Brett OkamotoOct 24, 2025, 08:18 AM ETCloseBrett Okamoto has reported on mixed martial arts and boxing at ESPN since 2010. He has covered all of the biggest events in combat sports during that time, including in-depth interviews and features with names such as Dana White, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Conor McGregor, Nate Diaz, Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao and Georges St-Pierre. He was also a producer on the 30 for 30 film: “Chuck and Tito,” which looked back at the careers and rivalry of Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz. He lives in Las Vegas, and is an avid, below-average golfer in his spare time.Follow on X
Tom Aspinall motivated by pressure to win at UFC 321 (1:19)Tom Aspinall speaks ahead of his UFC heavyweight title defence against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321. (1:19)
Tom Aspinall’s father and head coach, Andy Aspinall, said he has yet to see an opponent truly test his son in mixed martial arts — and he is beginning to think he never will.
“I want to see him tested, and he wants to be tested,” Andy told ESPN. “But lately, I’ve had this thing where I don’t even get nervous for the fight. The thing that actually does worry me is that over the next three or four years, Tom will have fought for a total of three minutes.”
Aspinall had hoped to finally have the opportunity to overcome adversity and take the undisputed belt from former champion Jon Jones in competition in 2025, but Jones announced his retirement instead. Jones has since stated he intends to fight again but has continued to refrain from mentioning Aspinall as a possible opponent.
In the absence of that Jones fight, Aspinall’s most obvious path to building a legacy appears to be what it’s been so far — historical dominance. It’s not exactly the legacy he and his team want, but Andy said, he doesn’t foresee any change to the narrative this weekend or anywhere on the immediate horizon.
Of course, he is a naturally gifted heavyweight, but his game is “sprinkled with magic,” as his training partner and fellow UFC heavyweight Ante Delija says. Working in tandem with his detail-oriented father, Aspinall has developed a four-pronged style that has become uniquely devastating to the heavyweight division.
“I think a lot of that comes from the father-son relationship. Of course, Andy is wanting to keep his son safe, which means wanting him to get wins effectively and efficiently. At heavyweight, Tom’s never going to fight someone who can’t knock him out. There’s a margin of error that presents itself, so if I’m Andy, I’m thinking the same thing for my son: ‘Get these motherf—ers out of there.'”
Less than one minute into his most recent fight against Curtis Blaydes in July 2024, Aspinall ate a jab, then dodged a short right cross in the middle of the Octagon. Exactly five seconds later, he countered Blaydes’ jab with a right hand of his own that knocked Blaydes out. It’s an Aspinall moment that specifically stands out to retired bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz, who now also serves as an MMA analyst.
“The momentum that he creates by being on his toes, flipping his jab, fighting loose with his hands down — it makes him twice as fast as everybody he fights. He has a style that you never see at heavyweight, and I think he’s going to change the division. More guys are going to have to start adding that to their game.”
The level of attention dedicated to each craft has honed Aspinall’s style into one that could “take out three different opponents on the same night, in three different ways,” Hardy said. It’s actually easy to forget that Aspinall’s base skill for MMA was grappling. He has 11 knockouts to go with four submissions in MMA and is interested in professional boxing eventually.
“He was always really confident in his grappling,” Andy said, “because he was so in front of the game in that aspect. But then he got really confident in his striking when people started falling over when he hit them.”
“When he first got into the UFC, they said he was good and I told them, ‘No, he’s better than good.’ And they asked me, ‘How do you know already?’ And I said, ‘Because I’ve just seen him train with the best boxer in the world for 18 months, spar 15 rounds with the best kickboxer in the world and had the British wrestling team into the gym.’ Tom is better than nearly all of them at their own sport. You put that all together, he’s better than good in MMA.”
Prior to coaching his son, Andy enjoyed a successful career as a systems analyst and computer programmer. Essentially, a business would hire him to break down its operations, modernize its computer programs and clean up all of the finer details. Andy has applied that exact approach directly to combat sports.
“Tom threw a high kick earlier, knowing that Volkov would start to answer with his right hand,” Cruz said. “When you do pad work, you get a feel for things like that. I’m sure he pulled that right hand out of Volkov, knowing he wanted to slide right under it.”
As Aspinall’s profile and resources have increased, so has his ability to draw training partners. His team has become a European hub for heavyweight talent, which has benefitted Aspinall greatly. He often lacked bigger sparring partners in the earlier stage of his career.
“People are gravitating there not only because of the training but because of the bigger bodies there they can’t find anywhere else,” Hardy said. “The culture they’ve created there has turned quite special.”
In a 2½-minute win over Serghei Spivac in 2021, Aspinall was credited for throwing only 22 strikes and landing 12 — but those numbers don’t even tell a fraction of the story.
Within those 150 seconds, Aspinall probably threw out at least 100 feints — deceptive, fake punches — which he didn’t intend to land, using them only to read and disturb any rhythm Spivac hoped to set up. Using feints at that kind of pace is rare at heavyweight, perhaps because the majority of the division lacks the fast-twitch reflexes needed to do it effectively.
Spivac is hardly the first or last opponent to look uncomfortable with Aspinall’s speed. It’s a natural gift that anyone can see, and his team has worked to take advantage of it as much as possible.
The topic of Aspinall’s speed and how he maximizes its effect in his game reminds Andy of a line from MMA pioneer Rickson Gracie’s 1999 documentary on vale tudo, “Choke,” that claims there are “loads of big guys” in combat sports but very few “good big guys.”
On the surface, that might sound like an arrogant — or at least very biased — thing to say, but the results support it. Aspinall (15-3) faces Ciryl Gane (13-2) at UFC 321 on Saturday in Abu Dhabi (2 p.m. ET on ESPN PPV, prelims at 10 a.m.), in his first defense of the UFC’s undisputed heavyweight title. If Gane, who is a 3-to-1 betting underdog, can simply make it to the second round, he’ll be the first to survive an opening round against Aspinall in 4½ years. The 32-year-old’s past three wins have come by knockout in 60, 69 and 73 seconds. His average fight time is the shortest in UFC history at 122 seconds. In other words, Aspinall is disposing of heavyweights in a manner the sport has literally never seen.
“Ciryl’s quite fast, but we’ll find out how fast he really is when he fights Tom,” Andy said. “I don’t know. Of course, people want to ask if [Tom] can go 25 minutes, and I say, ‘Of course he can in the gym.’ He could probably do 40 minutes in the gym against eight different partners, but that’s in bigger gloves and it’s just a different feeling. He’s got that drive where he wants to be tested, and the threat of a big punch is always there, but I don’t know if there’s a guy in the world who has the skill level to truly test him. I really don’t know.”
Khamzat Chimaev won the middleweight championship in August by defeating Dricus Du Plessis by unanimous decision. In the five-round fight, he landed 529 total strikes and accumulated more than 21 minutes of control, per UFC Stats. Merab Dvalishvili has defended his men’s bantamweight belt three times already this year, recording 32 takedowns in the process. Those figures, while impressive to Andy, do not reflect the approach he has instilled into his son. If Tom’s performances started to resemble anything like what those two have done, Andy said, he’d view it as a problem to correct.
“You can see how good those guys are, but I’d be really upset if Tom threw 500 strikes and didn’t finish a guy,” Andy said. “If Tom hit someone with 20 punches and didn’t hurt him, I’d think something was very wrong. If Merab takes you down 17 times, that means you kept getting up. His takedowns are good, but his ability to keep guys down and finish them is not. My philosophy, going all the way back to when Tom and I started, is to not get hit, first and foremost, and get the referee to stop it.”
“He literally just let go of a kimura and let Volkov get back to his feet,” Hardy said. “Then he took him down away from the fence, where the armlock would be easier to get. The confidence it takes to let go of that submission and give away position, you don’t see that. Where they were against the fence, mechanically Tom just wasn’t going to be able to get the submission. So, his response was, ‘I’m not even going to try, and I’m not going to just hold him here.’ That shows he’s just in a different league.
Aspinall’s style has been a work in progress for more than 20 years. It started with jiu-jitsu when he was a child and progressed into wrestling, boxing and kickboxing. He and Andy used to drill distance control in their family garden in Safford, England, in a kind of cat-and-mouse game between them, Aspinall mirroring the movements of his father. Andy would lob tennis balls at his son until he could accurately jab 20 in a row. As his career progressed, Aspinall sought out crossover opportunities that included sparring sessions with multiple-time heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury as well as multiple-time kickboxing champion Rico Verhoeven.
“I’ve watched film every day since the mid-’90s,” Andy said. “I’m mad on watching videos, because this game is all logic to me. We’ve broken down videos of specific strikes, analyzing where Tom’s head position is and how fast he’s able to back up. He can actually back up faster with his hands down than up, but he’s still safe as long as he has his head in this position. And I probably sound like I’m trying to come across as this ‘big head trainer’ and I’m not. I’ve just always been the guy to analyze the s— out of things.”