Making no guarantees
New champ GSP contractually obliged to face Whittaker, but anything could happen
Georges St. Pierre isn’t guaranteeing that he’ll be defending his newly-won UFC middleweight championship the next time he steps into the octagon.
After the Canadian beat Michael Bisping on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden to claim the 185 lbs. belt, UFC president Dana White insisted that St. Pierre’s next fight would be a middleweight title unification match against interim champion Robert Whittaker.
After a career spent fighting at 170 lbs., though, St. Pierre wasn’t making any promises when he spoke with Postmedia on Thursday morning.
“Anything can happen in the UFC,” St. Pierre said from Manhattan, where he rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. “My real weight is welterweight (170 lbs.). My real size, I weight 190 or 192 lbs., but I know I have the title so we’ll talk with the UFC and see what happens.”
In the lead-up to his blockbuster fight with Bisping, St. Pierre told reporters repeatedly that he was contractually obligated to take on Whittaker if he did manage to win the middleweight belt.
Anyone who pays any sort of attention to the UFC, though, knows that promises like that are broken constantly in the promotion.
And right now, St. Pierre has a lot of leverage in his negotiations over his next fight. White told reporters Saturday night that the GSPBisping fight was the topselling pay-per-view event in Canadian history, outselling even this summer’s heavily promoted boxing match between Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather.
When you’re that big a star, you can pick-andchoose what opponents you fight — and which weight-class you do it at.
And from the sounds of things, St. Pierre didn’t have the greatest time putting on the weight he needed to fight at 185 lbs without being considerably smaller than Bisping.
“It was hard, for a month I had to shovel food down my throat,” St. Pierre said. “It caused me a lot of stomach pain and reflux when I was eating. I was throwing up in the morning but I kept eating … It was very hard, it’s not a healthy way of living.”
If St. Pierre decides that his future in the UFC is going to be fought somewhere other than at middleweight, it would seem inevitable that the next time we see him in the octagon he’ll be fighting Tyron Woodley to regain the welterweight belt he gave up when he walked away from MMA four years ago.
First, though, St. Pierre is going to take a break.
As impressive as his win on Saturday night was, the 36-year-old didn’t make it through the evening without damage.
In fact, he was unavailable to reporters after the fight because he needed medical attention at a local hospital.
At the time, it was assumed that the medical care he received was to close the deep gash on his face that Bisping had opened up, but St. Pierre clarified on Thursday that wasn’t the case.
“I got elbowed in the back of the head and it caused a very bad inflammation in the back of my head and my neck was very stick,” St. Pierre said. “I couldn’t even tie my shoes, it was so stiff. When you look at the fight, I know when it happened.
“It looked like nothing, but it caught me right at the perfect spot. It was dangerous, it was close to the attachment of the spinal cord.
“You’re not supposed to hit there, but sometimes in the action you don’t realize. It wasn’t a big elbow, but it was very well-placed.”