabi long before Ciryl Gane’s fingers shot through Tom Aspinall’s eye sockets. The heavyweight division’s potential No. 1 contender bout between Jailton Almeida and Alexander Volkov was a certified dud, with Volkov forced to create offense off the bottom while the top man, Almeida, drove his forehead through the Russian’s chest.
Volkov tried to take the lemons he was dealt to make lemonade but ended up just leaving a sour taste in everyone’s mouths.
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By the time Gane was finding a home for that jab in the main event, the night was in need of a big delivery. And there was some truth-telling serum in play, too, because contrary to what Vegas oddsmakers believed would happen, Gane was bringing the fight. The blood began streaming out of Aspinall’s nose, which in and of itself was novel. In his past six fights spanning four calendar years, Aspinall had fought less than two total rounds of cage time. He’s been so good that we didn’t know what it looked like for him to be in danger. He was the guy who tossed opponents into the deep end of the pool, but he was never made to venture there himself.
He’d been so good, in fact, that one of the running narratives about his UFC career as a whole was that he’d only sat on the stool once, which was against that stodgy old nullifier Andrei Arlovski. It was to the point that any kind of adversity would feel like a momentous shift in perception, and Gane was out there giving him some adversity.
Then it happened.
He took fingers in both eyes on an exchange late in the first round, and the vision he had for the heavyweight division went blurry. Aspinall, who spent the better part of a year in a kind of purgatory while Jon Jones dithered as to whether to retire or not, had a panicked look on his face. He could not see. He held his hand over his eye as if to keep the eyeball from rolling out of his head. He walked around, blinking rapidly as if to process things faster, hoping for a quick restoration of sight. It didn’t happen. As the seconds ticked from the five-minute recovery window, it was apparent that disaster had struck.
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What made people angry was that the cageside doctor attending Aspinall could be heard saying the eye was fine, which threw us back a couple millennia to the gladiator days of yore. “The eyeball isn’t dangling from thy head, let the battle commence!” But Aspinall’s sight wasn’t as quick to return. Unsure if it was temporary or something far more serious as a 32-year-old fighter heavyweight on the cusp of historic things, he informed the referee Jason Herzog that he couldn’t see. As the fight was waved off, it was made abundantly clear that he could still hear.
The boos rained down at the Etihad Arena as if the Englishman were public enemy No. 1, and he took them in.
“Guys, I just got poked knuckle-deep in the eyeball,” he said. “Why are you booing? I can’t see.”
They booed, on the premises and far beyond, because there was no resolution. They booed because they paid the price of admission, or they had bets on the fight, or that they ponied up the money for one of the UFC’s last-ever pay-per-views just to see it end with no ending. Gane dropped to his knees and cried, because he didn’t want it to end that way either, especially after he had dictated the space so well in the early going. It was his big (perhaps last) chance to overthrow a UFC champion, to prove that he isn’t a perpetual runner-up.
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Yet he was lucky, too, because had the foul been deemed intentional rather than an accident, he would have been disqualified. That would mean no return match.
Ciryl Gane reacts after committing an accidental foul against Tom Aspinall at UFC 321.
(Chris Unger via Getty Images)
It was an unfortunate end that didn’t provide much of a resolution to the heavyweight picture. Coming into the fight there were major players whose fates swung in the balance of every punch. People like Volkov and Alex Pereira and, of course, Jon Jones, the man who won the vacant heavyweight title against Gane a couple of years ago. He was perhaps the most curious onlooker. The unifying title fight with Aspinall that he sidestepped was hovering out there as a backdoor possibility, even if Jones still wants no part of it. After the no-contest result reported out there in Albuquerque, Jones gave words to what he’s been telegraphing all along.
“Alex, I’d be down to bring the highest skill level to the White House,” he wrote. “I appreciate the respect you showed, let’s dance.”
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As in, Alex Pereira. Jones unpacked the burden of Aspinall in record time.
And if UFC matchmakers were looking for an excuse to bypass Aspinall altogether in pairing Jones and Pereira, UFC 321 rolled out the red carpet for it. Dana White said a rematch between Aspinall and Gane is the likeliest next step, meaning Jones and Pereira are free to tangle. Of course, Dana didn’t help the narrative that Aspinall is a quitter when he said, “Tom didn’t want to continue in the fight,” as if his heavyweight champion was overruled by his deepest inner wussy.
Tom Aspinall reacts after being hit in the eye while fighting Ciryl Gane at UFC 321.
(GIUSEPPE CACACE via Getty Images)
Naturally, Dana was pissed off. Way back in the day when the UFC first went to Abu Dhabi at UFC 112 in 2010, Anderson Silva put on a fiasco of a title defense against Demian Maia, in which the champion played with his food for 25 minutes. Dana threatened to cut Silva if he ever did a thing like that again.
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In this case, it was Aspinall who irked him. Aspinall, who has wrecked everybody the UFC has thrown at him up to this point. Who handled himself with the utmost professionalism as Jones made a mockery of the UFC. Just like that, Tom Aspinall was made to look like he wanted an easy way out in the biggest fight of his career. It’s not how anyone saw this thing playing out.
The way Aspinall envisioned things, he would get the heavyweight division moving again. He would defend the belt against all comers, and if one of those was Jon Jones or Alex Pereira coming up for a historic third title, all the better. After 15 months of waiting and keeping himself in shape, of answering questions about Jones and taking the high road at each juncture, this was his moment.
It was a mess, to be sure. It’s hard to fight when you can’t see.
Yet if hindsight is 20/20, Aspinall has never wanted out of anything. To say otherwise is just as blind.
