Michael Bisping admitted he wasn’t fully truthful with athletic commissions towards the latter end of his career.
After Bisping was viciously knocked out by Vitor Belfort in 2013, he suffered a detached retina that led him to essentially compete in his final 11 fights — including his middleweight title win against Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 — with one eye.
On a recent episode of JAXXON Podcast , Quinton Jackson asked Bisping how he was able to get approval from athletic commissions to compete in the octagon.
“I just lied my ass off in every test” Bisping revealed. “I even had like a little stupid code — like me and [coach Jason] Parillo. I would pass the test somehow, but then even on site, the commission at the day of weigh-ins, they want to check your vision. I was always terrified [what] they were going to say, because I didn’t have [the glass eye] then — this was only like a few years ago. So I didn’t have this, and my eye looked terrible … you could clearly see when you looked at the eye that it wasn’t healthy.
“And the doctors, I would think, all they’ve got to do is cover that eye and say, ‘How many fingers?’ And then I’m f*cked. So every training camp, the fight was the easy part because I was always terrified I’m spending all this money on a training camp, I’m putting all this effort into it, I’m going to fly off to wherever it is, and then day before the fight, I’m going to get pulled from the fight. So the stress was, it was major. When I would get past the weigh-ins, I was like, ‘Oh my, God, relief, now I know I can fight. Now I’m good, now I’m happy, now all I have to do is go out and fight, I don’t really give a f*ck about the fight.”
Bisping won seven of his last 11 fights after the injury, including a successful title defense against Dan Henderson at UFC 204 four months after winning the belt in 2016. “The Count” lost the title 13 months later to a returning Georges St-Pierre at UFC 217 in November 2017, and then had his final fight 21 days later, and was knocked out by Kelvin Gastelum at UFC Fight Night 122 in China.
If Bisping was in a position to have to cover his eye with a commission official, he says his head coach helped him with some different sound codes.
“So me and Parillo had a thing, I said, ‘If he covers up the eye, go [cough] for one finger, [yawn] for two, or whatever,” Bisping explained. “We did that a couple of times, and to be honest, they never even did it. They just went, ‘Can you see out of that eye?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ and they go, ‘OK.’
“I’m like, ‘Yeah, 20-20 here, brother.’”