Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  Leben was magnanimous in defeat. He conceded I landed a lot more shots and said he was content enough with giving the fans an exciting fight. ‘This right here is my favourite fight,’ he said.

  He was a likable bloke. I suspected we were similar people; two guys who got their sense of pride and self-respect from competing. He also had a sense of humour. When he’d stepped into that elevator with me we’d cracked up laughing (‘Well, this is awkward!’).

  Then the news broke that Leben owed his new physique to stanozolol, an anabolic steroid banned in sports since the 1970s. I wasn’t angry, exactly, because I’d won. If anything, it made my win even more impressive, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. The fight had an asterisk now and Chris had been fined a third of his purse and lost his livelihood for nine months.

  He at least admitted he took the stuff on purpose, though. That wouldn’t be my last encounter with an artificially enhanced opponent and – unlike Leben – most didn’t have the stones to admit they cheated.

  The night of UFC 89 was a lot more fun than after UFC 85. I had a bunch of mates who’d come down the M6 and we had a great night out. Referee Marc Goddard, who’d given me that grappling session in Birmingham years before, knew everyone in every club in Birmingham and was ensuring every fighter was having a good time. Dan Henderson, potentially my next opponent, was in town for the fight and was sat at a table next to us. We had a brief chat and my sister and a couple of mates took photos with him as we partied the night away.

  The following day I caught the train to London. I was enjoying a hearty dinner while chatting away to a blue-rinsed old lady who’d found herself sitting opposite me in First Class. Rumour has it that I love talking, and I admit I’ll hold a conversation with anyone given half the chance.

  While I was chatting away to the old girl I began scratching my left ear … and with a creeping sense of embarrassment I remembered that the previous night I’d had stitches in my left earlobe – and had just pulled them out in a squishy glob of jellied blood.

  The old lady’s dismay cannot be exaggerated.

  ‘Sorry!’ I told the grandmother, ‘this isn’t what it looks like. I’m not a thug or anything. I’m a UFC fighter.’

  I may as well have told her I was a UFO pilot.

  ‘A mixed martial artist …’ I tried.

  Still no recognition.

  ‘A professional fighter … an athlete … kinda like a boxer? You hear of it?’

  She clearly hadn’t.

  ‘I’m a … cage fighter.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, with palpable disappointment in what I was doing with my life.

  If the UFC marketing machine hadn’t quite reached the sexagenarian demographic Generation X and the millennials had heard the siren call of the fastest-growing sport in the world loud and clear. If I had any remaining doubts just how quickly MMA was growing in the UK, they were set to rest at the TUF 9 open auditions on Monday, 20 October 2008.

  Over 140 young hopefuls showed up to try out at Earl’s Court. They walked through the doors full of confidence and dreams and nerves, just like I had three years earlier. Dana and Craig Piligian were there, like they were in 2005, but instead of Forrest Griffin I was now the guy in the room the young fighters wanted to emulate. It was a weird moment, stepping into the role of giving ‘big brother’ advice for the first time.

  ‘Take this seriously, this is everything you’ve worked for,’ I told the room when Dana asked me to say a few words. ‘If you make it to Vegas, show up in shape – be ready to go on day one. In the season I won, a couple of guys showed up expecting to use the show to get in shape. Don’t do that to yourselves – train your arses off and we’ll have two more TUF champions from this part of the world.

  ‘I was you three years ago, and The Ultimate Fighter changed my life in ways I couldn’t even believe. Show us what you got. Make Dana pick you!’

  This time round, the producers were looking for eight British fighters, not just two, and the interviews all took place on the same day. The auditions began at 10am, and the last fighter interview with Piligian took place after 7pm.

  The rumoured coach of Team USA was either Dan Henderson or Rich Franklin, and when the pair were matched in the main event of UFC 93 in Dublin, Ireland, it was obvious what Dana was planning.

  ‘The winner of this fight will be the coach of Team USA,’ Dana confirmed at a pre-fight press event in the Irish capital. ‘Whoever wins will fly to Vegas next week and begin coaching against Team UK’s captain Michael Bisping.’

  I didn’t have a preference who I wanted to win between Franklin and Henderson. They were both world-class fighters; Franklin was a former UFC middleweight champion who hadn’t lost a fight to anyone not named Anderson Silva in six years and Henderson was a two-division champion from PRIDE who’d beaten everyone from Minotauro Nogueira to Renzo Gracie and Vitor Belfort to Wanderlei Silva. And of course, I’d been there when he gave Rampage a war for the light heavyweight belt at UFC 75.

  Maybe Franklin would have been more fun to do The Ultimate Fighter with, though. You don’t automatically think of ex-algebra teachers as wildly charismatic, but ‘Ace’ had a personality and, well, ‘Hendo’ never had a conversation he didn’t want to cut short.

  Whoever won the 17 January 2009 fight at the O2 in Dublin would be the toughest opponent of my career, no question. In the end, Henderson won an exciting fight by split decision. He was now the guy I had to beat, the gatekeeper to my shot at the UFC world title. Filming had already begun for the ninth season of TUF and Henderson, myself and Team UK flew the Atlantic to join the already selected Team USA in Las Vegas.

  My foot was in water.

  Running fast over my toes. And down my shoulders and my neck.

  My forehead was laying against something cold. I was standing up. There was a white noise crammed into my ears. I heard voices miles away.

  I was standing in a shower, resting my head against a cool white wall. Probably to help with the headache I’d just noticed.

  It felt like I was about to wake from a dream. But I didn’t, so I knocked the shower off. The white noise melted away and the talking sounded closer. I turned around in the steam. I was in a small bathroom with a box shower in a corner.

  I put a towel around myself. I was a little dizzy. I was carrying two headaches, one at the back of my skull and one dangling above my left ear. The white noise changed pitch into a long ringing. My jaw felt funny as well. I walked through the archway of a door and there was a larger, too much brighter room with six men in it. I knew them. There were bags crammed with stuff on the floor. One of the men gave me a friendly nod as the rest kept talking in muted voices.

  My mate – Jacko – was sat on a bench nearest to me. There were people wearing ID cards going in and out of the room. Something had happened. I didn’t know what.

  Acting as normal as possible, I quietly gestured for Jacko to come closer.

  ‘Hey – what’s going on?’ I whispered.

  Jacko had a sympathetic look on his face. ‘It’s alright mate,’ he said. ‘Go get dried and we’ll go.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, alright,’ I said, and turned back into the bathroom. I dried myself and put some clothes on but then I went back to Jacko, confused all over again.

  ‘Hey,’ I whispered again. ‘Where are we going? What’s going on?’

  ‘You’ve just fought.’ He looked concerned. ‘They are waiting to talk to you to check you out … you remember, yeah?’

  ‘Oh yeah … course. Gimme a minute.’

  I put the rest of my clothes on slowly, buying time. Not enough.

  ‘Tell me again – what are we doing?’ I asked Jacko.

  ‘You’ve got to go the hospital, mate.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  He turned to the rest of the guys in the room, attracting their attention.

  ‘Do ya remember what happened, Mike?’ asked one of them.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I lied again. ‘But … what are we
all doing now?’

  ‘You got knocked out,’ he replied. ‘You’ll be okay but they are going to take you for a check-up.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let me get my shoes on.’

  Jacko followed me into the shower room. I began lacing up my shoes.

  ‘What they on about?’ I asked him. ‘Knocked out? I’m not fighting for another two months. Why was I knocked out?’

  ‘You just fought – you lost by knockout,’ Jacko said. ‘They are going to take you to get checked out as soon as you are dressed.’

  What on earth were they all talking about? I was fighting in Las Vegas in two months’ time. In July, at UFC 100. But I couldn’t remember why I was in the shower, or in this room.

  ‘Why have I had a fight?’ I asked, almost angry. ‘Did I take a short-notice fight or something? I’m fighting in July, why did I fight just now?’

  ‘It’s July now, mate,’ I was told. ‘We are at UFC 100 now. You lost the fight to Dan Henderson.’

  Not being able to recall a few hours is one thing, but losing two months? Crazy. Didn’t make sense. I kept trying to remember what had happened earlier that day, or the day before or earlier in the week. It was like typing in a password that you know is correct, only to get an error message over and over no matter how slowly you pushed the keys.

  Jacko could see I was struggling. ‘Let’s go, mate. They are taking you to get looked at in the hospital.’

  It took the lot of them to convince me to climb into the ambulance. I’d learn later that this was the third time in twenty minutes that my team had pleaded with me to accept what my brain would never remember. They’d explained what had happened to me in the Octagon and before I’d gotten into the shower.

  ‘You okay, Mikey?’ Mark Kinney asked.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, waving everyone’s intense attention away as the ambulance door shut. ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t worry.’

  I doubt I sounded convincing.

  The euphemism the UFC use for fighters getting taken away in an ambulance is ‘transported’. On 11 July 2009, around 10:15pm Pacific Time, I was transported from the Mandalay Bay Events Center to Sunrise Hospital on South Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas.

  Jacko was with me, and Frank Mir, who’d lost his claim to the UFC heavyweight title in a brutal beatdown from Brock Lesnar in the UFC 100 main event, was my rideshare buddy.

  While my face was unmarked – you’d never have guessed I’d been on the losing end of a fist-fight – Mir’s jaw, cheeks and eyes were swollen purple and blacks. Yet the seventeen-and-a-half-stoner’s sense of humour remained undamaged.

  ‘So … how’s your evening going?’ he asked as the ambulance pulled out of the Mandalay Bay back entrance.

  Then the ambulance turned off the Strip and into the more residential parts of the city and something turned a corner inside my head, too.

  ‘Awww … mother-fucker!’ I suddenly said.

  ‘What’s up?’ Jacko asked.

  ‘Well, y’know when I said I was alright? That I could remember the fight?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I was lying. I couldn’t remember a thing. I was just saying that so you’d all stop asking me if I was okay. But now I can remember the whole fucking thing. Fuck!’

  Coaching Team UK during season nine of The Ultimate Fighter had been a privilege. Fuelled by patriotic pride, we wiped the floor with Henderson’s US team. Not only did Ross Pearson and Andre Winner from our team fight each other in the all-British lightweight finale (Ross won a great fight) but James Wilks won the welterweight finale. It felt great to see Team UK win both tournaments and have three of the four finalists; and it was very satisfying to help a group of fighters – British fighters – in the way Tito Ortiz, Saul Soliz and Dean Lister had helped me.

  I was emotionally invested and that passion led me to get a bit carried away in front of the cameras. After one particular incident when I got a little too wound up, I approached Dana in the car park and asked if maybe some of my edgier moments could hit the cutting-room floor.

  ‘Bisping,’ the UFC boss said while getting into his sports car, ‘if you don’t want to look like a dick on TV, guess what? Don’t act like a fucking dick on TV.’

  Obviously, I got no favours, and I shouldn’t have been surprised. While it was shown on Sky in the UK and elsewhere around the world, the reality show was produced for an American audience, and Americans love their British bad guys. Plus, Henderson’s coma-like charisma left the producers with no choice but to fill running time with me doing almost all the talking. If they had given Dan equal screen time, audiences would have been as bored as a gang of midgets in a theme park.

  For two sessions a day, six days a week, for six weeks, I was a very hands-on coach. But, unfortunately, I also enjoyed getting my hands on a pint and the best food Vegas had to offer. I’d spent a year and a half dieting to keep my body way south of my natural walking-around weight and, with a nine-month break between the Leben fight and UFC 100, I was glad to dodge chicken salads for a while.

  Unfortunately, I let my weight creep up to a mortifying 239lb (16st 9lb). I shake my head to recall it, to be honest. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t maintain the lifestyle of an athlete all year round during my career; I actually eat better and exercise more consistently now I’m a retired 40-something than I did during my UFC run. That’s pretty ridiculous to think about, isn’t it?

  Don’t get me wrong, once it was time for me to train, I could flip a switch. Once filming for TUF 9 wrapped in early April, I got back on my diet, hit the road for five miles plus a day and attacked the gym like a psychopath. In other words, I went from enjoying myself too much to training too hard.

  My training for UFC 100 saw the team join a massive camp based in Big Bear, California, once again run by Juanito Ibarra. I’d been training like a madman for months when, on 2 June, the UFC publicly confirmed that whoever won the showdown between me and Henderson would be declared the official No.1 contender.

  This was the big one. This was it. A chance to earn a UFC title shot and match my skills against my generation’s Sugar Ray Robinson. It was everything I’d been working towards. The raised stakes made me train even harder. Whatever Henderson was doing – running, sparring, lifting, rolling – I needed to do twice as much!

  You can only do as well as you know, and I didn’t know any better in the summer of 2009. So I pushed myself over the border between working hard and overworking. With three weeks to go until I faced Henderson, my body was shipwrecked.

  My knees, hips and back became so sore every training session had to begin with half an hour of slowly running in circles on the padded mats. I’d begin, with gritted teeth, at walking pace and slowly encourage warm blood to travel to pained joints that just wanted to be left alone for a few days. Then I’d push myself through a four-mile run, sparring, drilling and rolling all day. I was hammering at it so hard I was taxing my immune system; the little nicks and scrapes of everyday training loitered on my elbows, knees and lips. I remember one particularly painful cut in the tight skin on the top of my left foot that just wouldn’t heal up.

  In the years that followed, I’d come to understand that it takes confidence to take a day off when preparing for a fight. As the weeks and days counted down to UFC 100, I didn’t have that confidence. That was my fault, too. I’d spent over half a year with Dan Henderson living next door to my thoughts. I’d watched his fights over and over, witnessing him beat up legends like Wanderlei Silva and Renzo Gracie and even UFC heavyweight champion Minotauro Nogueira.

  The worst Henderson could do to me was played on a loop, over and over, when I should have been focused on what I was going to do to him.

  When I checked into the site of UFC 100, the golden Mandalay Bay hotel, in early July I was over-trained, over-tired and over-anxious.

  The sport came of age at UFC 100 and I am gratified to have been part of that milestone event in the sport’s history. The high-water mark of UFC 66 was beaten an
d then some. There were hundreds of media in attendance from around the world, ESPN and other TV cameras were everywhere. The UFC put on a three-day fan expo which reportedly drew over 50,000 attendees each day.

  The pay-per-view event itself was stacked beyond belief. The double main event was WWF wrestler turned UFC kingpin Brock Lesnar clashing with enemy Frank Mir for the UFC heavyweight title, and Georges St-Pierre’s latest UFC welterweight title defence against top contender Thiago Alves. Japanese judo champion Yoshihiro Akiyama – the UFC’s big new signing – made his much-anticipated UFC debut on the card, plus UFC Hall of Famer Mark Coleman continued his unlikely comeback and a massively exciting 22-year-old talent named Jon Jones was given 15 minutes in the spotlight.

  I’d gotten used to even the biggest Las Vegas hotels becoming MMA mini-cities, but UFC 100 transformed all of Vegas to a fight town. A huge crimson carpet had been laid in the exterior lobby of the Mandalay Bay Resort, emblazoned with the centennial numbers and ‘UFC’ and everywhere you looked – from the restaurants to taxi ranks to the lines in Starbucks – people were wearing MMA clothing and talking about the fights.

  It was like being at Woodstock, if instead of music and free love Woodstock was about fighting and overpriced skull T-shirts. This was the sport’s coming-of-age party and MMA took its place among the major sports in America.

  And I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

  Two nights before UFC 100, I went to the Noodle Shop in the Mandalay Bay with Jacko. It was early in the evening so we were the only ones sat in the hotel’s resident Chinese restaurant. I had a three-course meal. When I weighed myself in my room two hours later, I was only 187lb. I felt skinny.

  My memory of the first Dan Henderson fight comes from watching it on tape years later. I can’t give you any insight into what happened other than what you can see for yourself. We had a close first but in the second round I was knocked out.