Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  ‘You need to go to the hospital, Mike,’ Dana said.

  ‘Nah, I’m good. I’m good, Dana.’

  ‘You don’t fucking look good,’ Dana shot back. ‘You need to go to the hospital to get that eye checked out.’

  My eye getting checked is exactly why I’m not going to the hospital, I thought.

  ‘Nah, I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘You know, I fucking care about you,’ Dana said. ‘You need to get the eye looked at and an MRI done. That was a crazy fight. You took a lot of big shots. You are going to the hospital.’

  It wasn’t a suggestion.

  Then Audie tagged in, ‘You need to go to the hospital tonight, Mike. You aren’t going to the post-fight, you are going to get looked at now.’

  So, I climbed into the waiting ambulance and was driven to Manchester Royal Infirmary for an MRI. I was as abrupt and uncommunicative as possible (‘No pain’, ‘No headache’, ‘I’m fine’, ‘Are we done?’) and left as soon as the MRI scan came back clear.

  My after-party began in my suite as the first rays of sunlight slithered through Manchester’s grey clouds. My team was there, I had my friends from the US and the UK there and, extra special to me, my big brother Konrad had come to the fight and stayed with me all night.

  We were buzzing with energy and we had a great time all day. In the early evening we went out for something to eat at a nice restaurant. I apologised and explained to everyone in there – the waitress, the staff and the other guests – that despite my appearance I wasn’t on the run from a rival street gang.

  We had a great day. I finally went to sleep around midnight.

  I was still peering over and under black bruises on Monday morning. I knocked my aftershave over when I reached to turn the light on in the bathroom. My face had a shade of black-purple I’d never seen before. I moved closer to the mirror. I was swollen and technicoloured. I grabbed a bottle of water and got back into bed.

  Outside, it was around 9:30am. Already, I knew, middleweight contenders had tweeted challenges at me, and their managers were machine-gunning texts to new UFC middleweight matchmaker Mick Maynard. Before I wrestled myself back to sleep I ran the tips of my fingers around my head, ribs and forearms. Every inch felt like Braille, telling me a story I already knew: my time as a UFC fighter was almost over.

  The Dan Henderson win wasn’t supposed to be the last time I competed in Great Britain. I always wanted my final fight to be in the UK. That was the plan for years and years. In my mind’s eye I saw myself – sweaty but hopefully not too bloody and having spent every last effort to win – taking the microphone after the fight. I would say thank you to the British fans. I’d try and articulate how grateful I was.

  But I didn’t get to do that, and so I’ll write down here what I would have tried to have said in the arena if I could have got through it without choking up.

  Believe me – I never, ever, took your support for granted.

  More than anyone outside my family, there’s no one I wanted to make proud more than the British fans. Early on in my career there were times I experienced this as pressure. Pressure to perform, pressure to win, pressure to send you home happy. Quickly, though, it wasn’t pressure, it was support.

  There’s no doubt in my mind I achieved more because I had that support. At the elite level of MMA, every extra percentage of energy, confidence and will makes a difference. When I walked out in Manchester following UFC 100, when my toe was hanging off in Scotland, at the start of the fourth round against Anderson Silva in London, during the fight with Dan Henderson in Manchester, you made a difference.

  When I climbed into the Octagon on British soil, I was invincible.

  Bringing the UFC world championship home to Great Britain was the honour of my life. I’ll never forget the support you gave me as long as I live.

  Now, there’s a new generation of British mixed martial artists coming through. Support them like you supported me and – believe you me – there will be more British UFC title challengers. There will be more British UFC champions.

  From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

  The surgeon wanted to weld a metal rivet into my face.

  I was back in California, getting the bruise under my left eye checked out. Turned out Henderson’s big punch (or maybe big elbow) in the first round had separated the zygomatic arch and maxillary, the two bones that join together to form the underside of the orbital socket. That’s why my left eye had swelled up so nastily, the doctor told me.

  The bones had already knitted back together, and a metal plate under my good eye sounded like another athletic commission licensing nightmare. So, after getting assurances the fracture would quickly heal on its own, I demurred.

  Besides, my most pressing medical concern wasn’t my fractured face … it wasn’t the stinger I’d first suffered training for Brian Stann years before (which had gotten so bad my right shoulder, biceps and triceps were atrophying) … it wasn’t even my right eye.

  No, my biggest concern was always with injuries that could physically stop me from training and fighting and, at that moment, my left knee was pretty close to doing just that. The same kind of calcified floaters that had caused my elbow to lock out were causing my knee to lock in place periodically.

  If I was going to have any operation done, it was to fix my knee. I was looking at getting the procedure done in November 2016. I was done fighting for the year – or was I?

  My flight to Dubai had reached the halfway point over the Atlantic. The cabin had been blacked out for the night and I’d just finished watching a movie. The main source of light in the business-class cabin was the white glow from the dozens of television screens which hung silently in front of my fellow passengers’ sleeping faces. I couldn’t rest, though. My left knee had locked up in exactly the same way my elbow had two years before. Twice on the flight, I had to dig my fingertips into the joint and root out the calcified shards. It bloody hurt.

  I ordered another glass of wine and began searching for a second movie to watch when my phone buzzed with an SMS.

  It was Dana and the text conversation went like this:

  Dana: Call me.

  Me: I’m on a flight to Dubai. What’s up?

  Dana: U healthy?

  Me: Problem?

  Dana: Are you healthy/healed up?

  Me: Yeah, healthy as fuck. All healed and pretty. Why?

  Dana: Keep between u and me and don’t EVER say I don’t love u!! I don’t have deal done yet but U vs GSP in Toronto Main Event!!! If I can get this done are u in?

  A fight with Georges St-Pierre! I’d paid little attention to the rumours that ‘GSP’ – who for years was neck and neck on the pound-for-pound list with Anderson Silva but a much bigger box-office draw – was close to breaking his three-year sabbatical from the sport he’d once dominated. The two-time welterweight champion had vacated his crown in November 2013, saying he needed time away from the grind of defending his title. He’d remained a martial arts fanatic, though, and never stopped training. Now he wanted to come back and become one of the very few fighters to win UFC titles in two separate divisions.

  Beating Anderson Silva and GSP would be like having wins over both Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao on your record. Plus, I understood immediately my cut of pay-per-view revenue would be double, no, triple the biggest payday of my career.

  It took me a moment of just sitting there in my half-reclined seat before I could take it all in.

  I texted back:

  I’m healthy enough to beat Georges. I’m in!

  My trip to Dubai was in and out, very short, to open a UFC Gym there. My mobile phone couldn’t dial out while I was there but, as you can imagine, I was texting Dana every day for updates. There weren’t any, nor when I called the day after I returned from the Middle East.

  Whatever the hold-up was, I had to move forward as if the fight was happening. There were barely seven
weeks until the mooted Toronto date, so I worked with Jason and Brady to put together a tight, intense camp heavily focused on countering GSP’s formidable takedowns. I continued to either speak or text with Dana every day – until the day he texted me: ‘IT’S OFF’.

  Apparently, the UFC and the former champion had not reached an agreement. GSP was remaining retired and I’d got excited for nothing.

  It would have been for the best if I’d had the knee surgery as soon as I got the news St-Pierre wasn’t coming back, but there was a constant stream of rumours and chatter from people close to the former pound-for-pounder, so I held off over Christmas, just in case the GSP fight suddenly reappeared. It didn’t, so I had the surgery in January.

  In February, Dana contacted me saying the UFC and St-Pierre were having productive talks again.

  ‘He’s in on fighting you,’ the UFC president told me. ‘We got some stuff to figure out, but you are the fight he wants.’

  St-Pierre, I was sure, had hand-picked me as his comeback opponent for two reasons. First, I had the middleweight belt. Second, he’d outwrestled me when we’d trained together all those years ago, before I’d won TUF 3.

  I was confident for the opposite reason. I knew there was a world of difference between the wide-eyed kid he’d out-grappled at that UFC HQ basement gym in Las Vegas and the fighter I had become. A career of difference. A world championship of difference.

  I still laugh at how dismayed poor Georges was when I showed up late to our mid-morning press conference in Las Vegas, 3 March 2017, hoarse and a little worse for wear.

  ‘My God, Biz-ping! My God!’ he gasped with that accent that literally everyone on earth can do a spot-on impression of. ‘What haz ’appened to you? Biz-ping – what haz ’appened? Are you en-tock-zeek-ated?’

  ‘I am en-tock-zeek-ated,’ I admitted with zero shame. ‘I’m English; I’m in Las Vegas so I went out and had a good time last night. It’s not like I have a date to train for … when is the fight, Georges?’

  Georges didn’t say. In what I think was a first for the UFC, we were there to announce a fight would happen – but couldn’t inform the public as to where or when. I heard rumours as to what the delay was – everything from GSP having an issue with his eyes (which, obviously, I didn’t have much sympathy with) to disagreements between the UFC and Georges over everything from money to where and when the fight would take place.

  It could well have been a combination of all those things – I didn’t care. I just needed a date to aim for. If it was going to be in the next three/four months, I needed to begin organising a training camp and sparring partners. If the fight was five months or more away, I wanted to know now.

  But – even after we’d announced the fight, done a press conference and squared up in front of the MMA media’s cameras – no confirmation of any date came.

  It was frustrating for me and the UFC. A couple of months after the face-to-face press conference in Vegas, Dana announced that whenever St-Pierre felt ready to commit to an actual date for his big return, he would be fighting for his old welterweight title, held by Tyron Woodley.

  ‘The shot at the middleweight title has sailed,’ he informed the media.

  Obviously, I was pissed off. Twice now I’d had this massive, career-best-and-then-some payday dangled in front of me only for it not to happen. And yet, St-Pierre himself continued to indicate it was me he wanted to fight and no one else. I remained quietly confident the fight would happen eventually.

  I underwent a second knee operation in early summer. Dr Steve A. Mora, who’d done all my orthopaedic surgeries, told me the prognosis wasn’t terrible. The floating bodies had done a little damage before he’d removed them in January. In layman’s terms, my knee was no longer able to lubricate itself and friction within the joint was causing the swelling. The treatment was to inject fatty tissue, removed from my mid-section, into the knee to prevent further friction.

  It was a relatively minor procedure and the recovery time was only a few weeks. Only, I left for Thailand to film the movie Triple Threat two days later. As you can imagine with a film featuring martial arts movie heroes like Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White, Triple Threat called for a lot of fighting, jumping off things and running. Every evening I’d get back to my hotel room with my left knee twice the size of my right.

  One evening I was sat in my room icing the knee when Dana called. He wanted me to defend the belt in early July at UFC 213 at the big annual International Fight Week event.

  ‘I’ll text you a picture why I can’t,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Dana saw what I meant. He called back a few days later and said he planned on moving ahead with the two leading 185lb contenders, Yoel Romero and Robert Whittaker, fighting each other at UFC 213. He told me the plan included awarding the winner an ‘interim UFC middleweight title’ and asked me if I was okay with that.

  ‘It seems a little unnecessary to me, I defended the title six months ago,’ I shrugged, ‘but I appreciate you asking. I don’t care either way, to be honest. Neither of them has headlined a big card before so if we can bill my fight with the winner as a “champion versus champion” fight, and maybe sell a few more pay-per-views as a result, fuck it, I’m good with it.’

  Dana told me he wanted me there for the fight and to keep him posted with how my knee was doing.

  The plan for the middleweight title for the rest of the year was for me and the winner of the 8 July Whittaker/Romero fight to coach The Ultimate Fighter, season 26, opposite each other and then fight in November or December.

  In Dana’s dressing room before the fights began at UFC 213: Whittaker vs Romero I sat down with him and Hunter Campbell, the UFC’s chief legal officer, and Craig Piligian to negotiate my fee for doing TUF. I wasn’t unreasonable, but I pointed out this would be the third time I’d coached the series, that I was now the world champion and, most importantly, I’d developed my television and film career to the point where me filming for two consecutive months for any show had to require compensation.

  We hashed out a deal and, with that done, I took my Octagonside seat next to Dana for Whittaker vs Romero. The lights went out inside the brand-new T-Mobile Arena and the giant screens began blaring the pre-fight promo.

  Dana leaned in. ‘Who you got?’ he said.

  ‘Probably Romero early or Whittaker late,’ I shouted over the in-arena music. ‘Romero would be better for me, though. He gases. Plus, there’s some needle there for TUF.’

  The fight was one of the best of 2017, with Whittaker sweeping the last three rounds to win on points. I knew the Australian had a quieter personality so I went into the Octagon to ignite Bisping vs Whittaker in the fans’ imaginations. I took a replica UFC title belt with me and threw it down at Whittaker’s feet, telling him to pick that one up, too. My point was there were plenty of belts with ‘U-F-C’ written on them – but no matter how many he had, he still wouldn’t be the champion.

  ‘See you in a few days,’ I told Dana. I went home and spent some time with the family, waiting for the call that my return flight to the Fight Capital of the World had been booked.

  Monday came. Then it went.

  Tuesday, came. Then it went, too.

  On Wednesday afternoon, I called Dana.

  ‘TUF’s not happening,’ he said. ‘We had to go with two other coaches.’

  Dana explained the new ‘interim’ champion had torn the medial ligament in his knee fighting Romero. I’d flown to Vegas the week before to see if I’d be fighting Romero or Whittaker; with one beaten and the winner injured, I’d be fighting neither.

  With the ‘interim champion’, aka No.1 contender, Whittaker out, there didn’t seem to be a natural match for me for my second title defence. There certainly wasn’t one that would do even one quarter of the PPV buys that the GSP fight would generate nor, with respect to the available opposition, mean half as much on my record as the former two-time UFC champion.

  The rest of the middleweight Top 5 were all comin
g off losses; No.2 Romero of course had lost to one-legged Whittaker, No.3 Rockhold hadn’t fought since I’d KO’d him, No.4 Souza had been KO’d by Whittaker and Weidman had been stopped in his last three fights in a row.

  These were the fighters – along with their financial dependants – who fertilised Twitter with a blizzard of bullshit. ‘Bisping’s ducking me,’ they blarted; ‘Bisping’s hand-picking challengers,’ they moaned.

  Well, I’d fought Rashad Evans on six weeks notice, and Vitor Belfort on super-unleaded in his home town. I’d faced Dan Henderson in America during the 4th of July weekend, I fought Chael Sonnen on one week’s notice and I beat Anderson Silva. I did all of this – just to earn a last-minute title shot.

  So, forgive me if I was indifferent to these entitled demands from contenders who couldn’t string two wins together.

  I had to fight someone, though, and of the possible challengers I figured I’d get either Romero, the rubber match with Rockhold or maybe the rematch with Anderson (who was at least coming off a win). I was wrong on all three.

  The call from Dana came just before 11pm on 29 July. That night’s UFC 214 hadn’t been off the air for even an hour. Dana was still in his dressing room/office at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California.

  ‘You and GSP, one hundred per cent, November four, Madison Square Garden,’ he said. ‘You in?’

  I knew what had happened. Tyson Woodley’s successful defence of the UFC welterweight title vs Demian Maia earlier that night, while one-sided, had been far from a classic. It was the second straight fight where the UFC president had been displeased with Tyron’s performance as champion.

  ‘You in?’ Dana repeated.

  There was no point playing hard to get – of course I still wanted the fight. And competing at the iconic Madison Square Garden on New York’s 7th Avenue, where so many legendary boxing matches had taken place, was appealing as well.