Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  ‘People say I’ve got no punching power. I knew I could punch. This guy [Rockhold] demolishes everybody – finishes them in the first round. Check this out: first-round knockout. Left hook! Thank you, Jason Parillo. Everyone in the UK – thank you so much! Apart from my children and my wife, this is the greatest moment in my life.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  The UFC’s UK office arranged for me to fly over for a ‘victory tour’ after I became Britain’s first ever UFC world champion.

  We did a bunch of interviews and TV appearances in London then moved on to Manchester. Vicky from UFC PR picked me up from the hotel lobby for an early start on 17 June. I climbed into the ‘executive class’ people carrier that would be driving us around Manchester and she handed me the schedule for the day. The last item on the list was the one I was looking forward to:

  FAN MEET & GREET – TRAFFORD CENTRE, STRETFORD

  (6pm – 7:30pm)

  It was the highlight of the tour. Actually, it was one of the highlights of my career – and I’m a veteran of these things. I’ve always enjoyed meeting the UFC fans, especially those in the UK. In 2009, me and Ross Pearson did an appearance at a video-game store in Glasgow which drew so many people other store managers called the police, complaining their store fronts were blocked with UFC fans. At the Oxford Street HMV in London two months before UFC 120, the line went out the door and around the building into a back alleyway.

  The crowd at the Trafford Centre, though, was easily three times the size of the one at HMV. I was set up on a raised stage/bandstand area in the middle of the shopping centre. As I walked out onto the polished faux-wood floor I could see only a sea of faces in front of me all the way past the fountain-pool features, above on the upper levels and all the way to the lifts in front of me. It was humbling. There were over 2,000 people in line already. The ones at the front would have been waiting in place for hours; the ones at the back of the line had hours of waiting in front of them.

  I was handed a mic. I managed to thank the fans for coming. I added, ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  ‘We better get this going,’ I said to Vicky as I handed her the mic back.

  The fans were allowed up in ones, twos and threes into the small stage arena for pictures and, if they were old-fashioned, they could also get a signed 10x8 autographed picture of me with the UFC belt.

  One of the first guys up was a bear of a bloke in a grey T-shirt, jeans and biker boots. He was crying. Tears streaked from his brown eyes and into his black bush of a beard.

  ‘Mate – thank you,’ he said. ‘Never thought I’d see a British UFC champion …’

  I stood up and we clasped hands. This guy was enormous and here he was in tears because of something I’d done. One of the UFC staff had the big guy’s phone all ready and we did a picture together.

  ‘I’ll be at your first defence,’ he said. ‘It’ll be here in Manchester, yeah?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And, yeah, if I’ve got any say in it, yes, I’ll defend the belt here.’

  Twenty minutes and forty selfies later, I met a dad and his two lads, both blond and about aged ten. They’d driven up from Exeter, the dad told me. Up the M5 and M6 … on a Friday afternoon?

  ‘Yeah, they both really wanted to see you,’ the dad said. ‘We all stayed up to see you win. The big ’un ’ere lost his voice shouting for you.’

  The lad in question, his larynx apparently recovered, asked quickly, ‘Will you fight in England again?’

  ‘I think so, mate, the UFC are working on it,’ I said. ‘If it is in the UK, will you and your brother come see me and cheer for me?’

  They both nodded excitedly. Then they held either end of the UFC world title belt, the big gold plate between them, and posed with their dad and me.

  These were the stories I heard – or saw in teared eyes – for over three hours. I knew the British fans supported me, I knew they’d have been thrilled to finally get a British world champion but, again, the personal connection they’d made with me … it was almost overwhelming.

  When we finally left late into the evening, after every person in line got a picture, or a signature, or even a fist bump if that’s what they wanted, there were still hundreds of people there wanting pictures. They swarmed around the entrance to the back-of-house area so tightly the mall’s security people were worried someone could lose their footing and get trampled on. Before we made a break for it, they asked me not to stop walking for any reason, and they escorted me out of there like I was the US President during an assassination attempt.

  The fans followed us to the door and – somehow – were even waiting by the service entrance. They cheered and flashed camera phones as I was bundled into the black people carrier and driven away. It was like being in a boy band for the evening.

  I texted my manager, Audie, a picture I’d taken of the crowd.

  ‘We’ve got to get the UFC to confirm my next fight will be in the UK!’ I wrote underneath the image.

  I was the oldest first-time UFC champion ever. My wife and manager were hinting that I shouldn’t be fighting much longer. My body was delivering the same message, only less ambiguously. I had to use my status as the world champion to open as many doors for my post-fighting life as possible, I knew.

  And things were going well. My acting career was gaining traction. My regular work with Fox Sports and presenting the UFC Tonight magazine show had seen me develop into a competent television analyst and host. I had several business interests including UFC Gym locations in California and the UK. Plus, I’d launched a regular weekly podcast with comedian and undefeated mixed martial artist Luis J. Gomez.

  Luis J. Gomez (I have to write his entire name out – he insists on his middle initial as if he studied eight years at Yale to get it) and I started working together on a weekly show for American talk radio. We had a great chemistry together on the air. About 18 months into our show’s run (which I did from home on a DSL, aka broadcast-quality, line) we were both frustrated with our compensation. Luis J. Gomez suggested we strike out by ourselves with a podcast. That’s how the Believe You Me podcast came out.

  Around the same time, I also branched out into commentating, first doing the Contender Series on the UFC Fight Pass streaming service and then for televised UFC events.

  Whenever it came, I was determined I would be ready for life after active competition. This was completely different to when I thought my career had been ripped away from me due to the eye injury in 2013. I’d won the title now, I’d won respect and my place in history. I wasn’t ready to go yet; but I was ready to start getting ready.

  Given the heat between me and Rockhold and the fact the score was 1–1 between us (well, 2–1 to me when you include the sparring session – ha!), I thought the UFC could give the ex-champion an immediate rematch. I also expected to hear ‘Jacaré’ when Dana called with the name of the first challenger to my title. Or, maybe, ‘Mousasi’, who I was originally scheduled to fight in London. And, around this time, there was the first crazy talk of legend Georges St-Pierre coming out of retirement to fight me.

  Instead, when the call came, Dana said a name that had been linked to mine for over eight years: Dan Henderson.

  Joe Rogan is the UFC’s most respected colour commentator, an arena-packing stand-up comic, a TV host and BJJ black belt. But perhaps his biggest success is turning The Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube into the most influential podcast on earth.

  If The JRE gets behind something, it blows up; on the 16 June episode, Joe was getting behind Michael Bisping vs Dan Henderson, the rematch, for the UFC middleweight title.

  ‘What could be a better, more exciting fight to see than Bisping versus Hendo two?’ he enthused. ‘How often do you get to do a rematch of the most brutal knockout in history, with both guys just having KO’d two monsters? That’s the most exciting fight right now.’

  Rogan added that he’d already called Dana with his matchmaking brainst
orm. The fans and media ran with it. My Twitter blew up asking if I’d take the fight. Of course, I answered. Henderson was asked and answered in the affirmative, too.

  I mean, what did people think we were going to say?

  The call from Dana came.

  ‘Yeah, sounds great,’ I told the UFC boss. ‘But what about it being in the UK? Is that going to happen?’

  Manchester Arena or ‘a stadium in Cardiff’ were both available, he answered.

  ‘It’s gotta be Manchester!’ I said.

  And that was that. The rematch of the worst defeat of my career was on.

  There was some bellyaching from the middleweight division over the fight the UFC had put together. Guys like Jacaré (who’d turned down a title shot already), Yoel Romero (forgetting he was suspended for a USADA violation), Vitor Belfort (who’d started a streak of getting knocked out in the USADA era), they all felt very entitled to tell me, the champion, where, when and whom I should fight.

  Contrary to what was reported at the time, I didn’t ask for Henderson. My only ask was to fight in the UK. But, believe you me, if only I’d known how much it would piss off these self-entitled whiners, I’d have beaten Joe Rogan to it and called Dana White to suggest it myself.

  Henderson and I did a press conference together in Las Vegas on Friday, 19 August, and of course I was asked about Henderson’s past TRT usage.

  In the first fight, I got the weight-cutting wrong in the same way that I got circling into his right cross wrong. While I was holding my body hostage and starving it of nutrients, Dan Henderson was darting needles containing synthetic testosterone into his backside, which boosted his energy levels, bone density, strength and muscle mass.

  Would I have liked to have known Henderson was on TRT before I fought him at UFC 100? Well, yeah, of course. I’d also have liked to have known there even was such a thing as TRT, too, because back then I had no clue this legal cheating was going on in the sport.

  There’s a difference between what Henderson was doing with TRT – exploiting a loophole and using a medical therapy that these commissions ignorantly allowed him to use – and what Vitor Belfort was doing. Hendo’s physique had barely changed in the post-TRT era, to be truthful, while Belfort now sported moobs like a grandmother.

  ‘After TRT was banned and USADA testing came in, I became UFC world champion,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been a big believer in coincidence. Dan Henderson said he needed TRT to compete, that he’d get sick without it, but here he is today alive and well. He’s a miracle of modern medicine.’

  The MMA community was probably expecting something a little stronger than that but, the truth is, I’ve never had much animosity towards Henderson.

  True, I didn’t appreciate the incident with Mark Coleman but, looking at it literally from his perspective, maybe he just saw me and Coleman getting into it and had no idea what Coleman had just said to me. And other than that, Dan’s pretty inoffensive. He really doesn’t say much. He just sort of mumbles and shrugs his way to fight day.

  That doesn’t necessarily help the box office, though. Like I said earlier, I always felt responsible for putting arses in seats when I was headliner and especially so in the UK.

  Just like with all PPV events the UFC presented outside of North America, UFC 204: Bisping vs Henderson 2 would be broadcasting live at 7pm US Pacific Time. That meant my fight would begin around 5am in Manchester. I was a bit worried the tickets wouldn’t sell well for an event where fans would be filing out the arena at breakfast time. It was a huge ask of the British fans, I felt.

  Yet all 16,693 tickets sold out in six minutes. The British public were pumped the UFC championship of the world was coming home.

  For two weeks of the camp I was on a movie set in London, playing real-life 70s London hardman Roy ‘Pretty Boy’ Shaw in My Name Is Lenny, the biopic of Shaw’s underground boxing rival Lenny ‘The Guv’nor’ McClean.

  Again, it wasn’t like I’d won the UFC belt aged 28. I had a short window to use my world-champ status to help open up as many doors as possible for my post-fighting career.

  Jason Parillo, as you can well imagine, was positively thrilled when I told him I’d be on a British movie set for a fortnight, then would come back to California for a month, and then we’d head back to the UK for the fight.

  My call time for the movie was typically before 7am and I’d leave the set about 6pm, but I still trained twice a day. My friend Daz Morris was with me the whole time; we’d run in the mornings (well, Daz came with me once) and he’d take me on the Thai pads after filming was done for the day.

  Playing a character like Roy Shaw was a lot of fun and a new challenge. I researched the real-life ‘Pretty Boy’ extensively. I watched his old fights so I could mimic his wild, aggressive style and read his autobiography to get a handle on who he was. I studied his old interviews, and noted he licked his lips as he spoke, almost like a nervous tick. I incorporated this odd habit into my portrayal.

  Josh Helman and John Hurt were the movie’s leads but, for me, the real star was this beautiful woman, Rebecca something her name was, who had a small part in the film.

  As a team, we made the decision to remain on Pacific Time once we landed in Manchester the week before the fight. We were going to sleep during the day and be awake during the night. The fight was taking place to suit Pacific Time, after all, and we wanted to confuse my body clock as little as possible.

  Team Bisping – Jason, Brady, Daz and Lorenz Larkin and me – stayed in the Lowry. The last night I’d stayed in Madchester’s only five-star hotel was hours after I’d beaten Elvis Sinosic at UFC 70.

  It felt like a lifetime and five minutes ago. As I walked into the hotel’s plush bar/café area on the first floor with its deep cushioned armchairs and sky-blue mood lighting, a flash-flood of memories came back to me of the UFC 70 after-party. This same empty bar had been packed as tight as a nightclub in the small hours of 22 April 2007. Everyone had congratulated me on winning the Fight of the Night and, by the time I’d made my way over to order food, the kitchen had closed.

  ‘Aww, really? I’m starving,’ I’d said. ‘I’ve not ate anything since before the fight.’

  There had been a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see Jean-Claude Van Damme, my childhood action hero large as life, offering me half of his prawn sandwich. It had been a surreal moment for a guy only three years removed from working in an upholstery factory.

  Now I was back in the same place a decade later. I was no longer young or wide-eyed, but a grizzled, seen-it-all champion.

  Even though jetlag wasn’t a factor, preparing for a 5am fight had its own challenges. I trained Monday and Tuesday night around 2am, getting my body used to working out hours after the sun went down. The Lowry staff were fantastic in accommodating our sleeping patterns during fight week, even serving us all breakfast from 3pm to 6pm, but, mostly, we were bored.

  It is pitch dark by 5:30pm in Manchester in October and we were waking up around 4pm. It’s not like we could pass the time going sight-seeing or take a wander around the shops in the middle of the night. So, we spent a lot of time in my suite at the Lowry, just bullshitting and enjoying each other’s company. The highlight of the week was listening to Brady’s lunatic-fringe conspiracy theories.

  During the media interviews and press conference, I talked a great game about getting my revenge on Henderson, and I meant it. Even at the weigh-in, I felt confident in every word I said to my challenger on the stage, including that I would knock him out.

  Confidence ebbs and flows, though. Yes, I was a completely different fighter to the over-trained, undernourished and over-thinking lad who showed up to UFC 100. That was a fact.

  But … it was also a fact that the last time I got hit by this guy, I came to in a shower not knowing what month it was.

  There was a jagged energy about me on fight day. I was fidgety at breakfast and irritable at lunch. My afternoon workout rounded some of the sharp edges away but I still struggled to fall asl
eep for my usual pre-fight nap. I must have lain there for an hour in my blacked-out bedroom, listening as the people and cars outside the hotel went about their Saturday evening.

  The UFC bus to the arena wouldn’t leave until 2:30am. It was a ten-minute drive in the day; in the middle of the night the trip would be five minutes, door to door. Then there would be the two-hour wait in the dressing room. That was all ten hours away. So, I needed to sleep. I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about – the only thought that took form between my ears for over an hour – was UFC 100.

  When I eventually nodded off, I flinched from right crosses in my dreams.

  Around midnight my mate Jason Falovitch, who’d flown from Toronto, Canada to support me, stopped by my suite to say hi. Jason Parillo and the team were already with me, checking and double-checking all our fight gear was packed. I was sat on a cappuccino-coloured couch, putting on the mental armour I needed to wear into battle. On the wall behind me was a framed, oversized photograph of a tree leaf.

  Falovitch is a really trusted friend – we’re now partners in a fantasy sports business called PlayLine.com – but I was still unusually tense. It wasn’t the time or place for me to hear about his adventures in Prague earlier that week.

  ‘Jason, you’ve gotta go, mate,’ I said abruptly. ‘I love you and thank you for coming to support me but I need to get into fight mode now. Please, I need to be left alone with my team.’

  He understood, and I’d managed to say all that to Jason in a friendly, even tone. My mood continued to blacken after he left, though, and Brady wasn’t so lucky. We began warming up, using some of the carpeted floor space to drill a few techniques. The little errors in communication that always happen when you are rolling were somehow all unacceptable – and all Brady’s fault.