GSP keeps fans, rivals guessing
UFC middleweight champion plans vacation before plotting next move inside octagon
Newly crowned middleweight champion Georges St-Pierre says he will discuss his fighting future with the UFC after a planned vacation.
Right now his contract has him fighting interim middleweight titleholder Robert Whittaker next.
“But a lot of things can happen in MMA. You see things change all the time,” St-Pierre told a media conference call Thursday.
The 36-year-old from Montreal said he is going on holiday “to forget about fighting.”
“It’s not my job to think about that, it’s (for) the UFC and my agent. They’re going to talk about it and see what the next move is.”
The middleweight pecking order changed with the return of St-Pierre, who moved up a weight class to take on Michael Bisping. The 185-pound landscape changed even more when St-Pierre, in his first fight in four years, submitted Bisping in the third round of Saturday’s UFC 217 main event at Madison Square Garden.
St-Pierre said he wasn’t sure what his future might hold, although he suggested the answer might be coming in a few weeks.
He did say that he would not hold up the middleweight division.
“I don’t plan to hold the title and not defend it . . . I know there’s other guys in line — (former champion) Luke Rockhold, Whittaker and all these guys. They have a family to feed.”
St-Pierre joins Randy Couture, B.J. Penn and Conor McGregor as the only fighters to win UFC titles in two weight classes.
The 26-year-old Whittaker (204-0) won the interim 185-pound title in June with a unanimous decision over Yoel Romero at UFC 213. Bisping was injured at the time.
St-Pierre (26-2-0) had not fought since making his ninth straight welterweight title defence at UFC167 on Nov. 16, 2013, when he scored a narrow split decision over Johny (Bigg Rigg) Hendricks.
St-Pierre said the big change was that Saturday night he wanted to be under the spotlight.
“When I left the sport more than four years ago, I was in a bad place mentally. I was not having fun. I was having fun Saturday, I mean having fun to a certain extent because you get hit in the head . . . I did this because I wanted to, not because I had to.”
St-Pierre held the conference call because he did not attend the postfight news conference. He said he had to go to hospital immediately after the fight because he had taken an errant elbow to the back of the head — which is not legal — in the first round.
“When I got hit, I got kind of a flash-knockdown a little bit,” he said. “I got a very bad inflammation in my neck and I couldn’t really move my head much.”
“Now it’s still sore but it got a lot better,” he added. “I got treatment on it. I’ll be back 100 per cent pretty soon.
St-Pierre rated his performance a B, saying he could have done more on the ground against Bisping (31-8-0). The neck injury didn’t help.
“Michael Bisping did a great job,” he said, complimenting the Brit for his footwork and strategy. “The fight was very different than I thought it was going to be from his part.”
“I don’t plan to hold the title and not defend it . . . I know there’s other guys in line.” GEORGES ST-PIERRE ON THE UFC’S MIDDLEWEIGHT TITLE