Luke Rockhold is so confident he can beat Michael Bisping that he’s offered to give ‘The Count’ his fight salary if he can last a round with him.
“The bet was if I finish him in one round, we switch purses,” Rockhold, who was cageside to watch Bisping defeat Cung Le in Macau, told The MMA Hour show yesterday. “And if I don’t finish him in one round – one round – he gets my purse. Show and win, everything. All he has to do is run around for one round. I confronted the man and he wouldn’t take it. He started to backtrack and make excuses right off the bat.”
The two middleweights aren’t scheduled to fight yet, but have been bickering back and forth for several years, dating back to when Rockhold held the Strikeforce middleweight title.
In 2012 Bisping deemed himself to be the “unnofficial Strikeforce champion” after claiming that he’d got the better of him in a sparring session and it’s not something that still bothers Rockhold.
“The man said he got the better of me and beat me up in one sparring session. If he’s that confident that he did that, why wouldn’t he take a bet? An extra $100,000 on his paycheck couldn’t hurt, right? All he’s got to do is survive one round.”
When Rockhold first joined the UFC Bisping was dismissive of his rival, telling him to “win a fight” before challenging him, but with Rockhold now having defeated Tim Boetsch and Costas Philippou while the two have continued to trade verbal blows, it seems that he too is now interested in putting the fight together.
“I only want fights that get me to the top but I might have to make a slight detour and have some words with Luke Rockhold,” Bisping said after TKO’ing Le in the fourth round at the weekend. “He talks quite a bit and its about time to quiet him up.”
Rockhold is hoping the fight can be put together in December, and it’s he’s absolutely convinced that he’s got what it takes to beat him.
“(I see me) walking through his pitter-patter and just putting it on him, doing what I do,” Rockhold told Ariel Helwani. “I just don’t have respect for Bisping and his fighting style, and I’ll take anything he’s going to bring at me. After everything that’s happened with him, trust me, I’m just going to go in there and look for the kill. And I believe I can finish him in one round. I truly do.”
