Tom Aspinall is officially the UFC heavyweight champion and his excitement to return to competition seemed palpable during a recent interview. This recent chat took place with Brett Okamoto with the conversation being platformed on the official UFC YouTube channel. Aspinall has not competed in the cage since last July when he dispatched Curtis Blaydes with strikes sixty seconds into the bout.
While that UFC 304 outing saw him avenge a prior loss to Blaydes, defending his interim title in the United Kingdom was clearly not what Aspinall was seeking at the time. With the highly sought after Jon Jones bout falling by the wayside as ‘Bones’ retired from MMA, Aspinall has now achieved what was ultimately his overall goal of getting to now call himself the UFC heavyweight champion outright.
When discussing some of the feelings that he’s had being benched for the last year [as of July 27th when UFC 304 transpired last year], Aspinall said,
“What did I miss the most? I like how locked in I feel when I’ve got a fight. Nothing else really matters for that eight or twelve weeks apart from that. Something else I really enjoy is getting my hands wrapped in an arena, with another guy getting his hands wrapped in the same arena, and us both meeting in the middle in our underwear and seeing who the better man is. That anticipation… Walking out into a crowd of 25,000 screaming people—that’s a drug money can’t buy.”
Tom Aspinall has a date and an opponent ready
Tom Aspinall is seemingly on the verge of getting his next hit of this proverbial drug as he recently stated that he has a date and an opponent ready for him. This was mentioned by the divisional ruler during a separate interview with Adam Catterall with Aspinall quipping,
“Meetings have been done and I now have a fight. We’ve got a date, we’ve got an opponent to work towards.”
While he was coy on specifics, the UFC titleholder also went on to say that he wants to earn victories over the entirety of the top ten ranked heavyweights and Aspinall mentioned that he wanted to fight four times within the next twelve months to accomplish this.
