Michael Bisping is as tough as they come.
Not only did the Brit fight in the UFC for almost six years with complete loss of vision in his right eye, but the MMA veteran fought almost completely blind against Luke Rockhold in their first middleweight bout at UFC Fight Night 55. Rockhold dropped Bisping with a head kick before finishing him with a guillotine choke in the first round.
Speaking on a recent episode of UFC Unfiltered, Bisping revealed that he was headbutted in training just days before the Rockhold fight and was almost completely blind on fight night.
“The fight with Rockhold, a few days before I flew out to Australia I got headbutted in training and I had stitches in my eye,” Bisping said, per MMA Fighting. “This is all in the book. Obviously, everybody knows I’ve got one bad eye that pretty much, well, I have a fake eye in there now so it doesn’t work. [Laughs]. But my good eye, I had stitches all on the top of the eye and they actually took the stitches out as I got to the arena because they said, ‘Mike you can’t fight with stitches in your eye.’
“So they took the stitches out and at the start of that fight against Rockhold, he headbutts me and opens the cut and I couldn’t see a f*cking thing. It was like somebody taking a tub of paint and pouring it on a wind screen and then you put the windshield wipers on and it will wipe the paint off but it will just smear. So the blood was going into my eye, I would wipe the blood like this, and then I could kind of see for a second, and then the blood would run into my eye again so I would wipe it again and then while I was doing that, boom, I got head kicked. I had no idea what f*cking happened because I couldn’t see sh*t. But I couldn’t say that at the time because I still wanted to carry on fighting, you know what I mean? So when I got my opportunity for a rematch, even on two weeks’ notice, of course I f*cking took it because I knew I could beat that guy.”
Bisping avenged his loss to Rockhold by KO’ing the Californian at UFC 199, becoming the first British champion in UFC history. ‘The Count’ announced his retirement in 2018 and was subsequently inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame the following year.
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