Michael Bisping recalls stress of passing pre-fight commission exams with one eye
It wasn’t always easy for UFC Hall of Famer [autotag]Michael Bisping[autotag] to be cleared to compete with only one eye.
Bisping currently wears a cosmetic eye after a detached right retina, courtesy of a 2013 head-kick knockout loss to Vitor Belfort, eventually led to full blindness on his right side. He would go on to continue fighting for another four years with vision problems and was even able to capture the UFC title with a knockout of Luke Rockhold in 2016.
But how was Bisping cleared to compete? “The Count” described the stressful process.
“I just lied my ass off in every test,” Bisping said on the “JAXXON PODCAST.” “I even had a stupid little code, like me and (Jason) Parillo, I would pass the test somehow, but then even on site, the commission, at the day of the weigh-ins, they want to check your vision. I was always terrified that they were going to say – because I didn’t have this (cosmetic eyeball) then. … My eye looked terrible. It looks even worse now. It looked a little bit better back then, but you could clearly see when you looked at the eye that it wasn’t healthy.
“I would think all they got to do was cover that (left) eye and say, ‘How many fingers?’ And then I’m f*cked. So every training camp, the fight was the easy part because I was always terrified. I’m spending all this money on a training camp, I’m putting all this effort into it, I’m going to fly off to wherever it is, and the day before the fight I’m going to be pulled from the fight. The stress was so major. When I would get past the weigh-ins, I was like, ‘Oh my God, relief. Now I know I could fight.'”
Bisping would go on to hang up his gloves in May 2018 after back-to-back stoppage losses to Georges St-Pierre, and Kelvin Gastelum in November 2017.