Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  But I still turned the fight down.

  Booking a fight under the administration of the New York State Athletic Commission would be the end of my career. I was sure of it.

  The NYSAC had a reputation for applying its own rules unevenly. During UFC 205 the previous year, the regulator refused Rashad Evans a licence due to an ‘irregularity’ that no other commission – before or since – had found.

  It also refused to license a female fighter the same day, waiting until the actual weigh-in to inform her that, due to her breast implants of all things, it was too dangerous for her to compete. All this was made public, needlessly embarrassing the athlete, only for the NYSAC to change its mind and allow her to fight anyway.

  If the NYSAC thought boobs too dangerous, I could only imagine what it would make of my right eye – especially as it was about to settle a lawsuit for gross negligence to a boxer named Magomed Abdusalamov for $22million.

  ‘I don’t want to fight in New York,’ I told Dana plainly. ‘Can’t we do it in December in Vegas?’

  ‘No,’ Dana said. ‘I need GSP for Madison Square Garden.’

  ‘Can’t do it,’ I said.

  Dana asked if I was sure. I went radio silent on him for a second.

  I’ve rolled the dice on my eye situation this long, I said to myself. This fight is the biggest purse of my career. It’s worth rolling the dice for again, isn’t it?

  ‘This GSP fight will definitely happen this time?’ I asked.

  ‘If you are in, I’m going to walk into the press conference here at the arena in five minutes and announce it,’ came the answer.

  Five minutes later, Dana did just that.

  ‘I know Michael Bisping will fight,’ the promoter told the assembled media. ‘I know Bisping will show up, and he will fight. No doubt about it.’

  ‘You told us that ship had sailed,’ a reporter pointed out.

  ‘It sailed right back.’

  Now we had a location and a date – MSG in New York City, 4 November 2017 – it was time to promote the fight with a series of interviews and appearances across the US and Canada.

  Georges St-Pierre was the guy I’d thanked on live TV when I won my very first fight in the UFC, all those years ago in Vegas vs Josh Haynes. If you don’t respect GSP as a fighter, you don’t like mixed martial arts; if you don’t respect him as a person, you don’t like people.

  But I had a fight to promote, an opponent to unsettle and, to be honest, a lot of talking about the exact same thing that I needed to get through without sounding bored out of my mind. St-Pierre is cerebral and calculating, a difficult man to get an emotional response out of. The Canadian has heard it all during his 15-year career; between them, GSP’s former opponents Matt Serra, Dan Hardy, Josh Koscheck and Nick Diaz called him every name under the sun, questioned his manhood, insulted his country, his accent – none of it worked. St-Pierre never seemed to anger; and come the first round he was never emotional.

  The only subject that elicited uncontained passion from the man from the Great White North was palaeontology, the study of dinosaurs. What the hell could I do with that? Tell him he has the reach disadvantage of a T-Rex? That brontosauruses aren’t real? That a triceratops couldn’t hack it during the USADA era?

  St-Pierre steadfastly refused to return fire whenever I trolled him at press engagements and laughed with genuine amusement when I ribbed him. Nothing I said particularly fazed him – until mid-October. Following a press conference at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, Canada, Georges was standing among the exhibits of Wayne Gretzky and, y’know, other people who were good at ice hockey. He had some of his team around him and there were UFC PR staff dotted around. Georges was in the process of signing autographs for a couple of hockey moms – and I spied a camera guy who I knew worked for news website TMZ was filming him.

  I turned to Jason and said, ‘Let’s go sell some pay-per-views.’

  One hundred per cent playing the character of ‘Michael Bisping, MMA villain’, I stormed up to St-Pierre yelling, ‘Hey, Georges! Georges! Keep your fucking hands to yourself! If you put your hands on a man – that means you got a fucking problem. I will knock you the fuck out right now!’

  Jason played his part, too, halting my momentum exactly in front of the TMZ camera. The alarmed UFC staff also stepped between me and Georges, as I wanted them to.

  ‘Keep your hands to your fucking self!’ I continued.

  ‘You put your hands on me,’ GSP said as his confusion gave way to anger. ‘Fuck off, man! Fuck off!’

  I revved it up some more, pointing my finger in his face as I cursed at him.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ he said. ‘Don’t touch me! Fuck off, man!’

  Job done, I turned and walked away. As I did, I offered this advice to the most professional and composed athlete in the sport: ‘Learn to control yourself, Georges!’

  TMZ captured the whole thing – including the aftermath. After I left, Georges turned to the hockey moms – and the young lad who’d stood there during the blitzkrieg of f-bombs – and tried to continue his autograph signing. The kid ran off in tears.

  The video was posted on TMZ and got over a million views that day alone. Like I said, job done.

  I had to let Georges in on the act later that day. While waiting to appear live on Rogers Sportsnet (kinda like the Sky Sports News of Canada) at their studio, I went to the bathroom and found myself standing next to my opponent while having a slash.

  It was a small staff bathroom, with only three stalls and two urinals, side by side, next to the twin sinks. I didn’t even know it was GSP I was stood next to until the UFC camera crew came bursting in the door.

  ‘Hey – get out!’ I said.

  GSP chuckled.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ I laughed.

  If you are a guy reading this, you know that when you are using a urinal next to another dude, you stare at the wall. So there’s me and Georges St-Pierre stood shoulder to shoulder, our eyes locked dead ahead, taking a leak. We’d both obviously drunk a lot of water that day, because we were stood there for what seemed like a while.

  ‘So,’ Georges broke the silence, ‘you’ve got a Range Rover?’

  He’d obviously been watching my video blogs.

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered, ‘but it’s in the shop right now.’

  ‘Oh those things mal-funct-ion all the time, man,’ the former two-time UFC welterweight champion lamented. ‘I had one. You gotta get rid of dat, man.’

  I thanked him for the advice. We both zipped up and moved on to the sinks to wash our hands.

  ‘Alright, buddy, let’s get back into character.’ I made an exaggerated ‘mean face’ to Georges and went back to my green room.

  Twenty minutes after that, we were on set and live on air, and I was back to eviscerating him.

  Despite creeping into my late thirties and despite my body constantly reminding me I was fighting on borrowed time, I was in the form of my life. I was riding a personal best streak of five consecutive wins in the UFC. I felt I had the beating of everyone in my division.

  Jason had trained me for ten fights now and had unpicked all the psychological locks that had been holding back my full talent. The anger-induced swagger had been replaced by genuine confidence that, whoever I fought, whatever situation I found myself in, I had more than enough skill, experience and willpower to prevail.

  The camp for the GSP fight went fantastically. I felt like I could drag more oxygen than ever into my lungs. I wore muscles tighter around my arms, shoulders and chest. My thighs were powerful and my punching power had increased again.

  I’ve been told more than once that you’re not really supposed to talk about what happens in sparring – or the BJJ equivalent ‘tap and tell’ – so you’ll have to take my word for it that I was dropping UFC and Bellator fighters left and right. I felt like I had before the Anderson fight; more than a match for one of the all-time greats.

  We were using a ton of training partners and the RVCA gym was p
acked. The sponsors wanted to take advantage of the visual and shoot footage for an upcoming campaign, so, eight days from the fight, we had a camera crew filming us.

  Former TUF 9 Team UK member Dean Amasinger was part of the GSP fight preparation too. Dean had retired from active competition in 2015 and was transitioning into coaching; he offered his services as a training partner and I was happy to have him around.

  Unfortunately, in the last day of sparring he shot for a takedown and his full weight crashed through his shoulder into my ribs. There was a searing, tearing sensation I’d never felt before and I knew immediately I was injured. I screamed – not in pain – but in frustration. The best camp of my life for the biggest fight of my life … and I’d been injured with a week to go.

  An X-ray showed that it wasn’t broken but the cartilage had been shorn off. It was extremely painful and would need a while to heal.

  There was no way I was pulling out of the fight, though. This fight had been on and off for almost a year now, I’d turned down opportunities outside of the Octagon to ensure I was available to make this happen and – bottom line – I’d gone through too much for too long for this fight not to happen now.

  One of my friends from California, a medical practitioner, suggested I take an injection of lidocaine just before the fight to reduce the pain and allow me full movement. I initially said no, but I triple-checked and lidocaine was not on the ten-page-long USADA list of banned substances.

  ‘Okay, then, let’s do that,’ I said once I was satisfied.

  But it wasn’t so simple.

  The best advice I could find was that while taking lidocaine before a fight was perfectly fine, if I wrote down I had injured ribs during the pre-fight medical at the weigh-in at New York, there was every chance the NYSAC would pull me from the event.

  ‘Okay, I’ll take the injection in my hotel room, before I leave for the arena,’ I said.

  Nope, that wouldn’t work either.

  ‘Lidocaine only lasts for a very short period,’ I was told. ‘We’re talking twenty minutes to an hour. With your body working so hard in the fight, the effects will be gone sooner than that but, by then, the adrenaline released in the fight will take over and you won’t need the lidocaine.’

  ‘There’s no way I can take a doctor into the dressing room with me,’ I said. ‘The Commission will obviously ask me what I’m taking and a whole can of worms will be opened just minutes before my fight. New York has already kicked off about licensing me about my eye … I think if I go to them with a rib injury on top of that they’ll cancel the fight there and then.’

  So, a crazy plan was formulated …

  ‘Remember,’ my medical friend said, ‘if you get this wrong you’ll puncture your lung.’

  Worries about the rib injury were stacked on top of months of worrying about the NYSAC refusing to license me over my right eye.

  Before applying, I underwent a one-hour operation to remove the plastic drain I’d worn on my eyeball for over four years. The drain had become preventative by that point and, although I’d had it in for my previous eight fights, I wanted to do all I could to ensure the Commission licensed me.

  I’d initially provided them with, literally, an inch-thick file of scans, test results and a letter explaining it all from my eye doctor, who also noted that I have a ‘heavy-set brow and recessed globes’, which gave my eyes further protection. (Rebecca found this part absolutely hysterical. ‘See? See!’ she squealed. ‘I always said you look like a caveman!’)

  That wasn’t enough. The NYSAC had their own eye expert, they noted, and he disagreed with my doctor.

  The people now in charge of the Commission were clearly – and understandably – extremely cautious out of concern of another multi-million-dollar lawsuit.

  The NYSAC offered a way forward. If I signed a disclaimer stating that I would not bring any lawsuit against them in relation to my eyes, they would license me to compete at UFC 217 on 4 November.

  Madison Square Garden, located in 7th Avenue, Manhattan, is about as American as sports venues get. Although to a Brit, some of the history doesn’t translate, to an American fight fan ‘The Garden’ conjures up a lineage that stretches all the way to Rocky Marciano in the 40s, Joe Louis in the 30s and even Jack Dempsey in the 20s.

  Three UFC titles were on the line on that freezing November night and the limos and Uber XLs were pulling up three-deep alongside the iconic marquee on 7th Avenue.

  The Garden is also known as the Mecca of basketball, with the NY Knicks calling MSG home since its current incarnation opened in 1968. And it was into the Knicks’ recently refurbished locker room that I was directed when my team and I arrived at the fight venue a little after 9pm local time. The Knicks logo blazed up from the thick carpet, which itself was a cool blue contrast to the redwood and shining brass horseshoe of open ‘lockers’ that dominated the room.

  The room was surprisingly small for the dressing room of a team of 6ft 7in basketballers. But there was more than enough room for myself, my team and Rose Namajunas and her crew. ‘Thug Rose’, an introverted 24-year-old outside the Octagon and a stone-cold executioner inside it, would be challenging Joanna Jedrzejczyk for the women’s strawweight title on the card.

  When the knock on the door came for Rose, I got ready to put my crazy plan into action. It was time.

  Time to root the wrapped towel out of my bag and carry it to an empty stall in the bathroom; time to set my phone down on top of the toilet tank cover and, after hopefully getting three bars or more, calling my medical-expert friend on Facetime. And if that went well, it would be time to carefully unroll the towel and take out the two-inch syringe containing lidocaine and, with my digital medical assistant giving step-by-step instructions in real time, it would be time to inject myself in the ribcage in exactly the right spot to numb my injury but not puncture my left lung.

  Eyeing my blue gym bag with the towel and syringe in it, I waited for my moment. But Commission members were in and out of the room. Then Big John McCarthy came in to give his instructions for the main event. A UFC camera crew wanted to know when they could film me warming up. A Reebok rep checked to see if all the kit was good. Then Rose came back – having won the title with a first-round KO.

  This is lunacy! I thought. My ribs will just have to hurt. The stress of finding a window to go and take an online anatomy class, involving injecting myself in the toilets, was somewhat distracting me from preparing for my world title defence. If only I’d been as familiar with needles as Vitor Belfort.

  I grabbed the blue gym bag and put it in the locker.

  St-Pierre was two years younger than me and, as a result of his vigilant fighting style as much as his sabbatical from the sport, he had far fewer miles on the clock. While I am two inches taller than the Canadian, I never expected to have a size advantage in the Octagon; Georges is an incredible athlete with a deceptively large frame. His back, biceps and shoulders looked very large and his arms and legs were longer than mine too.

  The 18,201 fans enjoyed booing me in the way they’d boo a pantomime villain or a pro-wrestling heel. They had a black hat to boo and a vanilla hat to cheer.

  Both Georges and I understood what a victory against the other would cost. We bumped fists twice during referee Big John McCarthy’s instructions.

  Any thought of my rib injury melted away at the start of the fight. St-Pierre was circling constantly in the early going; clockwise and then counterclockwise and then back the other way, keeping the fight at jabbing distance. GSP had beaten some very good fighters for five rounds apiece purely with his jab. I lamented that my own jab was a relic of what it had been before the eye injury.

  Georges threw a big left hook – the first of many – two minutes in. I didn’t see the fist flying towards my right temple but I saw the way his feet, legs and trunk had moved and I sensed the punch. He hit nothing but air and I landed a one-two while he was still open.

  A jab bit into my nose. I nodded to my opponent. That
was a well-timed one. So was the right cross he stuck in my left ear. For a guy who’d not fought officially for four years GSP had started very sharply – which I expected – and was using striking rather than wrestling – which I had not anticipated.

  He landed another solid jab. I clipped him with a right hook. With one minute to go he shot his first takedown. It was a single-leg near the cage that had me sitting on my arse, my back against the fence. Georges held on to my left leg and didn’t move for several moments. I looked up at Big John and gestured for him to instruct my opponent to try to advance his position; when he did I posted off my right and regained my feet.

  I was overthinking; my conscious mind was struggling to let my instincts take over and guide my actions in the fight.

  We both fell short with a handful of punches each – then just as I was at the absolute apex of changing my weight to step to the left, Georges flew forward with a Superman jab. Because he’d timed it so exactly with the movement of my feet, the force of the blow knocked me backwards as I regained my balance. The timing of the punch couldn’t have been more precise even with the use of an atomic clock. The crowd leapt to their feet cheering – then a spinning wheel kick bounced off the top of my head seconds before the round ended.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Rogan explained on commentary. ‘GSP might have been lying – he might be even better. He might be better!’

  No question, round one was a wash. Jason told me not to load up on my punches so much.

  Round one was cut adrift in my mind. I started the fight from scratch in round two.

  GSP came out kicking. He threw a side kick, a push kick, a leg kick. None landed but they were delivered with such crisp perfectionism the three judges would have been impressed nevertheless. He then threw a left hook, but this time did a better job of disguising it. I had to change the direction of the fight. I used the stutter-step left high kick that had worked so well on Henderson. St-Pierre skipped forward and pushed me back with a side kick to the body. He again threw a leaping left hook in an arc so wide there was no doubt now that he was looking to take advantage of my diminished eyesight on that side.