Tom Aspinall ended up having a brutal UFC 321 fight week and he might have more than a disappointing main event showing to apologize for.
Ahead of his heavyweight championship title defense against Ciryl Gane this past Saturday (which ended abruptly in a no-contest when a Gane eye poke rendered Aspinall unable to continue), Aspinall included a segment on his YouTube vlog in which Daniel Cormier spoke to him about Aspinall’s potential to dominate his division. It was a candid conversation and Cormier’s words could be viewed as a slight to Aspinall’s rivals, which is why Cormier later said he was “a little upset” to see their conversation made public.
On the Pound 4 Pound podcast with Kamaru Usman and Henry Cejudo, the former UFC champions debated whether Cormier was wronged, with Usman siding firmly with “DC.”
“Yes, 100 percent,” Usman said. “When we saw [Cormier’s] reasoning behind it, he said, ‘Usually when a guy leans in like this, that typically means, hey, this stays between us, don’t tell nobody else.’ And he gave him a pep talk. He cheered him up. He let him know, ‘Hey, go take care of business.’ Of course, when he’s saying things like that and there’s a hot mic and he’s also saying, ‘The rest of the division are so easy you can run through this guy and that guy and that guy,’ that’s supposed to be with us, between us.
“For your team to release that and for you to approve your team releasing that, that’s where the issue is, because that’s supposed to be confidential. That’s right there the code that you can never drop. You can never drop that code. When a fighter talks to you personally or gives you something personal, that’s just personal. It doesn’t have to be broadcasted.”
Cormier’s opinion is typically broadcast on multiple outlets, with the former two-division champion appearing in an analyst role on ESPN, dropping weekly episodes of his own YouTube show, and regularly serving as a cageside commentator for UFC events. While it’s his job to have takes that are sometimes controversial, this is one instance where Usman believes the fighter meant to keep his words under wraps and Aspinall should have respected that.
On the other side, Cejudo believes it’s simply the nature of the game that if you’re in front of live microphones all the time, you’re going to get caught saying something people don’t like. Cejudo doesn’t think it’s Aspinall’s responsibility to withhold any conversation from the public, regardless of how Cormier felt about it.
“I personally have to disagree with you because there’s a lot of things Daniel has also said about people that people probably don’t like,” Cejudo said. “There’s a lot of things that he’s said truthful that people don’t like. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s humbling for those like myself, like DC, for us to be able to be that straightforward and also get a little bit of a taste of our own medicine. Hopefully, this doesn’t hurt his relationship with Tom, but at the end of the day, I think it’s good.
“I think DC should probably—I don’t think Tom owes anybody an apology. He’s doing the same thing we’re doing. I’ve always got a mic on. That’s the shit that goes viral. So I take it back, Tom, you good.”
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