BTG 127 - Eye Pokes Are Too Common To Be Accidental

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the guard we just had a UFC Fight Night Henry cejudo versus song and uh was a great Fight Card actually all the predum fights went to finishes mostly Knockouts couple submissions even the main card good amount of Knockouts and submissions the the worst fight honestly was the main event right and again spoiler are here if you haven't watched it yet uh Henry cejudo ended up losing due to a doctor stoppage because he suffered a severe IE poke and then it went to the scorecards and I not sure what the scorecards revealed but it was a very weird situation and it just brings about the topic of how do you deal with these fouls because it seems in any UFC card we're going to see at least one ey gou and even in this one I can recall two eye gouges happening in separate fights so it is a really big problem and in this case for example Henry I had him going into the third round won a piece I thought song won the first round I thought Henry uh took the second round at the end he popped in with a good cross that bloodied song's nose and then he had open up a cut under his eye so although I think the punch stat showed that song landed more it seemed to me damage wise that Henry was Landing more damage more damaging shots although Henry also has a fairly good chance so he did shot but he he didn't seem any worse for the wear uh whereas song the damage was uh very visible but that was my take I think I was surprised I was seeing like on X people are like putting oh everyone was saying it was two rounds To None I was like oh okay maybe I'm the one that's that's seeing what they're seeing but I I thought Henry had won the second round third round um I'm trying to remember now because I I've kind of Forgotten a little bit about it I think song was probably winning that round if I can remember correctly but then I I think the fight the round started actually with a nutshot from song that Henry recovered from pretty quickly and then with about a minute 13 left he got ey GED and it was a bad one because it was a double ey gouge hand reached like this fingers split out so he got both eyes but it was particularly uh Henry's left eye that got really jabbed in like finger inside the eyelid and uh they stopped it and Henry did what rarely any fighter does which is he used up all five minutes and the ref as usual is trying to speed up the process uh but Henry was complaining about the eye significantly he at one point sat down and kind of played to the crowd which is a weird move and I think when he did that a lot of people thought he was just milking it for rest time I don't think he needed to rest if anything I think it was going to work against him cuz song was going to be even fresher um it it's hard to say because what ended up happening after the five minutes were up he resumed the fight but very very different right he was basically running away uh quite literally from song who was pursuing him like a rabid dog and uh it looked like Henry could not see what was coming at him because he was just frantic moving around wasn't throwing any counter punches and in between the third and uh fourth round he just kept telling his corner I can't see anything I'm I'm see blurry uh I can't see the punches call the doctor in uh and hers was it Herzog I'm not sure but that was was a ref or was another one but they made a weird move because I've seen them stop fights in between rounds but he said that they had to start the fourth round so then he can call the fight and then it would go to the scorecards so it's a weird like why would you do it that way didn't seem to make any sense I don't know if they would have stopped it in the third it wouldn't go to the score cards that'll become a the contest and that would seem to have favorite Henry because by all standards he was going to be losing on my card it would have been 2 to one I think on many people's cards it was 3 0 so uh kind of a weird move by the referee there but he ended up losing on the scorecards after they did that now he a lot I see a lot of people hating on Henry saying oh he he was trying to cheat he thought he was winning the rounds so that he was going to get an easy win uh I'm like I'm not sure that was a case I'm not sure if he was faking now I can tell you most people that I see right in the comments have never suffered a night injury cuz you'll see people like oh like oh it takes like a minute and then you're back to normal like no it definitely does not right uh I have seen some pretty egregious eye gouges I've Had The Misfortune of having fighter many fighters with shitty opponents that I gouged them one of them got dced because he blatantly I gouged my opponent my fighter twice and the second time the the referee dced him justly it was actually from the guy was I gouging my fighter from bottom mount and just literally looking with his thumb for the eye it was just very blatant um and similar types of injuries I've had over the years with Fighters and it's always blatant right I I feel like ey gouging accidental does it happen yes but very rarely uh I think for the most part people are cheating and that's what really gets me upset about this because it's like admissible cheating let me explain something we're fighting striking on our feet I can't think of a valid reason a legal valid reason for me to have my hands SP like this right this does not really help me in any way and I'm actually using energy because my relaxed hand is going to be closed like this there's no eyou here I have to stretch out my fingers my extensors have to extend and I have to keep tension for this to work all right so this is not an accidental motion this is stretched same thing with this here right now you can make a little bit more of a case oh I'm trying to push and I think that is more of The Accidental area where you know I am like trying to push somebody and then the fingers curl in a little bit and and they catch you there but this one is definitely cheater 100% you're trying to I out somebody right uh this one little bit of a gray area although I mean for my sake if I'm striking my hands are usually here relaxed and then obviously when I go to strike I close the fist but here I'm I'm in a position where I can parry and catch right with either hand and I'm not using wasting energy by flexing my hand closed or stretching my hand open but what was interesting when song restarted the round after the the eye gouge he was right away like this hands stretched out fingers open and putting a lot of pressure and I was like what the hell dude like normally the ref gives you a Stern warning hey keep the hands closed right and he was just like this the whole time moving forward it was like you know uh it's like he was trying to threaten that he was going to I gouge again it's a very weird move right it doesn't hold a lot of strategic advantage to be with your hands out like this unless I'm trying to AG out you right or if I'm I'm constantly trying to push you which is normally not the case right and it's easy for me to make the adjustment with like a relaxed hand to to push there there's no need to be hand SP out constantly that is a very weird uh stance so that's why to me this is kind of like a cheater move right where I'm moving at somebody like this like it's like I'm trying to get an accidental eye gouch uh it shouldn't be happening as often as it does and you'll often find that Fighters that get into the ey gouges usually have multiple fights where they get eye gouges uh there go Jon Jones is the is the classic one right uh this to me is a cheater tactic so there needs to be harsher penalties on this because otherwise if you're getting a free pass every time you do it and you're making it seem like oh you know this this happens all the time like no no it's not supposed to happen all the time I can't recall a time that I've iow somebody right and look grappling where we don't even have to worry about striking right but we do have lots of pushing and wrestling right which means it's a lot more reaching involved and when you reach you tend to have a open hand because I'm not trying to punch you now I'm trying to grab the back of your head trying to grab a wrist I'm trying to post on your shoulder I can't recall a time in my grappling career where I had to stop a match because I got oued or my opponent got I gouged I can't recall in the tournament I've been in ACC where that's happened either and I've spectated now the past uh 2017 2019 2022 and 2024 so like the past four I've been at person can't recall one time someone got oued in hundreds of matches in each tournament so if I gouging was something that happened easily by accident we would be seeing it more graphic oh the I go we have to stop you know the the match and then like we have a penalty time like it's not even in the discussion right like it just doesn't happen but in MMA where we're striking right which means closed fist it's happening all the time my opinion is BS people are cheating either you have bad technique and don't know how to fight properly or you're trying to cheat now you're not trying you are cheating I think it's a ladder people are cheating right they know they can get away with it and they're going to try to just like the growing cakes right it's another one like and just to hammer in because the eye ones are the worst ones in my opinion because they can have lasting impact on a person's career there's a lot of people that don't get to ever see the same again in their life I know a couple of them that they're are essentially blind out of one eye because from people IE gouging it's totally unfair you you you could cut a career short there not to mention you're you're affecting someone's Health outside of the the cage long term so I feel like this is something that I'm not sure what the right answer to it is in regards to iy but just to say a few things it's not a few minutes and you're okay like if you had a severe eye gouge 5 minutes is not going to do it right 10 minutes is not going to you're going to need a few hours at Best and you might need to go to the doctor and and get stuff checked out I've had like from I've talked about previously the scuba diving injury I had where I was seeing double and I wasn't I GS it was just a literally vacuum that pulled my uh my eye out of the socket pretty much and I was seeing blurry for like 3 days right you could give me a the 5 minutes ain't going to do crap for me right like and that's in my opinion not even as severe as like a real eye gouch right I have seen uh severe ey gouges in person and this is one of the things that makes the Henry thing a little less believable right so I'm not going to totally throw a song under the bus here normally I injuries are extremely painful when they particularly when their eye gouges uh to the point that I've have seen someone in training he shot in on somebody it was um it was actually George mosid doll was when he was training with my brother and I back in the day he shot in on my brother and my brother's hand was on his hip and his thumb was just happened to be sticking out and George's face went and basically the my brother felt his whole thumb go inside of George's eye socket and I didn't really see what happened I was just on the outside and I was behind my brother so I couldn't really see it but the reaction was uh terrible because George rolled to his back immediately started spasming and then threw up all over the place and my brother was freaking out you know I guess he was like a 20-year-old and he was like ah was looking at his thumb because he felt like the penetration right and I was like what the hell is going on and then my was like my thumb went all the way in his eye and uh George took a few minutes to be able to just get him out of that state because he was just in spasm right uh that was probably the worst one I've seen in person again I you could give George two hours and he was not going to be okay right like uh we had to take him to the hospital fortunately he was able to be cleared and you know obviously he's had a great career since but that type of injury you're not bouncing back one and that one just happened to be like a rare flu like accidental case like where my brother's hand just happened to be jammed into his hip right uh but we don't usually see that thank God because that's a terrible can tell you those are excruciatingly painful but I've had like I said most of the time when you see it happen it's like a poke uh versus someone ramming their head into your your your thumb and those pokes are very painful and uh with Henry we didn't really see him in any pain on the eye gouch he just went right into saying he couldn't see it was very blurry right uh so that's a little bit unusual because normally the pain is severe uh when it's a hard eye gouge but in any case I mean I'm not an expert I just have some personal and anecdotal experience so uh but if he did suffer eye damage and he was very blurry it would be hard to recover from that like it doesn't just go away right it's like five minutes is not really going to do it so all the five minutes is doing was if you had like one of like a minor poke where like it just like ah you know like okay like your on your eyelid kind of inverted or whatever like okay I got to get that sorted do this type of thing like if you had an eyelash stuck in there like five minutes will get that out but anything else is not really doing much for like you're going to be fighting with like not full capacity of eyesight which is pretty terrifying when you're when you're fighting and you have somebody who's a really good Striker like song was uh so the idea that you can just bounce back from in 5 minutes is not true if it's a real eye injury it's not going to really make much of a difference to be honest the best thing you're going to get out of is get your wi back if you're retired but other than that you're if again like I said there there's obviously a gradient of how severe the eye pokes are sometimes it's just like like this and you're like ah like you have a few like moments and then you're good but if it's a real jab of the eye you're not bouncing back that quick right so it was in clear that Henry wanted out of this fight that's for certain right now was it because he knew he couldn't fight anymore and that he was going to lose this fight or was it because uh like people are saying he was trying to cheat his way out of it and he was hoping to win on the scorecards because in his head he was winning that I couldn't tell you and he did do some gamesmanship which was weird when he was playing to the crowd but again he's kind of a cringey guy so it's not offbrand for him I think that kind of rubbed people the wrong way like he's like oh he's like playing this and then he like he pretty much quits a fight after that it's not a great look optically right uh but it doesn't mean that he was faking it either I don't think uh well I would hope that he wouldn't fake his way out of a fight it's possible I can't fully discount it wrestlers are dirty and he is a wrestler uh but uh it's believable to me that this is what happened right and but it's clear that he wanted out of there uh because he asked he was trying to get his corner to throw in the towel and like and call the fight and the corners weren't like really listening to it they were being the type of corner like you get back out there you're going to find a way to win right uh but uh he like I call the doctor in because when you when you say that as a fighter you know they're going to stop the fight if you say I can't see it's over so uh he clearly wanted out of the fight that's for certain but if he wanted out of the fight cuz he knew he could not intelligently defend himself it makes sense look he's 38 right if he suffers a severe knockout or gets even more damaged he is totally shot right and could have some long-term consequences but this is kind of the problem I feel with Henry in his like career trajectory which I talked about when I on Friday on the news which is he took such a layoff because I feel like he made the same misc culation as fedor's management did with his career that he took a few years off thinking that he was going to be able to get more money and ended up not getting any more money and then comes back and now has suffered three losses in a row he lost the AA he lost the Mystique and he probably lost a lot of the fire right uh because normally a fighter does not want to walk away from a fight right even when he knows the stack the the cards are stack against them you're still going to step in right like you're you're in there to the death right and you'll find any way to win despite the odds when you have the mentality like oh I'm not doing well here I don't like this I I need to get out of here it's not a good recipe for the mentality of a fighter because you have quit in you now and like I said it's understandable it's actually very reasonable but we don't want a reasonable fighter we we want a fighter that believes in the impossible so in my opinion this kind of puts the hammer I mean the the nail in the coffin right like your equitability is higher here even though you were wronged and cheated yeah but like the fact that you are able to walk away from this want to walk away from this is not a good sign from the mentality talent wise he looked good you know like I said I thought he won one of the rounds uh he didn't seem to commit to any of the takedowns I don't know if he was waiting into the later rounds or not but it wasn't looking like at the current fight trajectory that it was going to work out for him looked like song had was able to outpoint him I was going to continue to do so for the most part excuse me and uh that he wasn't going to be able to close the gap and find the takedown um yeah because he would have to win the last two rounds which especially after the IOU definitely wasn't going to happen but I mean the what can we do about the II right I know was I think a Grappler Brandon Reed if I'm not mistaken he actually competes with little goggles which is or maybe he just trains with them I don't know but I've seen him wear the goggles before they're like the swimming goggles right and I don't know if he has some type of vision issue or or whatnot and but that's not entirely terrible for I mean for grappling it pretty much works because you don't really have to worry about impact too much and normally you're not jamming your eyes into someone's you know body or face so you don't have to worry about that but with MMA there is a problem there of course because we're punching and kicking and kneeing so then we have to wonder about the Integrity of like how well are those goggles going to hold up I mean we've seen cups get crushed imagine if the goggles got broken and then A Shard of that goes in your eye right so uh I guess there would have to be some engineering involved uh to make sure that these things wouldn't break and then I guess targeting is also not going to be an issue because if you're the opponent I mean the other thing you have to consider too is that if I punch hard the goggle the frame is going to dent in uh and since it's going to be technically a thinner area because it's just the rim versus a whole fist the pressure is going to be significantly higher so even that might be enough to cause the cuts more frequently now because it's going to push the whole Rim around sharply and probably towards one side if I hit the right eye or their left eye it's going to like bevel a little bit so yeah I know people have teased that I thought of that too but while I think for grappling it doesn't really pose a problem for MMA I think it would right like we would have to find a way to be able to one Ure that the goggle wouldn't break to that you could disperse the pressure so that it wouldn't cause Cuts in itself or any other type of damage I think the bigger thing really is just really de incentivizing fighting with your hand spit out to me like I said it's a cheater tactic man like you shouldn't be out there with your hands like this like this is I'm trying to I out you all right like have an open like you have your relaxed hand that's generally what you're supposed to be doing when you're fighting this leaves it easy to close I'm not wasting energy because I'm not either I'm not in flexion or an extension I'm just relaxed where my hands want to be I can catch I can Parry here and you know if I need to push I can open up and and push you know if I need to close I can close so I think that minimizes is a lot of the potential because like I said it's more understandable to me when someone is trying to stop a Tak down and an IOU happens because that's more like a I'm doing this type of thing versus the Striking situation which is I'm punching but my hands are open right which if I recall that's what song ended up doing he kind of open-handed jabbed Henry and you know got the double eye gouch that to me should be a de cable offense right at the very minimum lost a point because you took an illegal action I jabbed at my opponent with my hands open right different than opponent is shooting in at me and I'm trying to push him away right that's excusable okay you was trying to you know post on the shoulder and you know this guy's head went into the the path or he miscalculated and he managed to get the eye right uh so I think that's a tricky area I understand that but we do have camera replays and there's people watching off to the side so I imagine this could be investigated and figured out right uh but if these penalties are not harsh people are just going to keep doing it right and even with like run shots like people dismiss those those are also not easy to come back from probably the worst growing shot I've ever suffered I was down the floor for 30 minutes couldn't get up I remember because I was throwing a roundhouse kick my brother was throwing a step sidekick and sparring and his step sidekick just caught both of my nuts just po heal right in dropped me like a sack of potatoes and at first I was just grimacing in pain ah and he was he started to laugh afterwards and I got really upset and I tried to get up and I couldn't I got to my knees and like just my I felt my hips completely just shut down like and it just rolled back in to my my side and I was like fetal for like a good 10 minutes then I was able to get up to my knees but I still couldn't stand and it took about like I said 30 minutes before was able to get back on my feet and I was done sparring like I couldn't do anything after that so groin shots can be just as debilitating and I've been on both sides of this I had it where I remember I was sparing this guy who was a good boxer and I was just starting an MMA it must have been like maybe a year and this guy was piecing me up on the feet and I threw an inside uh leg kick that obviously went too High caught him and clipped them not not particularly bad just clipped them and he needed like a couple minutes and I was like man I'm sorry and uh after the couple minutes we restarted and then I started beating him and I was like running all over him I'm like what the hell I'm like oh my God the nutshot like it just took his legs out and you know he was he was mad enough to keep fighting you know but even like a groin shot that wasn't severe was enough to ruin his fight capacity where like where he had a obvious Winning Edge on me now swing completely the other way so these types of fouls even if they give you the five minutes it's not enough right like if they did the damage they already the damage is already done so like you're not getting it back right like you're you're not always going to be able to recover I know for some people that's hard to understand and that's because you've never suffered the injury that would be like saying oh boom I split you open oh give him five minutes he'll be okay like no he's split open already like he's not coming back from that now like he has to deal with this cut right it's like that accidental Clash of heads right like you can't oh five minutes and he's good even though you can't see it the damage is the same if it's an eye gou or if it's a nutshot right like it's there you can't undo it the the five minutes is not going to be enough so we need the action the penalties to be more punitive in my opinion like it it needs to be like minus point right and maybe there's a case for even accidental uh to be a minus point right from the get-go because the the the thing is like unfortunately Fighters are not honorable so we can't really gauge like how bad of a nutshot was this or how bad of a ey gouge was this like you can't really see it from the outside the only person they can tell you is the guy who has all the incentive to lie right um so it's hard to know whether this is a warning or this is a penalty or this a DQ right like it's really hard to say to me anything that's done blatantly should be instant DQ right uh so that's why like I'm saying if I'm jabbing people with my hands like this like and I I got somebody DQ all right the pushing that's like a different thing I it shouldn't be that common to happen though right like it really shouldn't be that common I think it's more cheating than anything if I'm being honest you don't see like training injuries all the time where people getting eye GED every day right uh it but like I said every UFC card there's going to be at least one guy getting ey gouged that doesn't make sense it really really doesn't make sense so I don't know that's my take on in like I said I have good amount experience I've had multiple fighters who have suffered serious eye injuries uh from very dirty opponents and couple of them got away with it you know and it's really aggravating and like I said you know some guys are they never get to see the same again it's it's messed up but it's kind of like we we've created the system where you can foul a couple times without penalty so the guys who are dirty will right I don't think uh Spectators understand that right like these guys are willing to do whatever it takes to win and cheating is not Beyond them because to them it's only cheating if they get caught so we need to make sure that those type of people don't survive in this sport right they either reform and play clean or they get the hell out because if I if we can't fight honorably then you shouldn't be fighting me because I'm fighting at a handicap now because I'm fighting within the rules and you're going to fight outside of them