Tom Aspinall may not have a fight on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still training like a champion. In a new video released on Glory heavyweight champion Rico Verhoeven’s YouTube page, Aspinall trades body shots with the kickboxing legend and goes up to 100% power with the Dutch fighter.
“Iron gut challenge with Tom Aspinall is no joke,” Verhoeven said after they exchanged the last set of punches.
And of course, no content involving Tom Aspinall would be complete without a Jon Jones gut check to see how the interim heavyweight champion feels on his chances of fighting “Bones.”
“I think we’ll get it,” Aspinall said before sighing and adding. “I don’t know. He’s an unpredictable guy.”
“Everybody’s got a different idea of what I should do,” he continued. “Some people are like, ‘You should just leave him and he’ll fight you.’ Or some people are like, ‘The more you talk s— the less he wants to fight you.’ I’m just like, what is this? We’re supposed to be professional fighters. Fight each other, that’s what we do. I thought that’s what we do anyway.”
Aspinall has spent over 560 days as interim champion and that number only continues to rise with no end in sight. There’s rumors that he could face Ciryl Gane and defend his interim title for a second time before finally facing Jones in November … if Jones agrees to face him.
On Jones’ end, he’s living his best life in Thailand filming a Russian TUF clone. He’s goofing in the pool, he’s scuffling with Hasbulla on a daily basis. And he’s telling a whole lot of people that he’s not particularly interested in fighting again, at least not at the moment.
In a normal situation, the UFC would strip him and get the heavyweight division moving again. But these days the UFC seems perfectly content to leave things on cruise control, no matter how frustrating it is to the fans and fighters caught in this endless stasis.
