It’s common knowledge these days that Michael Bisping had serious eye issues during the last few years of his MMA career, but even now he’s still revealing new stories about how bad it got, and his latest involves his first fight with Luke Rockhold.
“The fight with Rockhold, a few days before I flew out to Australia I got headbutted in training and I had stitches in my eye,” Bisping stated on the UFC Unfiltered podcast. “This is all in the book. Obviously, everybody knows I’ve got one bad eye that pretty much, well, I have a fake eye in there now so it doesn’t work. [Laughs]. But my good eye, I had stitches all on the top of the eye and they actually took the stitches out as I got to the arena because they said, ‘Mike you can’t fight with stitches in your eye.’
“So they took the stitches out and at the start of that fight against Rockhold, he headbutts me and opens the cut and I couldn’t see a f*cking thing. It was like somebody taking a tub of paint and pouring it on a wind screen and then you put the windshield wipers on and it will wipe the paint off but it will just smear. So the blood was going into my eye, I would wipe the blood like this, and then I could kind of see for a second, and then the blood would run into my eye again so I would wipe it again and then while I was doing that, boom, I got head kicked. I had no idea what f*cking happened because I couldn’t see sh*t. But I couldn’t say that at the time because I still wanted to carry on fighting, you know what I mean? So when I got my opportunity for a rematch, even on two weeks’ notice, of course I f*cking took it because I knew I could beat that guy.”
Of course, Bisping would prove to be right as he knocked out Rockhold in the opening round to achieve his dream of winning the middleweight title.
