A brash Brit who became UFC champion, Bisping retires from MMA
Michael (The Count) Bisping, who went from the furniture assembly line to UFC champion, has retired after a record-tying 29 fights in the Octagon.
The brash Brit won Season 3 of “The Ultimate Fighter” in early 2006 and became the face of the UFC in Britain. Ten years later, he upset Luke Rockhold to win the UFC middleweight title, which he subsequently lost to Canadian Georges St-Pierre.
The 39-year-old Bisping made the announcement on his podcast “Believe You Me.”
“It’s been a long journey,” he said.
“You can’t do it for ever,” he added. “I’ve done it for a long time.”
Hard work and the gift of the gab helped turn Bisping, a native of England who now calls California home, from a middling fighter to a marquee attraction with an endless gas tank, good wheels and solid arsenal.
Bisping (31-9-0) last fought in November when he was brutally knocked out by Kelvin Gastelum in the first round. The shortnotice bout came just three weeks after he lost his middleweight title via submission to St-Pierre at UFC 217.
Bisping has had surgery to repair detached retina in one eye and said he began to have issues in the other eye after the Gastelum fight.
He leaves the sport with a record-tying 20 UFC wins, counting Luke Rockhold, Dan Henderson, Anderson Silva, Cung Le, Brian (All-America) Stann, Jason (Mayhem) Miller, Yoshihiro (Sexyama) Akiyama and Chris (The Crippler) Leben among his victims.
His losses were often at the hands of former champions such as Henderson, Wanderlei
(The Axe Murderer) Silva, Rashad Evans and Vitor
(The Phenom) Belfort.
“What else am I going to do
(in MMA)?” Bisping said on the podcast.
“I’ve won the (championship) belt. I’ve had tons of wins. I’ve done everything I set out to achieve. What’s the point of flogging a dead horse? Not that I’m a dead horse.”
Bisping defended his middleweight title once, winning a unanimous decision over Henderson to avenge a savage UFC 100 knockout, before losing to GSP.
Bisping was on an assembly line making furniture back in 2003 when he decided he had to get out. Having taken martial arts since a kid, he looked to boxing.
“I thought I don’t know if I’ll ever be the champion of the world but I know I can be good enough to be a pro and at least make a bit of a living out of it,” he told The Canadian Press in June 2008.
“And that was a plan. Very quickly, that turned into mixed martial arts.’’
Quitting his job on Jan. 4, 2004, he started commuting from his home in Clitheroe near Liverpool in northwestern England to spend the week training with an old coach in Nottingham. Money was so tight he sometimes slept in his car, a battered Volvo 440, returning home on the weekends to see his family and make some cash by DJ’ing.
His manager got in contact with the UFC, who suggested he take part in their TV show.
Unexpectedly, he won it.