Dominick Cruz says Ciryl Gane is no cheater. I agree with him. I just wish he’d found a better way to say it.
Cruz made his case on his “Love & War” podcast while talking it over with fellow former UFC champ T.J. Dillashaw, and MMA Junkie picked it up Thursday. The topic was the eye pokes that have followed Gane around for a year now. At UFC 321 last October, Gane poked Tom Aspinall in the eyes during their heavyweight title fight. Every account calls it inadvertent. Aspinall still needed multiple eye surgeries, never got cleared to compete, and vacated the belt. Gane (14-2 MMA, 11-2 UFC) got promoted to undisputed champion.
Then came UFC Freedom 250, where Gane stopped Alex Pereira by TKO. Pereira came out of it saying Gane hit him in the back of the head numerous times during the finishing sequence, and he lit up referee Herb Dean for letting it happen. Two big heavyweight fights, two foul controversies. That’s how a guy picks up a cheater label whether he earned it or not.
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Cruz Gets the Verdict Right
Here’s Cruz, in full:
“This is my take on Ciryl Gane poking eyes: I haven’t had a lot of eye pokes in my career. I haven’t had a lot of groin shots in my career,” Cruz said. “I always said if you can poke me in my fcking eyes, I’m doing something wrong. You can punch me in my head. Trying to hit my head is so fcking hard. If you could poke me in the eye, that’s my problem. So we (Dillashaw) agree on that, and I think that’s why he’s not a cheater.”
I love a fighter who answers a question straight, and Cruz did. No hedging, no PR voice. He picked a side.
The problem is the route he took to get there. Cruz’s argument is about defense. It’s a philosophy he has lived by his whole career as one of the hardest guys to hit cleanly at 135 pounds, and it makes sense as a personal code. If your head is moving and your hands are working, fingers don’t find your eyes very often.
As a defense of Gane, though, it proves nothing. Whether Aspinall’s head was in the right place tells you zero about what Gane intended. Cruz jumps from saying he hasn’t taken many eye pokes in his career to “that’s why he’s not a cheater,” and those two thoughts never actually meet. Worse, the logic lands on a guy who had multiple eye surgeries and gave up a championship because he couldn’t get cleared. Telling Aspinall, even indirectly, that getting poked was his problem is a cold read on a fight that cost him his belt.
Dillashaw Makes the Better Case
Dillashaw, sitting right there, made the argument Cruz should have made.
“I don’t think he is (a cheater),” Dillashaw said. “It’s gotten blown out of the water since the Pereira fight. Obviously everyone is a Pereira fan. They want him to win, and they want to call the illegal blows. It’s like, he wasn’t going for it on purpose, and Pereira’s moving his head as he’s hitting him.”
That’s the actual point. Cheating requires intent. A fighter throwing punches at a target that is ducking and turning will sometimes land somewhere ugly, and the crowd that loves Pereira is going to see a crime in every one of those shots. Dillashaw also stuck up for Herb Dean, saying it’s crazy to watch an arena boo a referee and that he feels bad for him. Fair. Dean didn’t throw the punches.
The Pereira timeline matters too. Dillashaw is right that the Gane conversation got louder after that fight. One accidental foul in the Aspinall bout was bad luck. A second controversy in a second title-level fight against a fan favorite turned bad luck into a reputation. Reputations in this sport get built on vibes more than evidence, and nobody has put up evidence that Gane meant to do any of it.
Where That Leaves the Champ
So yes, Cruz and Dillashaw land in the right spot. Gane is a heavyweight champion with a 14-2 record who has been on the wrong end of two messy finishes, and the word “cheater” is lazy. If you want to say he has sloppy habits that keep showing up in big fights, go ahead and make that case with the tape. That’s a criticism. Calling a guy a cheater is an accusation, and it should take more than a pattern of two.
But Gane deserves defenders who argue about him, and Cruz mostly argued about himself. His point was that he’s hard to poke. Great. That was true when he was champion at bantamweight and it has nothing to do with what happened to Aspinall’s eyes at UFC 321.
The guy who got hurt the worst in all this lost his belt in a hospital, and the guy holding it now gets booed for it. Cruz could have defended Gane without making Aspinall the punchline. Dillashaw managed it in about five sentences.
