UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall has spoken out about the ‘horrendous’ eye surgeries he’s had to undergo this year as a result of the damage he suffered from eyepokes during his first title defense against Ciryl Gane last October.
“I’ve had three [eye] surgeries,” Aspinall said on ‘Great Company With Jamie Lang’. “I had one on the left and two on the right. By the way, I’ve had the snip, right? I’ve had a vasectomy, and I was thinking that has got to be the worst surgery ever. Mate, compared to eye surgery, it is nothing. Honestly.
“It’s f*cking horrendous. So they kept me awake. I lay awake, they put something on to keep your eyeball open… and obviously, they numb it and stuff. They numb your eye. They did drops and then an injection on the side. Mate, they’re coming at you with like a scalpel or knife, or whatever it’s called and you’re just watching them slice your eyeball open. It was horrendous.”
Aspinall also talked about dealing with the unexpected backlash he received from some fans who jumped to the conclusion that he was faking his eye injuries.
“This is something that I’ve learned to understand the hard way: When you’re fighting somebody, you’re just Saturday night entertainment. That’s it. If you’re not in that fight, then people are going to root against you, and that’s the way it is. It’s shit. It’s a bad situation. But I can’t expect millions of people to care for me personally. They want to see me have a fight with somebody. That’s what they paid for. And it’s shit, and it’s harsh, and it’s not very nice, but that’s what it is.
“I still get comments like, ‘Oh he f*cking ducked out of the fight, he didn’t want to be there’ and stuff like that, but a lot of MMA fans have also never had a fight in their life, and I don’t expect them to understand what it takes to get to where I’ve got to. It’s just as simple as that, and you don’t see many fighters coming out and saying it. It’s always people who have never had a fight. If you’re going to sit behind your phone and comment on the toughness of a professional MMA fighter, then you don’t really know what you’re talking about.”
