Michael Bisping does not want Tom Aspinall to come back too soon.
In October, Aspinall made the first defense of his undisputed UFC heavyweight title at UFC 321, which ended up as a disastrous outing against Ciryl Gane, with the bout ending in a no-contest after Gane poked Aspinall in the eyes. Over the following months, fans and fighters ripped Aspinall for “quitting”, despite the heavyweight champion dealing with lingering eye issues. So bad were the issues that Aspinall had surgery on both eyes earlier this week, with a social media post revealing that Aspinall’s medical team is doing everything it can to get him back to “fighting fitness.”
Michael Bisping, who famously lost an eye as a result of issues stemming from a detached retina in his fight with Vitor Belfort, knows all about exactly what that constitutes.
“What is fighting fitness? I know this very well,” Bisping said on his YouTube channel. “The benchmark for having fighting fitness is 20/200 vision, which is still classed as clinically blind. Now, when you read, when you do an eye test, you’ve got one of those big charts, you’ve got the top letters, then you have two letters underneath that … and they gradually get smaller and smaller to the tiny little ones at the bottom.
“If you’ve got 20/20 vision, boom, bish bash bosh, you will smoke all of them. But 20/200 vision, all you’ve got to get is the top letter, the big old massive one, and then the two relatively big ones underneath that. If you can read those three letters, you have 20/200 vision. I know this because I cheated the eye test many, many times.”
Bisping famously fought several of the final fights of his career with partial or no vision out of one eye, even winning the middleweight championship while hampered by the injury. But given how serious the complications with eye issues can be, and knowing the consequences firsthand, “The Count” cautions Aspinall to be as careful as possible and not force a comeback too soon.
“The fact that they’re talking about it online would say to me that the operation has been a success, so now it’s just a matter of time for Tom to rest up, to heal from the surgery, and then come back and rematch Ciryl Gane,” Bisping said. “But how long will that be?”
“As I’ve said in other videos, you cannot rush this. When you rush back too soon, things can go wrong. When you operate on something, you weaken it. Anytime you go in there and drill or cut and slice and mess about with it, you weaken it. So, you have to allow it a lot of time to restore, to heal 100 percent. That can take a while.”
As things currently stand, Aspinall has given no timeline on his expected return to the octagon.
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Full credit to Bisping for being the kind of wild man who loses an eye and keeps fighting, but I’m 100 percent in agreement with him on this one: do not rush back, Tom. Living the rest of your life with one or zero eyes is just not worth it.
Have a good weekend, y’all. No TMR Monday as it’s a Holiday, so see y’all on Tuesday.
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