In the later minutes of Urijah Faber’s loss to Jimmie Rivera at UFC 203, the action was temporarily stopped after Faber poked Rivera in the eye.
That eye poke was “a little bit” deliberate, at least according to Rivera.
Responding Monday to a question from reporter Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour broadcast as to whether he believed the eye poke was intentional, Rivera responded “I think it was a little bit.” The bantamweight also appeared to refer to a groin shot that occurred earlier in the fight (warning: language maybe NSFW).
“He hit me in the nuts, and he didn’t really say sorry afterward,” said Rivera, who suffered a crack behind his retina from the poke. “If you hit someone in the balls or poke them in the eye, you say ‘I’m sorry, my bad,’ so I don’t know. … I don’t really care at this point. I got the W. I got the win over someone I grew up watching.”
Interestingly, Rivera went on to describe what he seemed to believe was a special technique Faber used to land the eye poke.
“I’m surprised the referee didn’t see, because the way he was throwing the left hand, his fingers were open,” Rivera told Helwani. “It was like a slap. It wasn’t a punch, where you usually have your hands closed. It was a slap. He did it once or twice in the previous rounds.”
It’s not the first time Faber has received this accusation. In 2014, an eye poke appeared to lead directly to Faber’s fight-ending choke on Francisco Rivera (no relation to Jimmie Rivera). In Francisco Rivera’s mind, there was enough doubt over the outcome of the fight that he appealed to the Nevada State Athletic Commission to overturn the ruling of a Faber submission win. The commission upheld Faber’s victory.
The unanimous-decision defeat at UFC 203 was the second straight for Faber (33-10). The 27-year-old Rivera, meanwhile, advanced his mark to 20-1 and hasn’t lost a contest since 2008.
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