“I never felt like we needed new gloves. These mfs just need to close they hands, just that simple. Are you stupid or are you dumb lol.” —Joaquin Buckley
UFC has a poking problem, even with its fancy new gloves.
Former middleweight champion Chris Weidman was playing nine ball with Bruno Silva’s eyes at the UFC Atlantic City MMA event last weekend in New Jersey, which not only brought a premature ending to their 185-pound affair, but also cost Silva 30 percent of his vision.
“[Weidman] poked both my eyes, and the exam showed I lost 30 percent of my vision in one of the eyes,” Silva told MMA Fighting. “But the doctor doesn’t think it’s permanent, he thinks it will come back fast. I’ll have to go back there next week for another test.”
Or maybe the appeal-seeking Brazilian is just being overly dramatic.
“Obviously, I don’t want to poke him in the eye, but I just also think what are we turning this into?” Weidman told The MMA Hour. “MMA is a tough sport. Get the ref’s attention, let him know you got poked in the eye, but dropping and trying to get all this time, and then you go back to the replay, and it’s like, did you even really get poked in the eye? I think it’s a bad precedent.
“Any time your finger touches the eye, he has the right to say it’s an eye poke, and he gets his five minutes, or whatever the time is now. I also think as fighters, we have to be like okay, if it’s not bad, it’s not bad. He poked me in the eye, it looked bad, but you blink once or twice and boom, you’re good. I’ve been poked in the eye in sparring bad where like knuckles deep. That’s completely different. None of these shots were that bad.”
UFC middleweight “Action Man” Chris Curtis, who fights Brendan Allen at UFC Vegas 90 this weekend in “Sin City,” doesn’t understand how some fighters are so prone to fouls, suggesting repeat offenders are dirty … or just plain stupid.
Like longtime rival Nassourdine Imavov (probably because of this).
“God damn he’s just the dirtiest (expletive) who’s ever fought,” Curtis said at the UFC Vegas 90 media day. “I’ve got 41 fights, and I don’t think I’ve ever been called for an eye poke, I don’t think I’ve headbutt anybody, I’ve never kicked a down opponent. How do you do this s—t back-to-back like every fight?
“My God like you’re either dirty or stupid, that’s just one of those you’re either dirty or dumb. I don’t know which one you pick but Jesus I can go most of my career without gouging people’s eyes, headbutts and all that, but he does this s—t every single fight so like you know, like what the f—k?”
Streaking welterweight contender Joaquin Buckley has an even better idea.
“I never felt like we needed new gloves,” Buckley wrote on Twitter. “These mfs just need to close they hands, just that simple. Are you stupid or are you dumb lol.”
Might be time to borrow some of that “Bellator technology.”