Despite widespread criticism in recent days, Chris Weidman is sticking to his guns that Bruno Silva overreacted to being accidentally eye-poked by him on four occasions at UFC On ESPN 54 this past weekend, including a double poke in the fight-ending sequence.
Weidman had declared in his immediate post-fight interview on Saturday night that Silva had been “looking for a way out” and that “you can’t just drop every time you feel something touch your eyeball,” and it seems that several days later his stance hasn’t changed.
“Of course, I’m sorry that happened,” Weidman said on The MMA Hour show on Wednesday. “That said, I am sorry that it happened, and it sucks that it ended that way, but you could make a very strong argument that I got eye poked, by far [with] the most devastating eye poke of all the eye pokes. I didn’t drop to the mat and try to get time, and all eye pokes aren’t created the same.”
It’s worth stopping here to note that Weidman did appear to get a thumb in the eye at one point during the fight, though it should be stressed that Silva correctly had his fist closed at the time, whereas in each of the former middleweight champ’s eyepokes on his opponent it was due to the fact that his hands were open and his fingers pointing out.
And despite Weidman’s claim that the eyepoke he received was worse, later in the conversation he actually states himself that, “he poked me in the eye, it looked bad, but you blink once or twice and boom, you’re good.”
Of course Weidman has proven many times before that he’s an extremely tough fighter, but as anyone whose ever been poked in the eye before, or has seen countless such incidents in the Octagon over the years will know, blinking a couple of times and then being good to go is not a realistic depiction of how this kind of injury usually goes.
“I’m not saying I know exactly how he felt, but if you look at my first two eye pokes where the ref stopped it, I barely touched his eye,” Weidman continued. “Even on the last one where he went down, like my finger went underneath his eye. If you really zoom in, it wasn’t in his eyeball, like he did to me with that one with his thumb.”
That might not sit well with Silva, who has revealed that his doctor concluded that he had “lost 30 percent of my vision in one of the eyes,”, though thankfully that’s expected to be temporary and he should gon on to make a full recovery.
Meanwhile, the 39-year-old Weidman still feels like winning by a double eye-poke combo finish serves as a teachable moment for the 35-year-old Silva.
“That’s the thing. I almost came out trying to coach him. It’s like my kids who I coach in wrestling, you’re going to get poked in the eye, there’s going to be things that happen to you on the mat. You can’t just drop to the ground, and turn around, and expect the ref to know what’s going on in your head, and that he’s seeing everything. It’s just a bad habit. Bad things happen when you do that. He got in the habit, any time his eyeball got touched at all, he dropped to the ground and was like crying, and he needed time and all this stuff.”
“Obviously, I don’t want to poke him in the eye, but I just also think what are we turning this into?. 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.”
There’s been some debate since the fight as to whether Weidman should have been disqualified for his repeated eye-pokes. Officially the fight was only amended from a TKO victory to a technical decision win (30-27 x3) for Weidman after the footage was reviewed, and the former champ, who had lost seven of his previous nine fights, believes he deserved to get his hand raised.
“I feel like it’s a legitimate win. I won all three rounds according to the judges’ scorecards. Is it the way I wanted to win? Hell no. I don’t want to poke a guy in the eyes. I’ve never poked a guy in the eyes ever in any fight and then in this fight, if you add it up, it was two and then the one-two eye poke as people are saying in the last one. It’s just unfortunate. I don’t want that to happen. It’s never happened before.”
With all that being said, Weidman does appear to be willing to make things right by doing a rematch if that’s what the UFC decides is best.
“If the UFC wants to have a rematch of this fight, sure. But I would happily move on, too. It’s not like I’m scared of him or anything like that. I felt like everything he had, I feel like I would only just get better. Whatever.
“If they want to do a rematch, that’s fine, too. I’m open to that. My heart goes out to Bruno Silva. He was very frustrated. It sucks, but he fought me 13 minutes, and he was losing the fight. If they want to do a rematch, sure.”
