Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  Asking for a timetable on returning to the Octagon was pointless at this stage, I knew that. I understood why sparring was out, too. So I asked him if there were any other exercises I should avoid while I ticked over waiting for my eye to heal.

  Without looking up from his computer terminal he told me any physical exercise was out.

  ‘Increasing your heartrate will cause an increase in blood pressure, and we need your blood pressure low if we are interested in this retina staying where it is.’

  This became an impossibly boring, frustrating and worrying time in my life. Most days I’d come home from dropping the kids off at school and lie on the couch until it was time to go get them again. I spent a month watching The Sopranos all day, and at night I would drink more – much more – than I had since 2003.

  Over the next few months, I grew to hate that doctor’s office. I couldn’t stand that I was the only patient under the age of 60, the waiting room was annoying, I loathed going through the conveyor belt of tests, getting the ink squirted into my eyeball, the light and air blasted into my iris and the waiting around to do the same binocular screen test. Most of all, I hated having the same conversation with the doctor at the end.

  ‘There’s no change, which suggests it is healing,’ he’d say.

  But I couldn’t train.

  ‘There’s some improvement,’ he’d say.

  But I couldn’t train.

  ‘There are reasons to be optimistic,’ he’d say.

  But I couldn’t train.

  He wouldn’t be drawn on any time frame for recovery.

  ‘Your eyesight may never improve enough for you to resume your fighting,’ he’d say, never realising what that meant to me. ‘But it could also improve dramatically next week.’

  The doctor thought he was dealing with a lunatic. ‘A twice-detached retina is enough for anyone,’ he said during one appointment.

  ‘I can still fucking fight,’ I told Rebecca walking back to the car many times. ‘I am going to fight. I’m going to. I can fight with one eye if this one doesn’t get better.’

  To be granted a licence as a professional mixed martial artist by almost every major sanctioning body in the world, you must have uncorrected vision (without glasses or contacts, for obvious reasons) of 20/200 or better.

  It’s not a particularly high bar to hit, believe me: 20/200 vision means you need to be 20ft away from an object in order to see what ‘normal-sighted’ folks can see from 200ft away. It means you can’t read newspaper headlines clearly. If you can’t meet this standard even when wearing glasses or contacts, it means you are, in fact, legally blind. (There’s also an argument that measuring how well fighters can see objects 20ft and more away is a stupid way of testing their eyesight for a fight.) But, week after week, my right eye failed to hit the 20/200 minimum.

  The UFC brought me in as a guest fighter for the huge UFC 168 event in Las Vegas, Christmas week 2013. I’d looked forward to it but when I got there and felt the excitement of a major UFC fight week, it was rough.

  I’d been drinking way too much for months and the night before the fight in Vegas was no exception. It wasn’t happy drinking, either, and it wasn’t a happy hangover I brought to my ringside seat at the same MGM Grand Garden Arena where, seven years almost to the day, I’d won at UFC 66.

  It didn’t feel like the party was over. It was more troubling than that. The sport was getting bigger and bigger all the time. As I sat there watching Uriah Hall blast Chris Leben out in one round in what was the final fight of my old rival’s career, and Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate tear the house down in the second women’s title fight in UFC history, it felt like the party was just beginning. But maybe I had to leave anyway.

  While I’d been contemplating that someone sat in the row behind me had kept pushing my shoulder.

  And again, and once more. I turned my head, just to let whoever was doing it know they were bothering me. Then it happened again, harder, and I heard laughing. I turned all the way around and saw it was Mark Coleman, a UFC heavyweight champion of the late 90s who few in the sport missed.

  ‘You one-eyed bastard!’ he laughed.

  ‘Fuck you, pal,’ I said.

  There was more snickering, high-pitched like a child’s, further to the right. Dan Henderson was sat two seats down from Coleman. He was giggling away, loving it.

  ‘And you – fuck you, too!’ I told him.

  I got up and walked towards the exit to the backstage area. I needed to get out of there before I did something embarrassing in front of a lot of people.

  On the way out I bumped into Dana, who was returning to his seat as the main card began. He asked me how I was doing or something. I stormed right past him and into the backstage area. Once I was away from the cameras and eyeline of the fans, tears raged from my eyes. I was angry and unsure what the future looked like.

  Burt Watson spotted me. ‘Come with me, Mike.’ He put his arm around me and led me into a small dressing room which was going unused that night. Burt spent five minutes talking me off the ledge.

  ‘You stay here as long as you need, baby, as long as you need to get your shit together,’ he said in that almost musical voice of his. ‘You do not want to go back out there like this – do not give those guys you are talking about the satisfaction of seeing you all emotional.’

  I stayed in that tiny room for ages, listening to the noise of a full UFC house through the walls of the arena.

  I felt better when I got off the pain medication. With a clearer head, some perspective returned. Instead of sitting in front of the TV (I’d finished The Sopranos, anyway), I’d drive to the park with Ditto and go for a long walk. Then I’d go home to my amazing family and our big house with its own swimming pool. Life could be a hell of a lot worse; I never lost sight of that.

  My agent called with great news: I’d been cast in the major US TV show Strike Back. Things were going to be okay, no matter what happened with my eye.

  The weekly eye-doctor appointments continued. Every week, Rebecca would drive me the 80 minutes there. We’d sit in the waiting room with the polished floor and black-and-white photographs of trees, the grey door would open and my name would be called to signal the battery of tests, the oil drops, air blast and the inevitable answer when I asked if I could train yet.

  On one such soul-singeing visit in February 2014, I’d gone through all of that and was waiting in the doctor’s office as usual. When the door opened, in walked an Asian man about 5ft 6in tall with salt-and-pepper hair. He had a real presence about him, and the kind of strong Californian accent that you hear in car commercials.

  He shook my hand and introduced himself by his first name. I could read his credentials – there were a lot of them on the ID he was wearing on his lapel.

  ‘Your doctor is away for a couple of weeks so I’ll be looking after you today,’ he said with a smile.

  He was just the coolest fucking guy I’ve ever met. He was charismatic, funny, very intelligent – obviously, he was intelligent to be an eye doctor – but also worldly wise with it. He engaged with me, the person, not the injury. After taking a look at the day’s test results, he swung a medical stool on its wheels and sat directly in front of me.

  ‘Everything is looking fine,’ he said. ‘The repair looks good, no swelling, and vision has improved to 20/200.’

  I asked him if that meant I could train again. Before he answered I started selling him on how important it was that I exercise.

  He nodded away as I spoke. ‘Yeah, sure, yeah.’

  ‘Sorry, you mean I can work out?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘Any restrictions or—?’

  ‘No, no, don’t worry about that. Go do what you want to do.’

  ‘Really? The other doctor said it wouldn’t be safe …’

  ‘I can’t imagine that cage fighting is safe,’ he smiled. ‘But you are at no increased risk than anyone else in your colourful profession.’

  ‘Wait, wow.’ I l
ooked at Rebecca for a second – she was stunned, too. ‘Are you saying I can fight again?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Call the UFC and book a fight.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Rebecca said, knowing what this meant to me.

  I struggled to take it in. It was like the world was re-ordering itself.

  ‘So … I’m at no extra risk of hurting my eye?’

  The doctor used his feet to paddle his stool closer to me.

  ‘Whether or not your retina will tear again, I can’t say. No one can tell you that. What I can say is that your retina is fine today and your vision is sufficient to be licensed as a professional fighter in the state of California.’

  Oh, fuck.

  ‘Michael,’ the doctor added, ‘my father always said to me there are two types of people who live in the jungle. The first are the kind who go steadily when they’re swinging through the trees; these people don’t let go of one vine until they have a firm grip on the next. That’s safe, that’s very practical. But it may not get them to where they want to be in life before it is too late.

  ‘Then there’s the second type, the ones who swing as fast as they can go, letting go of one vine and stretching as hard as they can for the next. These people aren’t as safe but they just might get to where they want to be in life. Something tells me that you are very much the second type of person in the jungle.’

  ‘I am, Doc,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I am like.’

  ‘I know you are.’ And he smiled again. ‘Call the UFC. Tell them to book your next fight.’

  The call was placed to UFC matchmaking that very day. The return call from Joe Silva came three days later.

  My opponent was Tim Kennedy, a former US Army Special Forces sniper and 12-year MMA veteran who was coming into his own as a contender. He was coming off a first round KO of the in-form Rafael Natal. His only loss in three years was on points to Luke Rockhold for the Strikeforce organisation that had recently been absorbed into the UFC.

  I knew him well. He was part of the same group that produced those juvenile videos with Jorge Rivera for UFC 127, and had a long-standing resentment of me.

  The fight would be the main event – meaning a five-rounder – of a Wednesday night event in Quebec City in Canada. The event would be taking place on 16 April 2014, which gave me only seven full weeks of training after having little exercise for the best part of a year.

  The first few weeks back in the gym were challenging, but I was just happy to be back doing what I loved to do. Kennedy had plenty to say to promote the fight. I’d missed every aspect of being a UFC fighter, including firing one-liners at opponents, so happily returned fire.

  As great as it was being back, I absolutely hated the fight itself. Kennedy came with a game-plan of taking me down and holding me there, and that’s what he managed to do for long stretches of the match. And it was a ‘match’ because, for me, it wasn’t a UFC fight as much as it was a rough freestyle wrestling match.

  Takedowns are supposed to lead to something offensive – like a submission attempt, an elbow strike, hammer fist – something. Only, Kennedy didn’t go for any of those things and, having underestimated his wrestling ability, I needed him to do so to give me the space to escape and get back to my feet. At one point Kennedy was holding me down right in front of my corner and Jason and Brady were saying, ‘Get up, Mike,’ to which I could only answer, ‘I’m fucking trying.’

  Kennedy never hurt me, but it was incredibly frustrating. Before long boos were churning around the Colisée Pepsi arena. By the time he was announced a unanimous points winner I was disgusted with the fight, and myself for allowing him to do that to me.

  This wasn’t the return I’d wanted and I was happy to learn that my next fight would be against an opponent who wouldn’t be looking to lay and pray.

  That summer, Rebecca and I were married in front of family and friends in a beautiful ceremony not far from our home in California. We’d long since made a life-long commitment to each other, of course, but it was one of the proudest days of my life when we got around to the ceremony.

  Bruce Buffer served as an unforgettable MC, introducing both me and my stunning bride as we walked into the reception.

  Most marriages are a celebration of a life two people are going to build together; me and Rebecca’s was a celebration of the life we were living.

  ‘Hey, buddy, all your interviews done now?’ I asked as I returned the fist bump offered by Cung Le, my next opponent.

  ‘Yeah, now I’m ready to eat,’ the former Strikeforce MMA and multiple-time world kickboxing champion answered.

  We took our places around the circular glass table. It was a weekday in early June and we were in a private dining room at the Lung King Heen restaurant at the Four Seasons hotel in Hong Kong. The room, the restaurant and the hotel itself were all absolutely incredible, an award-winning kaleidoscope of Eastern style and Western money. There were some seriously wealthy people in there. I spotted at least three watches that would have set their owners back over $200,000 and women with diamonds on their fingers the size and shape of Quarter Pounders with Cheese.

  Typically, UFC fighters who are scheduled to fight don’t break bread together, but me and Le had gotten along great during our three-day trip to promote our 23 August main event. We were to headline a card due to take place 55 minutes across the South China Sea in a casino in Macau. And, y’know, you don’t turn down a private room in a restaurant like Lung King Heen when someone else is paying.

  Cung had a background right out of the martial arts movies he appeared in from time to time. Born just days before the fall of Saigon, when Communist North Vietnam captured the capital of South Vietnam, Cung had been smuggled out by his mother under heavy machine-gun fire. His family eventually settled in San José, California, where bullying led Cung to begin training in martial arts at the age of ten. He would become one of the best kickboxers in the world, and after dominating that sport, he moved to MMA in 2006. His flashy striking had beaten the likes of Frank Shamrock, Patrick Cote and, most recently, he’d slept former UFC middleweight champ Rich Franklin in the most devastating one-punch KO of 2012.

  As we ate our ludicrously expensive – but also free – gourmet meal, Le and I traded stories about breaking into action movies and showed each other pictures of our families. Other than him name-dropping actor Channing Tatum several times more than anyone could be expected to feign a polite interest in, I enjoyed his company.

  The next morning I flew home to get ready for a fight against a fellow martial artist, a fellow striker who I respected and actually quite liked.

  A few weeks later Callum stuck his phone under my nose and showed me a UFC fan Q&A with Cung and Luke Rockhold that had taken place that day.

  My eldest son had developed into a hardcore UFC fan. He watched not only every fight, but watched and read every piece of UFC content he could get his hands on. (He even visited the fan forums, which had me joking that he’d develop a very unfavourable opinion of his father if he believed what he read there.)

  Callum pressed play and, wouldn’t you know it? There was my Hong Kong dinner date, Cung Le, joining in a bit of Bisping bashing.

  There was an adjustment period as I adapted to the diminished eyesight in my right eye.

  Can you see your nose? No, you can’t. It’s always in your field of vision but your brain perceives it as a distraction; and so it filters the image out, and replaces that part of your vision with information from your opposite eye.

  My brain perceived the less detailed information from my right eye as a distraction, and was filtering it out in favour of the ‘better’ data from my left eye. This threw my depth perception off a little and I found that my jab, for example, which had been a key weapon for me throughout my career, was now often half an inch or so off target. If you look at my punch stats pre- vs post-eye-injury, you can see that I went from landing dozens of jabs in each fight to barely a handful.

  I’ll figure it out, I told myself.
You did this before in the middle of the Akiyama fight.

  I’d begun training regularly with my old mate Kendall Grove. My fellow TUF 3 winner had left the UFC three years before and was preparing for a fight in the Bellator organisation. Having him around was great, I’d managed to put a terrific team around me in California – and that included my new management team. I’d begun working with Paradigm Sports, an Irvine, California, agency founded by an Iraq-born former college athlete named Audie Attar. We’d started on a fight-by-fight deal (I wasn’t going to sign anything long term after Liverpool) but Audie was doing a great job by me.

  I made a lot of progress during the summer of 2014. I’d adapted my style and found a group of people who had my back. I got back on the plane to China determined to remind the whole MMA world what I was capable of.

  ‘Are you sure that Cung Le isn’t on TRT, Dad?’ Callum asked via email.

  I was sat on my bed in my suite back at the Four Seasons. During the time I’d been in the Far East ticking down to fight day, I’d seen headlines about my opponent looking ‘ripped’ and in ‘insane’ shape in an Instagram post, but until Callum emailed me the link I hadn’t seen what the fuss was about.

  A click later, I saw. There was Cung Le photographed from the waist up, wearing nothing but a gormless grin, looking for all the world like a condom stuffed with Lego bricks.

  The recriminations from the MMA community were well under way. Some media and fans were wondering how on earth Le had gained so much lean muscle and trimmed all excess fat after the age of 40. Other weren’t wondering at all – they were flat out stating their belief such a transformation had required the use of banned substances.

  If Le had posted that same picture five years before, I believe, he’d have gotten exactly the feedback he was obviously looking for. ‘Wow! Cung’s in amazing shape for Bisping!’ ‘Holy cow! Le is shredded!’

  Times had changed, though. Cheaters like Vitor Belfort had made everyone who followed the sport a reluctant expert on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs.