It doesn’t feel good when objects fly into your eyeballs, especially if those objects are high-speed fingertips from a heavyweight striker of Ciryl Gane’s caliber. Unfortunately for UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall, he experienced such an occurrence at UFC 321 this past Saturday in Abu Dhabi.
The highly-anticipated championship main event screeched to a halt late in Round 1, resulting in a no-contest after Aspinall stated that he was unable to see due to the eye pokes he suffered. Narratives have since spiraled out of control throughout the MMA community, with some claiming Aspinall sought a way out of the bout after presumably dropping the lone round to Gane on the judges’ scorecards. Thanks to the premature ending of the fight, scorecards were never released to confirm who won the frame.
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Appearing Tuesday on “The Ariel Helwani Show,” sports medicine doctor Brian Sutterer broke down exactly what happened when the fight was waved off by referee Jason Herzog and the cageside doctors.
“What I saw was a mechanism, a moment, a foul that can clearly cause — even if it’s not specifically a big, bad severe injury, can clearly cause enough visual impairment that the fight should be stopped,” Sutterer told Uncrowned. “That’s really what you have to focus on. Everybody seemed to be latching onto the fact, that even at the hospital afterward, the doctor said, ‘Well, there’s no serious damage.’ People thought that his eye visually looked OK. The doctor that was there covering the fight said the eye looks OK. There’s a big difference between something looking OK and something functioning OK.
“When you get knuckles dug deep into your eyes, not just on one side, but on both sides, that’s plenty of force and plenty of trauma to cause your eye to not function the right way, even though it might objectively look OK when the doctor is there at the ringside examining it.
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“It was handled perfectly. The eye visually looks OK, but in those circumstances, you have, No. 1, a foul, a mechanism of injury, and you have a fighter that’s telling you symptoms, that’s telling you they can’t see. If you can’t see, you can’t protect yourself; the fight can’t continue. It seems very straightforward to me.”
Eye-pokes are an unfortunate reality of fighting in MMA, and perhaps more specifically, the UFC. This isn’t the first time a fight has ended by the foul and won’t be the last.
Sutterer said he believes Aspinall likely suffered a corneal abrasion, and even if he could’ve continued, the abrasion would’ve caused light refraction, leading to a shimmer in vision and blurred spots.
“So the cornea is the outermost layer that goes across the front of your eye,” Sutterer said. “It’s a clear layer of cells, and if you take a finger, something dirty, even a clean finger, and you scrape it across the front of the cornea, you actually tear — you’ll cause trauma to that layer of cells on the cornea. That’s a corneal abrasion.
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“There’s a reflex that happens that you cannot control where your eye wants to close because it’s experienced a trauma. Your body is designed to protect yourself. So whenever you have trauma to the eye, your body doesn’t know what you’re doing — it’s designed to react and protect itself. So there will be a reflex that you cannot easily overcome, where the eye wants to close itself. You’ll have tearing that occurs. The tearing can cause the vision to look very blurry.
“The eyelid is going to want to close and stay closed. That’s why you see fighters really struggle, and it kind of looks like they’re faking it, right? That’s a reflex. That’s not something they’re intentionally doing. It’s your body trying to protect the eye from more injury.”
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One of the more notable recent cases of a corneal abrasion occurring in MMA happened between former UFC welterweight champions Leon Edwards and Belal Muhammad in their first fight in March 2021. However, that instance arguably came with a bit more clarity, as cameras captured in slow-motion Edwards’ fingertip entering to pull Muhammad’s eyelid when it hit the eyeball.
Aspinall’s poke involved poking the eyelid and the application impact, which can also cause damage, as explained by Sutterer.
“Let’s say your eye is closed and a finger goes directly into the eyeball,” Sutterer said. “You can think of it like a concussion to your eyeball,” Sutterer said. “We know with a concussion, there’s this force of energy that’s transferred into your brain, into those brain cells, causing disruption to those brain cells.
“When the [eye] gets poked, that energy is transferred through the meat of the eyeball and can cause damage to the retina, which is the layer on the backside of the eye. It can cause this temporary stunning, where your vision is going to be blurry. It’s going to be distorted just from all that direct pressure. Those were probably the two most likely things causing him to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I can’t see.'”
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In a video posted Tuesday, Aspinall’s father and coach stated that the champ “still can’t see anything” out of his right eye and that Aspinall’s left eye was only working at “50%.”
“[Doctors] said it’s bad, it’s not good,” Aspinall’s father said. “But his eye is a little bit more closed than it was. His right eye, he still can’t see anything. He said it’s just grey, and they tested him on words and he just couldn’t see anything. His left eye, 50% — he went down about four letters and then he just couldn’t see the letters. So one’s really, really blurry and one’s still not working.”
Sutterer said he expects Aspinall’s recovery to take several weeks, although that could obviously change depending on the severity of the damage.
UFC CEO Dana White confirmed immediately after the fight that Aspinall and Gane will run back their title tilt at the earliest convenience.
