Last week, UFC president Dana White seemingly killed the previously announced Georges St-Pierre vs. Michael Bisping title fight after GSP revealed he wouldn’t be ready to fight until November at the earliest. According to White, middleweight champion Bisping would now face #1 contender Yoel Romero. But the UFC did a much better job of notifying the press than they did the fighters involved. According to Michael Bisping, he still hasn’t been in touch with the UFC regarding the change.
“Honestly, it’s news to me. I haven’t heard anything about it,” Bisping said on a new episode of his podcast Believe You Me. “I reached out to Georges and he said he hasn’t heard anything officially either, and I still haven’t heard anything from the UFC or Dana White. I know that a lot of people are complaining about this potential delay with Georges, so we’ll see what happens.”
“So yeah, to clarify, as of right now, no official word from the UFC. I haven’t heard anything, and Georges is still hoping for it, I’m still hoping for it.”
As for the delay until the Fall, Bisping says that actually works out really well for him.
“It’s a blessing in disguise because I can’t fight anytime soon,” he said. “I can’t exercise. I can’t train. My knee is giving me many, many problems. It was doing it in Thailand, it’s still getting no better. So long story short, what I’m getting at is I’m not going to be ready to fight anytime soon so again, that’s another reason why this plays into the perfect scenario for me.”
When White first declared the fight was off, we wondered whether Bisping and St-Pierre would accept the promotion’s decision. We even speculated that Bisping might claim his knee was too injured for him to compete over the summer. Not that it required a lot of imagination to see that happening … Michael had already elected to undergo miniscus surgery the last time talk of him fighting Yoel Romero really started to heat up.
It just goes to show you that the UFC no longer has an iron clad grip on what will or won’t happen in their promotion. With Michael Bisping set to make an extra million plus dollars off a St-Pierre fight, why would he agree to take on the tough but little known Romero? Maybe if the UFC had offered to make up the difference, his knee wouldn’t be acting up as much as it is now. But that’s never been the UFC’s modus operandi.
Unfortunately for them, the way things used to work no longer seems to be functioning quite as well as it used to. With former owner Lorenzo Fertitta and hard bargaining matchmaker Joe Silva both gone from the company, Dana White is starting to get out-maneuvered by his roster of increasingly uncooperative fighters. And while you can count us amongst those who want to see the middleweight title defended over the summer, you really can’t blame Michael Bisping for looking out for his own financial interests rather than those of the company that just sold for $4.3 billion.
