St-Pierre, Bisping trade verbal punches
The last time Dana White sat on stage with two fighters in Toronto, Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather put on a big, over-the-top show.
On Friday, White was back, this time with Georges St-Pierre and Michael Bisping in tow.
The results were significantly more subdued.
In front of only a small, intimate crowd of 60 or so fans at the Hockey Hall of Fame, St-Pierre and Bisping took verbal shots at each other, but the overwhelming take-away from Friday’s press conference was that the fighters share an underlying respect for one another.
How could they not?
With McGregor and Mayweather, the goal of an entire summer’s worth of media events was to convince the world that they shared enough animosity that anything could happen in a fight that was easy to dismiss as a dumb stunt.
There’s no need to do that with a fight between an MMA legend, in St-Pierre, and the UFC’s current middleweight champion. Everyone knows they can fight.
While it might not have compared to July’s McGregor Mayweather madhouse at the Budweiser Stage, Friday wasn’t without fireworks.
Bisping was in a punchy mood and took shots at everything from Canada’s inability to produce another MMA star other than StPierre and the Montrealer’s tame on-stage push after last week’s press conference in Las Vegas. St-Pierre refused to engage. “All this is a mind-game, I’m used to that,” said St-Pierre, who hasn’t fought since beating Johny Hendricks in late 2013. “They always come out with the same song, I’ve heard it before … I choose my battles, I’m going to fight him in the Octagon and beat him there.”
The news conference ended with a staredown between the two fighters, and for the second week in a row they couldn’t help but get into it. Yet again, Bisping placed a hand on St-Pierre’s chest and yet again the Canadian slapped it away.