Ahead of his first UFC headliner, Randy Brown would like to see eye pokes addressed more, but he feels automatic point deductions are not the answer.
Brown faces Gabriel Bonfim in the welterweight headliner of Saturday’s UFC Vegas 110 event. Eye pokes have become a controversial topic as of late, especially in the past couple of weeks after the Tom Aspinall vs. Ciryl Gane main event of UFC 321 ending in a no-contest, as well as the wild ending to the Waldo Cortes-Acosta vs. Ante Delija fight at UFC Vegas 110 this past weekend.
Many have suggested taking points for every eye poke. Brown does not agree with that stance.
“I mean, it’s obviously an issue, but here’s the thing: It’s easy for people outside to just say, ‘Hey, you know, point deduction immediately, eye poke gets a foul, a foul’s a foul, just close your fist,’” Brown told MMA Fighting. “It depends on the fighter’s style, it depends on how they fight, right? It depends on your attributes, as well, and your makeup. Some people have bigger hands, longer fingers, right? And you can’t fight squeezing your fist the entire time, then you’ll be bound up, you can’t parry punches, you know what I mean? Even when you kick, your hands have to be open so that your posterior chain is loose so that you can get these kicks out. And a lot of people don’t really understand those things, right?
“So they think that when someone gets eye poked, it’s always dirty. I want to say eye pokes are 95 percent of the time unintentional. It’s just the thing that happens with the type of gloves that we wear and the sport that we’re in, and I think that there shouldn’t be an automatic point deduction, but I do think that there is something needs to be done, whether it’s with the gloves, or whether it’s some sort of rule. One warning, so the the fighter can be aware and know like, ‘All right, I have to make these adjustments right now because if it happens again, then a point deduction.’ But I truly don’t even have the answers.”
Brown understands the impact of eye pokes in fights, and he understands he has caused infractions like that in the past. “Rude Boy” says that his most recent opponent Nicolas Dalby, who Brown knocked out in the Fight of the Night at April’s UFC Kansas City event, brought it to the referee’s attention as something to watch out for.
The 35-year-old believes that no fighter — outside of, perhaps, a former two-division champion — is looking to poke an opponent’s eye in a fight on purpose.
“I’ve been in situations where I’m backstage and because I’ve poked people in the eye before, unintentionally, and the referee came backstage to me, warning me backstage before I even fought,” Brown explained. “That was because of what Dalby was complaining about leading up to the fight. So now, I’m like, because of what happened in the previous fight that has nothing to do with him, now he’s taking that and now the ref is coming to me backstage. So now I already got a strike. So he’s trying to create a narrative that I think is not good. There’s no fighter that’s looking to poke you in the eye intentionally, unless [it’s] Jon Jones or something like that.
“But there’s no fighter that’s intentionally going out there and it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going to kick him in the balls or I’m going to poke him in the eye. You’re trying to win, you’re trying to fight, you’re trying to win. Things happen. It’s 100 MPH, and I think something needs to be done, but I don’t think that’s the answer.”
Brown enters the bout a winner of four of his past five bouts, with the lone loss coming via controversial split decision to Bryan Battle at UFC 310 this past December. He faces the 18-1 Bonfim that’s coming off of a controversial decision win of his own against Stephen Thompson at UFC Nashville in July.
While eye pokes have stolen a lot of headlines recently, Brown believes that there’s one other infraction that, while less physically damaging, is worse.
“I think grabbing the cage is worse than poking somebody in the eye,” Brown said. “That may be a hot take, but I think that because grabbing the cage, they say it’s a reflex, which it is, right? But there’s guys where I’ve seen grab and hold, there’s difference between grabbing and there’s difference between grabbing and holding. There’s times where I almost feel like I’m getting taken down and the reflexes, it happened to me, the reflex is just, ‘Whoa.’ But you grab and release.
It’s like, you realize because you stopped, but if you just lock your fingers in there, I think you’ve got to take the point.”
Subscribe to my channel
