Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  Belfort had already been caught using anabolic steroids (by the Nevada Athletic Commission in 2006 vs Dan Henderson) and on another occasion walking around with almost double the normal levels of testosterone bouncing around his veins. There was no doubt in my mind I’d be facing a vastly more physically powerful opponent if I accepted the São Paulo fight.

  And yet … I also felt Vitor Belfort was mentally weak. Whatever the bullshit excuses they come up with, people like Belfort didn’t take steroids because they were confident in their abilities, they took them because they weren’t confident. Belfort had psychologically collapsed several times when faced by someone who fought back – he was terrified of Anderson Silva in 2011 – and I knew damn well I’d fight back.

  That’s who I was, wasn’t it? I was the guy who never once said ‘no’ to a fight. I’d never ducked any opponent – and I never would.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll fight him, Dana,’ I said.

  The Brazilians I met out and about in São Paulo couldn’t stand Belfort. Some of them didn’t know much English but they knew enough to tell me how they felt about my opponent: ‘Belfort – cheat!’

  And not only a cheat, but one who used his sanctimonious Bible-thumping to excuse his cheating. When he was asked at the press conference to explain how it could be fair that he, a former PED abuser, got to now use Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT), Belfort had the gall to say, ‘Like Jesus said, throw the first rock who never did anything wrong. I believe everyone in the world has done something wrong but that’s not a reason to crucify them.’

  When MMAJunkie.com reporter John Morgan pressed for a legitimate answer, Belfort asked for volunteers to beat John up. How Christian.

  Belfort was insanely jacked at the weigh-in at the Ginásio do Ibirapuera arena the day before our fight. You could virtually hear his skin creaking against the bulging muscles and veins. He looked like the Incredible Hulk squeezing his penis.

  My plan in the fight was to take over after the opening rounds. I felt good in the opening round, which was essentially the boxing match I’d anticipated. But in the second, I was stunned by a head kick to my right orbital socket. Belfort followed me to the ground and attacked with hammer fists and the referee stopped it. I thought the stoppage was early – I was fine – but it was what it was.

  Twenty minutes after the fight, me and Belfort were lying down backstage on two gurneys about ten feet apart. The space we were in was curtained off and we were both getting cuts on our faces sewn. I always preferred getting stitched by the medical personnel at the arena rather than at a hospital when the adrenaline of the fight has worn off.

  ‘Hey, brother, we both came out okay,’ Belfort said. ‘This is great; we are all happy and safe. God took care of us both.’

  I made a joke about it being easy for Vitor to say that because he’d won the fight. The fight was over, y’know? We shook hands and went our separate ways. Before I left the arena, I checked my fresh stitches in a mirror.

  The eye didn’t look bad.

  The flashes came later. The first thing I noticed was my fingers turning invisible in restaurants. The first time it happened I was reaching for my drink and my hand became a stump. I moved my hand a little closer to the centre of my vision and everything looked fine. That’s weird, I thought, before carrying on eating and chatting away with Rebecca.

  My professional record now stood at 23 wins and 5 losses. I didn’t like the look of that ‘5’. I texted Dana White saying I wanted to fight again as quickly as possible. The match the UFC came back with was one that had been talked about, at least by my opponent, for over five years.

  Alan Belcher had been vocally campaigning to fight me since I first moved down to middleweight.

  ‘I’ll have a fight with Alan Belcher on the way to the car back to the hotel,’ I answered a fan question at the UFC 152 press conference, ‘but he should stop worrying about me and arrange a fight with whichever tattoo artist drew that abomination on his arm.’

  Poor Alan’s enormous tattoo of (allegedly) Johnny Cash, which covered the entirety of his upper left arm, was great for piss-taking. It’s awful; the condensed forehead and elongated jaw makes it look like the result of a union between Roseanne Barr and Tim Sylvia. It was the worst ink job this side of that fat pervert in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

  Belcher had been on a good run while calling me out, beating Denis Kang (submission), Wilson Gouveia (TKO), Patrick Cote (submission) and Rousimar Palhares (TKO). He was coming off a loss, like me, so the fight made sense. The Arkansas striker did his best to talk up the fight but at the UFC 159 weigh-in at Newark, New Jersey, I could see in his face that his confidence was wobbly.

  ‘You are shitting your pants!’ I told him. He confirmed my suspicion by shoving me in the chest.

  Belcher had wanted to fight me for half a decade but, half a minute in, it was dawning on him that we were operating at two different levels. He was significantly slower than me. I felt like I had ages to get out of the way of his strikes. At one point I slipped a kick and actually said to him, ‘What the fuck was that?’

  We had a pure kickboxing battle. I landed triple the shots he did until, inadvertently, one of my fingers cut his eyelid and we went to the scorecards 29 seconds before the scheduled end of the final round. I won 30–27 on two cards and 29–28 on the other.

  The next day I was getting a coffee from a Starbucks in the hotel and saw Belcher with his team waiting to be picked up to go to the airport. I went over to check if Alan’s eye was okay and we spent about ten minutes chatting and laughing about the insults we’d thrown at each other over the years.

  Despite being only 29 years old, that was the last time Alan Belcher competed in MMA. It was very nearly the final fight of my career, too.

  ‘Oh, you’re doing that crazy thing again,’ my mate Damien said.

  And I was. I was slowly moving my right hand side to side along the restaurant table, wiggling my fingers slowly as they disappeared into thin air. It was always in dark restaurants or watching the TV at home at night. Whenever my right hand was 45 degrees from my line of sight, I couldn’t make out my fingers. They disappeared behind a grey curtain. Then I’d move my hand closer to my line of sight and my fingers would reappear. My eye didn’t hurt at all, so I didn’t go to see a doctor. I can be stupidly macho like that.

  A few weeks after the Belcher fight I noticed my whole hand would now vanish if I moved it more than 40 degrees into my peripheral vision. The grey curtain had moved inwards. Then it was 30 degrees. Then 20. And then I was sitting at the kitchen table one night when I realised I couldn’t see anything out of my right eye. Nothing at all.

  I spun into a panic.

  I googled the symptoms – hit after hit suggested one thing. I then googled ‘best eye doctor’ and telephoned the first one with a five-star rating.

  ‘Hello, I think I may have a detached retina,’ I said when they picked up. I explained I was a professional fighter who’d been kicked in the eye months before, and described my worsening symptoms.

  I was put on hold for 40 seconds before the receptionist came back on the line. ‘We were due to close in twenty minutes but I’ve spoken with the ophthalmologist and he wants to see you immediately. Do you have our address? And is there someone who can drive you here?’

  Rebecca drove. When we got there I was laid down on a white examination table in a white room with a bright white light shining down. Drops were used to dilate my right eye and they swung some sort of viewing apparatus over my face which streamed images to a screen.

  He wasn’t looking for more than 30 seconds before he removed the apparatus from above my face. ‘You do have a detached retina,’ he said. ‘Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Just what I read on Google …’

  ‘The retina is what we call the thin layer of light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye,’ he explained. ‘It is attached to a layer of blood vessels which provide the eye with oxygen and nutrients. If the retina is torn
away from those blood vessels – in the case of your right eye now – not only is vision impaired but the eye is starved of that oxygen and those nutrients. I need to perform what is called a scleral buckling procedure, immediately.’

  The surgery lasted an hour and it involved injecting oil into my eyeball to push the retina back against the blood vessels. The retina was then lasered back in place and, finally, a silicone sponge was positioned on the outside of my eyeball to help take the pressure off the tear while it healed.

  Even though I’d left it for months before seeking medical treatment – and had even fought with the injury – the operation was a success. My eye definitely looked a little different with the oil inside it, but until the last couple of decades a detached retina was the absolute end of any sporting career, so I was happy that treatment was available.

  I flew to London to film a movie called Plastic and then accepted a fight in Manchester vs Mark Muñoz on 26 October. Muñoz – who’s now a real mate and our kids are friends – is a two-time All-American wrestler, so I supplemented what I was doing with Jason and Brady by working with MMA pioneer and catch wrestling legend Erik Paulson.

  My camp was going so well, but looking back both Jason and Paulson commented that I was sparring far too hard. I wanted to send a message in the Muñoz fight, though, and kept pushing it hard. In late September I was driving the five miles from Erik’s CSW Training Center in Fullerton to my house when a grey darkness skated from across my eyes as slowly and deliberately as electronic curtains in a posh hotel room.

  It was a super-creepy experience. I knew exactly what had happened. My retina had detached again. I called the same ophthalmologist I’d seen just three months before and was scheduled for an operation the next day. I called Dana and informed him.

  ‘Hey Dana, I’ve got some bad news but it will be okay. My retina has re-detached but I’m still going to be able to fight in Manchester because—’

  ‘Wow, stop.’

  ‘I’m having an operation tomorrow – I’ll be in and out in an hour and—’

  ‘Stop, stop.’

  ‘… I reckon that if I rest for two or three weeks—’

  ‘Mike! Stop!’

  ‘… I’ll be fully healed and I’ll be able to fly to the UK and do the fight.’

  ‘Stop! What are you talking about? Bro, you just told me your retina is detached. The fight is off.’

  The UFC has always been great with anything to do with injuries. Dana had the UFC’s medical adviser, Dr Jeffrey Davidson (known to everyone as ‘Dr D’), liaise with my ophthalmologist as I prepared to go into surgery and I gave permission for Dr D and the UFC to be kept informed of my progress.

  The day after the surgery I was in the passenger seat of our family car. Rebecca and I had dropped the kids off at school and had stopped off at a local Target (kinda like a giant Asda or Tesco) to pick a few things up for the house. I was dressed in a tracksuit and wearing a black eyepatch over the white bandages around my right eye. My phone rang.

  ‘It’s Dana,’ I told Rebecca as she pulled out of the supermarket car park. I answered and said hello.

  ‘I just got off the phone with your doctor,’ Dana said. ‘I’m so sorry, it’s not good news. You’re probably not going to fight again. Your doctor says there’s too much scar tissue back there. He said you’ve been unlucky; the scar tissue has pushed the retina to detach again. In his opinion, he can’t see how you get to fight again.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  EYE OF A NEEDLE

  I pushed the news away from me. I wanted nothing to do with the idea that my fighting career was over. There was no way I was done fighting. No way.

  But the nightmare had only just begun. The worst day of my life came a few weeks later. It began when I woke with a headache. Going for a walk with my dog Ditto and Lucas didn’t help, it was getting progressively worse, and when we got back it was so bad I lay face down on the floor.

  The pain just kept getting worse and worse. Over the course of an hour in the afternoon, I went from ‘Agh, agh, this really hurts!’ to screaming – screaming – in agony.

  Rebecca called my ophthalmologist, but he was in surgery and so I went to the emergency care hospital at Garden Grove. There, I was diagnosed with a condition known as acute angle-closure glaucoma.

  Basically, the eyeball is kept wet by the constant secretion of a clear protein-rich fluid that moisturises both the front of the eye and the chamber behind it. The chamber behind the eyeball is called the posterior cavity and the normal ‘water pressure’ (called IOP) in there is 9–20mmHg of pressure. Sometimes the drain in the posterior cavity becomes blocked, flooding the cavity and increasing the pressure on the eyeball.

  Any IOP of 22 or over is considered high pressure. The worst case of acute glaucoma Garden Grove had ever seen was 60mmHg.

  My eye pressure was 89mmHg.

  ‘Think of a water balloon on a tap,’ one of the doctors said. ‘The water will keep filling the balloon until, eventually, the pressure will cause the balloon to burst. That’s what’s happening behind your eye.’

  They treated it there and then with a laser – burning a tiny hole to let the fluid drain. They gave me pills for the symptoms and another set the size of Big Macs for the pain. Then they sent me home to rest. The pills knocked me groggy but didn’t land a glove on the pain. When we got home, I lay face down on the living-room floor. I went to bed around 5pm. I shut the curtains because the light was painful. Rebecca checked on me every half-hour, growing more concerned that, despite the laser, despite the meds and the painkillers, I was still groaning with discomfort. Around 2am, I began screaming in white-hot agony at the top of my lungs.

  The pain was now almost indescribable. I didn’t know humans could suffer like that without passing out. It was like a rat was eating my eyeball from the inside out.

  Rebecca dialled my ophthalmologist – who picked up but was about to go into an emergency surgery. He was extremely concerned that I was in such agony again. He instructed us to go to the nearest hospital immediately.

  ‘They will be waiting for him,’ he told Rebecca. ‘Get him there right away.’

  We threw some clothes on and Rebecca drove there as safely as she could with me screaming and howling behind her in the back seat. When we arrived the pain was so searing I’d have gladly shot myself in the head – anything to make it stop.

  There was a doctor, a bald guy with a moustache, and a nurse in her thirties, waiting for me outside. My ophthalmologist had briefed them on the phone. I was awful to them, screaming and swearing as they tried to get me to answer a series of questions. ‘DO SOMETHING!’ I shouted, over and over.

  ‘Michael,’ the doctor said evenly, ‘your IOP eye pressure is greatly elevated again. I can relieve the pain now but I need you to lay down on that bed and hold very still. Do you understand? Hold very still?’

  ‘YES! WHATEVER IT IS, DO IT! NOW! JUST FUCKING DO IT!’

  I locked my spine in a line, squeezed my fists as tight as I could and pressed the back of my skull into the bed I was lying on. The nurse stood behind me and braced my temples with her palms. My good eye darted anxiously about the room, trying to see what was coming. The doctor appeared above me with a needle. He moved fast. There was a stab of pain and – the relief was instant and overwhelming. I moaned …

  The doctor and nurse stepped back and told me to sit up. The pain had vanished like a childhood nightmare when the light’s turned on. I spent 20 minutes apologising to both of them for the screaming and cursing.

  The doctor then showed me a tiny rounded silicone device, maybe an inch in size. ‘We need to insert this into your eye,’ he said. ‘It is an artificial drain and this will prevent the pressure from building again. Your eye isn’t draining on its own.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, now capable of a rational discussion once more. ‘But I’m a professional fighter – can I fight with that in my eye?’

  ‘Your only concern tonight is with your eye,’ the d
octor said. ‘Patients lose their sight due to glaucoma and we don’t want that happening.’

  ‘No, I need to know,’ I pressed. ‘Fighting is how I take care of my family – it is how you are getting paid. I can’t have a procedure done if it will end my career.’

  The doctor relented. ‘You can fight. I fitted this on a heavyweight boxer several years back and he resumed his boxing career afterwards.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

  But the operation didn’t go to plan. First, I came out of the general anaesthetic early, while the operation was still ongoing. I began convulsing uncontrollably until I was put back under. When I woke up again I was still in pain, pain that quickly boiled like a kettle until I was screaming again.

  ‘Is it the same pain as when you came in tonight?’ the doctor asked several times as I howled in agony.

  ‘WORSE! MUCH WORSE!’

  I was put under again. Adjustments were made to the positioning of the drain. After three procedures in one day, I went home exhausted, drugged-up and concerned about my future.

  The eye injury not only torpedoed my MMA career but, I feared, would hurt my budding acting career. On top of that, I was fighting a ridiculous lawsuit brought by the Liverpool gym people back in England. It was a stressful period for me and one of the times my Rebecca and the kids rallied around me.

  The doctor who’d performed the surgery had referred me to another doctor, who I saw every Tuesday at 11am for check-ups. It was an 80-minute drive there. It was an 80-minute drive back.

  ‘We’re going to keep you under close observation,’ the new doctor said on my first visit. He was a middle-aged fella, balding on the temples and with the long physique of an enthusiastic amateur runner. ‘Our main concern is around the scar-tissue area. We need to keep a close watch that it isn’t pushing at your eye and tearing the retina once again.’