Seattle’s big UFC Fight Night event went off with a bang despite tons of last minute changes to the card. Unfortunately, the main event ended with a whimper after Henry Cejudo vs. Song Yadong was taken to a controversial technical decision.
Halfway through the third round, Yadong managed the ol’ Three Stooges two-eyes-with-one-poke move on Cejudo. That left “Triple C” struggling to see, and he took the full five minutes to try and recover. It wasn’t enough, and the fight was waved off and sent to the scorecards after the start of the fourth round. Yadong would win, but suggested an immediate rematch which Cejudo accepted.
That plan was quickly nixed by UFC CEO Dana White at the UFC Seattle post-fight press conference.
“Not at all, not even a little bit,” White responded when asked if he wanted to see the two headliners run it back. “I just don’t want to see it again.”
White seemed to question Cejudo’s motives for taking the full five minutes and then deciding he couldn’t see well enough to continue after the end of the third round.
“Only he can answer those questions,” White said. “I don’t know if he thought, ‘If I stop here, is this a DQ, no contest?’ I don’t know what he was thinking, or maybe he can’t see.”
The whole situation was awkward and confusing, and fans are still hotly debating whether the cageside physician should have let Cejudo continue or if referee Jason Herzog should have taken a point for the eye poke. Based on the scorecards, if a point had been taken the fight would have been a majority draw instead of a loss for Cejudo.
“If you thought [Song] intentionally poked [Cejudo] in the eye, [you take a point],” White said. “Why would he poke him in the eye? He was doing pretty well. If he was getting his ass whooped, and he poked him in the eye, you could probably make the argument.”
Intentional vs. non-intentional is such a stupid way to handle these things in the first place. Yadong was being sloppy with his hands, which became very apparent when the fight was restarted in the third and he stuck his fingers right back in Cejudo’s face. You should be held responsible for where your weapons go and if it impacts the fight you should lose a point. But them’s not the rules we have, and we’re stuck with the rules we’ve got.
“Listen, eye pokes are never good but they happen a lot,” White concluded. “And fights do continue after eye pokes. I don’t know, I’d have to look and see how many fights are actually stopped due to an eye poke. Not many.”
While the poke may have robbed Cejudo of an opportunity to turn the fight around, we can’t argue with White’s assessment that Song was taking over the fight and we basically learned what we needed to learn out of that match-up. None of it feels particularly fair to “Triple C,” but that’s just how it plays out in mixed martial arts sometimes.
