Belal Muhammad has endured fight-changing eye pokes in two different fights, and now he’s convinced that opponents are blatantly using those fouls to their advantage because referees rarely — if ever — penalize them for it.
As he prepares to face Gabriel Bonfim on Saturday at UFC Vegas 118, Muhammad finds himself in unfamiliar territory after two losses in a row. Granted, one of those was a back-and-forth title fight against Jack Della Maddalena, but the other was a decision loss to Ian Machado Garry
after he endured several eye pokes that he believes absolutely affected the outcome.
“It changes everything,” Muhammad told MMA Fighting about the eye pokes. “It changes the momentum of the fight. It changes the protocols. It changes what your mindset was. There’s a pause in the action, and then you have to hear the crowd boo as you’re trying to wipe it out of your eye. Then you have to hear their corner yelling something, your corner yelling something when you’re just trying to get your vision back, and then you have to go back into the mindset and the phase of what was I thinking before that? Where was my mindset? How was I about to attack? Where was he going? I think we’ve seen guys talk about it.”
In fact, Muhammad feels like more and more fighters are using those fouls to their advantage because there’s no set rule in place that an eye poke requires immediate punishment.
Referees use their own discretion when it comes to penalties for fouls of any kind during a fight, and issuing a warning rather than a point deduction is almost a standard reaction.
Looking specifically at his fight from this past November, Muhammad believes Garry absolutely used those fouls to his advantage, and it ultimately helped him win the fight.
“Especially guys like Ian Garry, who’s a strategist, they understand how to win fights, and they go into a fight with a strategy,” Muhammad said. “I do think that it was a strategy to poke in the eye, especially early. Because it stops everything. It stops the beginning of the fight, the onslaught that’s to come, and your vision’s never going to be the same, and you have to say yeah [I’ll continue].
“Because we’ve seen it with Tom Aspinall and we’ve seen it with myself. When you say you can’t see, you’re labeled a coward. You’re labeled scared. You’re labeled this and that. So fighters are knowing that now, and I think there’s a lot of fighters that are putting it into their game plan. The same way the NBA is adding flopping, the MMA world’s adding more eye pokes to change the game.”
While fighters are often given a warning with the foul being called accidental, Muhammad just isn’t buying it.
“I’ve never had a fight where I’ve poked anybody in the eye,” Muhammad said. “It’s trained. You close your fist. Once these guys start getting repercussions right away, I think it will make them change. It will make them close their fist right away, but now nothing’s happening to them, so there’s no need for them to change anything.”
As much as he hopes he doesn’t have to endure something similar in his next fight or any future fight, Muhammad admits he might have to fight fire with fire to truly even the score.
Make no mistake, that’s not what Muhammad wants to do, but he argues that if the referees aren’t going to dish out any punishment, then he has to get payback somehow.
“It’s like my eyes got a magnet for finger-pokers,” Muhammad said. “In my honest opinion, I think a lot of these guys are starting to use that because they know there’s no repercussions. So these guys are coming in, knowing it’s going to affect you, poke you in the eye. They’re not going to get a point taken away; nothing’s going to happen to them. That just changes the whole fight, right?
“It’s all good. From now on, I’m not trusting any of these guys. If one of these guys poke me in the eye, just know that they’re about to get it back three times in their other eye.”
