St. Pierre set for comeback fight vs. Bisping at UFC 217

NEW YORK — Georges St. Pierre waved his hands as a conductor would to a chorus of “G-S-P” chanted by fans wrapped in Rising Sun headbands inside Madison Square Garden.

“These are your people? These are your people, Georges?” fighter Michael Bisping chirped as he dismissed the rising cheers with a wave.

GSP is back for his people and on top of a UFC card one more time.

But is it for the final time?

St. Pierre (25-2) was one of the UFC’S biggest stars and pay-per-view draws during his long reign atop the 170-pound division, but the Canadian star walked away in November 2013. After a lengthy sabbatical, he returns Saturday to headline UFC 217 in a 185-pound championship bout with Bisping (31-7), the gritty English veteran who won the middleweight championship in a surprise upset of Luke Rockhold last year.

St. Pierre, now 36, left UFC as one of its biggest box office draws, holder of the second-longest winning streak in the promotion’s history and with enough stardom to grace the cover of a video game.

Four years later, St. Pierre returns to a UFC world that blew up into a $4 billion company without him.

His fights with Nick Diaz and B.J. Penn that drew two of the biggest buy rates in UFC history have been passed six times, notably by cards headlined by Conor Mcgregor. Ronda Rousey came (and went?) and bulldozed her way into becoming a mainstream superstar. St. Pierre’s 12-fight winning streak that he takes into Saturday has been topped by Jon Jones and matched by flyweight champ Demetrious Johnson. And it was Mcgregor again, with a championship belt draped over each shoulder, who was announced Friday as the EA Sports UFC 3 video game cover boy.