Daniel Cormier weighs in on curved glove debate

On the latest DC & Helwani Show podcast, former champ champ Daniel Cormier and Ariel Helwani discussed whether the UFC needs to change its gloves in order to avoid eye pokes like the one that ended Leon Edwards vs. Belal Muhammad in a No Contest at UFC Vegas 21.

A lot of times when you poke eyes, you are trying to grab, said Cormier. If your fingers aren’t allowed to open or straighten, I think that you could eliminate some of the eye poking but the reality is, there’s gonna be issues with the gloves being curved if we go forward. My thing is this, you’re never gonna find something that works perfectly. There’s gonna be issues with everything and I don’t know what it’s gonna take in order to stop eye poking. I believe eye pokes will still happen, maybe not as frequently but they will still happen.

Eye pokes happen just about every fight. The big one that just happened with Belal, is probably – when was the last time a big one like that happened where it was so damaging?

Having curved gloves will help, because it does allow you to still lock your hands and wrestle. You can still grab, you can do everything, it keeps the fingers from going straight. Even when Jones would touch people in the eye, he wasn’t trying to. He was just trying to manage distance and because he’s so long, he’d put his arms out…

I do believe that the rounded glove could help, so long as it’s not so rounded that it’s making it into a fist. You just don’t want it into a fist. You want to be able to maneuver and use your hands. So if it’s just a little curve, just to bend the front, okay, but not anything that makes your fingers kind of all the way go forward.

This thing that they started implementing, where you’re supposed to have your hand up, has helped, but the reality is, you’re in a fight. Sometimes those things happen. Unfortunate that it happens in those big spots. So yeah, I’m all for different designs on the gloves but I do believe that with the different designs, I don’t know what the issue will be but there will always be something. In a fistfight, it’s never perfect… There’s always gonna be issues but we should do whatever’s necessary to limit those things.

UG, if you ran the MMA circus, what you do to minimize eye pokes?