Georges St-Pierre back in spotlight
Money not an issue for former champ: ‘I want to rewrite the sport’s history’
The children swarmed the champ, offering up scraps of paper, baseball caps or shirt sleeves for him to autograph as he made his way across the room.
Most of these kids probably weren’t yet born when Georges StPierre became a world champion fighter in 2007, but that hardly seemed to matter Friday. Instead of going to class that morning, the fifth-graders at École Montcalm got to hang out with a star athlete.
“I’m a kid in a grown man’s body,” says St-Pierre, the former Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight titleholder.
“A lot of these kids are victims of bullying. I came here to give them a message of hope and to encourage them with school because that’s what they should focus on. And I came to play Nintendo Switch with them.”
The champ invited the students to an east-end Montreal boxing gym Friday as a reward for their work on an anti-bullying project for the Georges St-Pierre Foundation. For a few hours, St-Pierre played video games with the children, showed a few of them how to hit a speed bag and posed for dozens of selfies.
But after being away from the fight game since 2013, this is also St-Pierre’s way of stepping back into the spotlight.
Last week, the 36-year-old Montrealer confirmed he’ll be making a comeback fight next fall against Michael Bisping — a brash, cockney-accented pugilist who also happens to be the UFC middleweight champion.
The circumstances of St-Pierre’s retirement are such that many of his fans say they’d be happy if he never laced up the gloves again. His last bout was a scrap that left the champ’s face beaten and lacerated beyond recognition.
After the match, which he narrowly won, St-Pierre said his brain “got bashed left and right” inside his skull and admitted he suffered memory loss in the ring. That night, St-Pierre announced he’d be taking an indefinite leave from the sport because of the pressure that came with being No. 1.
“As soon as you beat someone, you have a new challenge. And another and another one and another,” St-Pierre told the Montreal Gazette. “And you carry a lot of people on your shoulders . ...
“If I had to go back in time, I would have stopped maybe one or two fights earlier.”
If the majority of his career was defined by St-Pierre’s ability to win while sustaining minimal damage, his last three bouts are something of an aberration.
Within those 15 rounds of combat, he absorbed more blows to the head than in all of his previous bouts combined.
He’d also had both his knees surgically rebuilt and appeared to lose a bit of the speed that made him such a dominant fighter. Further complicating matters, he’d grown frustrated with the UFC over its lenient anti-doping policies and the promotion’s tendency to bully lesser-known fighters.
“I was not in a happy place, I didn’t have the drive and it showed in my training. I felt like I was fighting the whole system,” StPierre said. “I always said that if I come back, it would be for a fight that excites me. I’m in a good place, I have a lot of side businesses, real estate investments, money is not an issue. I don’t fight because I need money, I fight because I want to rewrite the sport’s history.
“I don’t like the idea of living with regrets. Now I’m in my prime and everything, the infrastructure of my life is set up for this moment. If I don’t do this, I’ll live with regret.”
Save for a stint hosting a TV show about dinosaurs on the History Chanel last year, St-Pierre has mostly shunned publicity since the Johny Hendricks fight. He says he has spent the better part of four years indulging his passions: travel, talking to kids about bullying and paleontology.
“I got to go on a dig in Argentina, in North Dakota ... I had a chance to meet some of the great paleontologists of the world,” he said.
“I also partied, I had fun, I’m not afraid to say that I lived the life.”