Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  Just 16 weeks later Silva was back in Las Vegas for the UFC 64 pay-per-view, in a challenge to superstar middleweight champion Rich Franklin. ‘Ace’ Franklin was a former maths teacher at Oak Hills High School in Cincinnati but Silva gave him a lesson in trigonometry, finding the angles for shot after shot before subtracting Franklin’s world title from him in 2 minutes and 59 seconds.

  Silva was just getting warmed up. Over the next seven years, the Spider defended the middleweight title ten times, a record likely to stand for decades. He dismissed a generation’s worth of contenders, often with the bored superiority of a big brother handing out Xbox schoolings.

  During those seven years as champion Silva had no one to overtake on top of the pound-for-pound rankings other than previous versions of himself. There was no one in MMA’s short history to compare him with. So most experts didn’t even try; instead, they would make contrasts with the giants of the boxing ring like Roy Jones Junior, Sugar Ray Leonard and even Muhammad Ali himself.

  Every time I checked where I stood in the middleweight Top 10, it was his name at the top. He was the summit I was working so hard to climb to and, quite honestly, I felt I’d give him a much better fight than several challengers who seemed overawed by Silva’s reputation. I badly wanted to fight him.

  I’d had my chances to fight him over the years. If I’d have beaten Henderson at UFC 100, I’d have fought Anderson Silva for the belt in late 2009. If the judges had acknowledged that I had beaten Chael, I’d have fought Anderson at UFC 148 in July 2012. If I’d have beaten the Radioactive Man in January 2013, I was tabbed to fight Anderson for the title at UFC 162.

  But none of that happened and, instead, Anderson’s time as champion came to an end in those two bizarre fights with Weidman in 2013. Chris Weidman, 9–0 at the time, had apparently earned his title shot by staging a 12-month sit-in at his home in Baldwin, New York.

  At UFC 162 in Las Vegas, Silva acted like he’d had some Adderall crunched up into his morning protein shake the entire fight – yelling, pointing and even dancing while in range of the New Yorker’s punches. Finally, Weidman capitalised and threw a left hook that the defending champion – the same man who made Forrest Griffin, Vitor Belfort, Dan Henderson and all the rest miss by millimetres – all but head-butted.

  It was shocking. It didn’t look like real life.

  The rematch later in the year ended in even more bizarre circumstances – Weidman blocked/checked a routine leg kick and Silva’s shinbone snapped clean in two. I was in the front row and heard the wet snap, like a whip hitting a puddle, and witnessed the foremost talent in MMA being carried out on a stretcher. He screamed in agony the whole way. It was awful.

  It looked like the greatest career in MMA history would end on the cruellest and most painful of flukes but, to everyone’s astonishment including my own, Silva returned just 13 months later and soundly defeated Nick Diaz in a super-fight. Both fighters tested positive for banned substances in their post-fight test, and Silva’s reputation took a hit as he was banned for a year for, he claims, taking an erection tablet a friend of his brought back from Thailand.

  Yeah.

  While Anderson was serving his time, I was clawing my way back up the rankings with two straight wins. I probably should have taken the time to get elbow surgery done on my right arm. Some cartilage tissue had broken off during training for the Brian Stann fight and had been floating around in my joint so long they’d become calcified. They were so big my range of motion was becoming affected. But I wanted to fight, to win, as soon as possible.

  A good win over veteran contender C.B. Dollaway at UFC 186 in Montreal on 25 April 2015 set me up for a headline fight back in the UK.

  After years of teasing it, the UFC finally held an event in Scotland on 18 July. The SSE Hydro arena in Glasgow was packed with over 10,000 fans. A lot of my friends and extended family from Clitheroe, who couldn’t fly to Brazil, Canada, the US or China on two months’ notice, all made the drive to Glasgow.

  My opponent was Thales Leites. It was another one of those fights where only the people who really follow the sport understood how tough an assignment it was. Leites was a legit third-dan BJJ black belt and, after losing to Silva in a UFC title challenge, had really worked on his striking.

  The US-based Brazilian was on an eight-fight win streak and the odds-on favourite when he landed in Scotland to fight me. After the Rockhold loss, I’d been written off by some sections of the MMA world, I think that’s fair to say.

  But I knew things the critics didn’t. First and foremost, I knew I was getting better.

  Jason Parillo and the team were pushing me to another level. I was now one of the most experienced mixed martial artists in the sport and, because of the way I’d always trained, I could pair that experience with a level of aggression no one in the division could match.

  But – even more importantly – I’d become a much more even-tempered fighter. That hadn’t come about overnight. It took time and patience on Jason’s part to round the jagged edges off my mindset when it came to my fight career. But, after eight fights and three years together, I trusted him implicitly.

  One humid May morning, I pulled into the RVCA gym car park and chose a spot under the giant graffiti-style mural that lights up the outside of the white building. I was grabbing my gym bag out of the boot (I still couldn’t bring myself to say ‘trunk’ quite yet) when Jason appeared.

  Yours truly had been a little irate towards his training partners the previous few days. I’d lost my cool in sparring and allowed it to darken my mood. My coach wanted a word about it.

  ‘There are a lot of good guys inside that gym who want to spar with you, Mike,’ he began. ‘They are all very, very good. But you’re world champion calibre. I’d like you to go in there and act like the world champion we both think you are – handle them like they are the world champion’s sparring partners. Don’t let them get the better of you and your emotions. Go in there and dominate the room in a positive way. Set the tone, set the worth ethic. Can you do that for me?’

  I nodded: ‘I can do that.’

  And I did that all through the camp and all the way to a win over Thales Leites. The only time my emotions spiked was when I hugged Callum seconds before I stepped into the Octagon.

  As a main eventer, I was allowed an extra cornerman. I’d asked Cal if he wanted to do it. His eyes lit up and the grin on his face went from ear to ear. He had the best week, following me around during the PR stuff, collecting his official Reebok cornerman tracksuit from the UFC office. He was really professional as I went about my usual fight-week routine. I was so proud to have him with me and I thought this could be a regular thing whenever I was given a fourth cornerman.

  Then it came to the fight. When I got to the Octagon steps and gave Callum one of those last-moment hugs fighters share with their team my emotions burst through like a dam. The whole reason I began this journey was to provide for Cal and Ellie when they were toddlers and the emotions were stirred up too much. It was an emotional distraction exactly when I needed one the least.

  Leites and I had a hard five-round fight. He was very big and strong for a middleweight and caught me with some hard shots. As if he wasn’t a tough night’s work on his own, my right elbow locked up a couple of times due to those floating pieces of calcified cartilage, plus I suffered a crazy injury in the first round. Somehow, I caught the underside of my big toe on the edge of the sandpaper-like logo on the Octagon canvas and it sheared the skin off like a doner kebab.

  You’re going to have to take my word for it – every second my toe was on the canvas, it was like an electrical current of pain. One of the newspapers the next day had a close-up of it with the headline ‘TOE-TALLY GROSS!’

  Nevertheless, I landed great combinations on Leites in every round and mixed my shots up very well. In all, I landed over 30 more significant strikes than he did in a fight which was almost entirely spent striking. I won the decision.

  My old opponent Br
ian Stann interviewed me afterwards and I reaffirmed once again I was coming for the title.

  ‘UFC – I am still here ten years later,’ I said. ‘Weidman, Rockhold, Yoel Romero, line ’em up and I’ll take ’em out.’

  My next opponent was supposed to be Robert Whittaker, not a big name at the time but clearly a fighter who had a big future, at the massive UFC 193 event in Melbourne, Australia. I was really looking forward to competing on the blockbuster indoor-stadium card; Ronda Rousey, by now the top star in the sport, was defending her women’s title vs Holly Holm and a staggering crowd of over 56,000 would be on hand.

  Then I got an email from the UFC.

  ‘NOOO!’ I yelled, making Rebecca jump as we ate breakfast at the kitchen table.

  I read her the email. Because MMA had only just been sanctioned by Sport and Recreation Victoria State authority, after years of lobbying by the UFC, the local commission was insisting on all 26 fighters on the card retaking all their annual medicals once we got to Australia. That would mean heart tests, blood work, MRIs and, yeah, a full battery of eye tests.

  I’d already seen at first hand the huge variance between medical opinions regarding my eyesight. One doctor insisted I couldn’t even go for a jog; the next week another doctor had cleared me to actually fight. What if this random Australian doctor, assigned by an authority who until recently had refused to even sanction MMA, decided the baseline requirement of 20/200 wasn’t good enough?

  It wouldn’t just mean I’d be taken off UFC 193 and miss out on a payday despite completing and paying for a full training camp. If I was denied a licence to fight anywhere in the world, it would make getting a licence to fight everywhere that much more difficult. There was every chance my entire career could unravel.

  Putting my entire career in the hands of some stranger who, for all I knew, could have been against MMA getting sanctioned in Victoria in the first place made me very anxious. It was all I thought about for several days; every scenario ran through my head all at once. The one I kept coming back to was a jobsworth doctor declaring me medically unfit.

  ‘You can’t go on like this,’ Rebecca said. She was the only one in the world who I confided in. ‘You’re supposed to be focused on training and fighting, but all your mental energy leading into fights is spent worrying about eye tests.’

  She was right, of course. From the Kennedy fight to my retirement, the mental stress I felt regarding my eye situation was unbearable. The fighting itself was easy in comparison; climbing into the Octagon for a professional fist-fight was a reward, a stress reliever almost.

  Thoughts of my career coming to an end via the email of an Australian doctor plagued me. I was distracted and distant in training. During a wrestling practice I was taken down and posted my left hand awkwardly. The pain was enough for me to call time; when I stood up my arm was locked at 45 degrees.

  ‘Guys, I can’t move my arm,’ I said as Jason and a few others gathered around. ‘I’m trying to straighten it as hard as I can – it’s not moving.’

  I knew exactly what had happened. I dug my fingers into the joint and could feel one of those calcified floating bodies jammed deep in my joint. It was painful, but I wiggled it out and could move my arm again.

  I saw a specialist that afternoon. Doctor Mora was of Peruvian descent and one of the best orthopaedic surgeons in America (he’s also handsome enough to star on The Young and the Restless, or so Rebecca has informed me more than once). He told me the bits of tissue were now so big they would continue to get jammed up my elbow.

  ‘These bodies are going to continue to calcify,’ he said, ‘which means they will get bigger and will interfere with your range of motion with increasing frequency.’

  The news my arm could lock out in front of me at 45 degrees – like a German with a beer tankard – in the middle of a fight wasn’t great, but the doctor had more.

  ‘I encourage you to get this taken care of now,’ she said. ‘I know you have a match coming up. From personal experience, I can tell you it is not worth it. I had similar foreign bodies floating around my knee – I put off the surgery until the end of the season but my leg locked up in the middle of a meet. It is literally like throwing a spanner in the works. I damaged the joint so much I missed a full season.’

  The next morning I called the UFC and pulled out of the Melbourne event, then I called the specialist back and confirmed I’d take the Thursday slot for the operation.

  I hated pulling out. I prided myself on showing up and fighting but I think Rebecca had a point when she said the elbow injury was a blessing in disguise.

  ‘You probably should have got the elbow surgery several fights back,’ she said. ‘There’s a reason you didn’t. Maybe something was going to happen in Australia with the eye exam.’

  ‘I don’t know how much longer I can go on doing this,’ I admitted. ‘The stress of the eye situation … and a random doctor could take it upon himself to overrule the others and end my career on the spot. I’m paranoid about people looking at my eye. Did you see me at the last press conference? I’ve taken to wearing sunglasses indoors!’

  Rebecca looked at me with an exaggeratedly puzzled look. And I laughed.

  ‘Yeah, I’m well aware of what I used to say about dickheads who wear shades indoors,’ I sighed, appreciating her lightening the mood. ‘And I wasn’t wrong! If you wear sunglasses indoors, in the winter, then you are announcing yourself as a dickhead. Only difference is that I’m now one of them.’

  It was Christmas Eve 2015 and I was sat on the couch at home with Ellie and Rebecca. Callum was playing with his phone across the room, and Lucas was lying on his back on the rug in front of me, watching the television upside down.

  My elbow was fully recovered and the Bispings were ready for Christmas. In fact, after living in America for a couple of years we’d begun to use Thanksgiving almost as a dress rehearsal for Christmas, so we’d been ready for over a month. I was dodging most of the tasty food, though, because I was already in training to face Gegard Mousasi in London on 27 February 2016.

  I’d be back in the gym on Boxing Day (or, as Americans call it, ‘December 26’ – they have no idea what Boxing Day is and, after years of trying to explain it, I realised that neither do I).

  We were about to make a decision on whether or not to go out that night when my phone rang.

  Dana calling on Christmas Eve? What could this be about?

  He got right into it: ‘We’re thinking of changing things around on the London card. You versus Anderson Silva, main event, O2 Arena. How’s that sound?’

  Wha—

  ‘Hell, yes! I’ve always wanted to fight him.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Merry fucking Christmas.’

  ‘Merry fucking Christmas!’ I said.

  We hung up. From the first ring to me putting my phone back down took less than 30 seconds.

  ‘Who was that?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘Dana,’ I said.

  I just sat there. My family knew something was up. Rebecca and Callum leaned in. Lucas told me to be quiet – he was watching his movie.

  ‘I’m fighting Anderson Silva in London.’ I heard the words come out of my month. Just like that, after all these years, it was a reality. It actually felt like a Christmas present. Magical, almost.

  I was already training very hard for the London event but from the moment Dana called my discipline became razor-edged. I didn’t have a single ‘cheat meal’, cheeky glass of wine with dinner, nothing. I called Daz Morris, my old friend and one of the best Thai coaches in the UK, and added him to my team for this one.

  No stone was left unturned – beating Anderson Silva was everything to me. This fight, I knew, would deliver the final verdict on my entire career. I knew the sport’s self-appointed historians had already drafted the summary: ‘Michael Bisping, perennial contender, BUT couldn’t win the Big One.’

  Anderson Silva would be fighting for his legacy, too.

  After getting chinned by a meat and potato
es left hook from Weidman, the uncontrollable agony of the leg-break rematch, the drug test ruining the Lazarus-like comeback vs Diaz and the embarrassment of the ‘Thai erection pill’ defence, Silva needed a resounding victory himself.

  He wouldn’t just be looking for a win; I knew that for a fact. His ego would demand the full restoration of his near-mythical status that only a spectacular knockout would deliver.

  The UFC promoted the showdown as a decade in the making. We both had so much at stake, so much to win. For one of us to succeed the other had to fail.

  ‘It took Chael Sonnen two years of non-stop bullshit to finally anger Anderson,’ the Spider’s manager Ed Soares said during fight week. ‘It’s taken Bisping less than two months.’

  No doubt about it, I’d worked fast. You can guess which pressure point I focused on. Silva refused to discuss the doping failure, stating it was not ‘relevant’ and insinuating I was somehow being ‘unprofessional’ for bringing it up in media interviews.

  When we did an open workout for the media and hundreds of fans at a UFC Gym location in Torrance, California, on 11 February, Silva learned that I’d bring his doping up to his face, too. I waited until the cameras were rolling and gate-crashed Silva’s interview scrum.

  ‘Hey – did it work?’ I asked with the tone of a comedian about to roast a hapless audience member. ‘Did the Thai sex pill work? Did you have an erection?’

  During fight week in London, at the press conference, and at a photo-op shot on the banks of the Thames with Tower Bridge in the background, I wasted no opportunity to get right up in Silva’s face.

  At the weigh-in I held out my hand to shake his. He looked puzzled. I held it out further. ‘C’mon, shake,’ I said. He reached for my hand – and I withdrew mine, putting it behind my back. I leaned my face into his again. No respect. No quarter asked because none would be given.