UFC heavyweight champion, Tom Aspinall, wanted to “get the division going.”
Instead, the 265-pound weight class is back in limbo after Aspinall suffered a career-threatening injury at the hands (and dirty fingernails) of former interim titleholder, Ciryl Gane. In fact, Aspinall could be facing an early retirement if his upcoming eye surgery doesn’t repair the damage done by “Bon Gamin.”
“The Tom Aspinall-Ciryl Gane thing was a f*cking disaster,” Rogan said on his “Experience” podcast. “I mean, that’s a disaster. Tom Aspinall still can’t see. He’s got a f*cked-up right eyeball still. The reality is he might not ever fight again. Like, who knows? If he has surgery on his eye, and it doesn’t go well and he can’t see out of the eye … apparently he’s still f*cked up in his right eye. There’s some tendon damage or something. Eyes are so tricky, you never know.”
Maybe it’s time to “start taking points” for the infraction.
“Unless you’re a complete psychopath like Michael Bisping, who fought 11 fights in the UFC blind in one eye, which is so crazy that he did that,” Rogan added. “I hope Tom gets back in because again, we don’t really know what’s going on with his eye. And for all the critics, you need to know this: The right eye, that’s the problem, but if you look at when he fought, his left eye, the finger went deeper in his left eye than it did his right eye. So if you think he’s faking it, he was knuckle-deep in that f*cking left eye. It’s horrible to see.”
The 32 year-old Aspinall spent more than a year on the sidelines waiting for Jon Jones, who eventually vacated his title and retired from competition. No word yet on how the promotion plans to handle the heavyweight title picture but an interim strap may be in order to keep the assembly line moving.
Time will tell.
