Fast facts
- Division: Middleweight (former light heavyweight)
- Record: 10-0 entering The Ultimate Fighter 3; retired in 2017
- Nationality: English, born on a British military base in Nicosia, Cyprus, and raised in Clitheroe, Lancashire
- Team/gym: Came up at Black Knights Kickboxing under Allan Clarkin; Wolfslair ties during his UK run; coached by Tito Ortiz on TUF 3
- Notable wins: Luke Rockhold (UFC 199, title), Dan Henderson (UFC 204, title defense), Josh Haynes (TUF 3 final), Yoshihiro Akiyama (UFC 120), Brian Stann (UFC 152)
On Friday, Michael Bisping sat in a sauna and watched an old fight. A fan account had posted his UFC 120 war with Yoshihiro Akiyama, 16 years to the day after the two of them traded combinations in London, and Bisping quoted it on X: “Haven’t seen this in years. Made my sauna fly by.” He finished by calling it an honor to have shared the Octagon with Akiyama.
That’s a nice, small moment for a man whose career was mostly made of loud ones. It also landed at the end of a week that reached him from the other side of the cage, which we’ll get to.
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Clitheroe, a slaughterhouse, and a pub brawl
Bisping started jujutsu at eight. At 15, in 1994, he entered Knock Down Sport Budo, Britain’s first “no holds barred” event and a rough ancestor of what we now call MMA. He has credited Jean-Claude Van Damme with lighting the original fuse, which is about as Lancashire-in-the-’80s as a fight origin gets.
Then he quit. At 18 he walked away from martial arts “to pursue real-life,” in his words, and less than a year later Allan Clarkin, who ran Black Knights Kickboxing, talked him into boxing, kickboxing and karate because he saw something in the kid. Bisping won the North West Area title and the Pro British light heavyweight kickboxing title, quit again in 1998, came back, and won the British title a second time.
And then he needed steady work, so he took jobs in factories, slaughterhouses and on demolition crews. He upholstered furniture, delivered mail, laid tile, plastered walls and sold things. In 2001 he did 28 days in HM Prison Preston after pleading guilty to a public order offense that followed a pub fight. I bring that up because the polished commentator you hear on fight night was built out of those years, and he’s never pretended otherwise.
His grandfather fled Poland for England after the Soviet invasion in 1939, his mother is from Northern Ireland, and Bisping has described himself as “English through and through.”
The Count arrives
His pro debut came on 4 April 2004, a submission of Steve Mathews in 38 seconds. Inside a year and a half he’d won the Cage Rage light heavyweight title, the Cage Warriors title and the FX3 belt, and he went 10-0 before the UFC came calling. On The Ultimate Fighter 3, training under Tito Ortiz, he stopped Kristian Rothaermel, finished Ross Pointon after a flying knee, and stopped Josh Haynes at 4:14 of Round 2 in the final.
The early UFC run had real wins and one real argument. He beat Matt Hamill by a split decision in London that plenty of people thought Hamill deserved. At UFC 78 he became the first British fighter to headline a UFC card, and he dropped a split decision to Rashad Evans. People had told him for years he was undersized at 205, and with Dana White’s backing he went down to middleweight.
His first opponent at 185 was Charles McCarthy at UFC 83, the man who now edits this site. Bisping hit him with knees and uppercuts until McCarthy’s forearm gave out and he couldn’t come out for Round 2. We don’t hold it against him. Mostly.
The style, and the night it failed him
Bisping fought like the kickboxer he was. He moved, he kept his hands busy, and he won rounds on volume and pace. Against Akiyama he got rocked early, steadied himself and swept the cards 30-27 behind repeated combinations. Against Alan Belcher he outboxed him in the first, picked up the kicks and punches in the second, and won a technical decision when an accidental eye poke ended it at 4:29 of Round 3.
The circling had a cost. At UFC 100, after a season of trash talk as an opposing TUF coach, Dan Henderson caught him moving to his left with an overhand right and put him out. Bisping later said he couldn’t remember any of it. He was in the shower telling his manager, “I can’t be knocked out cause I’m not fighting for another two months, what the hell are you talking about?” He has owned it since, saying he got his “just desserts” for all the smack he talked.
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He wasn’t always easy to root for. After stopping Jorge Rivera at UFC 127 he spat at Rivera’s cornerman, believing Rivera had insulted his family, then apologized in the cage and was fined his win bonus. The UFC kept dangling title eliminators in front of him, too, and he kept losing them, to Chael Sonnen in 2012 and to Vitor Belfort in 2013.
One eye, one belt
The Belfort head kick detached the retina in his right eye. Bisping said fear of never fighting again kept him away from a doctor, and he ended up legally blind on that side. Plenty of fighters would have been finished there. Bisping kept going for three more years with half his vision, which tells you more about him than any promo he ever cut.
At UFC 199 in 2016 he knocked out Luke Rockhold and became the first British fighter to win a UFC title. He defended it against Henderson at UFC 204, the same man who’d erased his memory at UFC 100. He lost it to Georges St-Pierre at UFC 217, took a fight with Kelvin Gastelum three weeks later, got knocked out, and retired. The UFC put him in its Hall of Fame on 5 July 2019.
Where he is now
These days Bisping holds the microphone. Last Saturday at UFC Vegas 122 he did the cage interview as Gerald Meerschaert, 60 fights deep and coming off his sixth straight loss, took off his gloves for good. “Yeah, I’ve had a good run, Michael,” Meerschaert told him. A fighter who knows exactly what that walk feels like was a fitting person to be standing there.
He’s also acted, in XXX: Return of Xander Cage, Triple Threat and Red Sonja, and he played Roy Shaw in My Name Is Lenny.
The other news of the week was harder. His son Callum, 25, a former college wrestler at San Francisco State, won his amateur debut by unanimous decision in December and scored a first-round TKO in April. At Sundown 2 in Los Angeles, fighting John McCain for the promotion’s amateur catchweight title, Callum shot for a takedown in Round 2, McCain stuffed it, pinned him on the fence and punched until the referee stepped in. MMA Fighting ran the video, and the internet did what it does. “damn, Michael Bisping’s son got slept,” one account posted.
His dad was knocked out cold on the biggest pay-per-view in UFC history and still came back to win the belt with one working eye. Callum is three fights in. He’s got a better role model for what comes after a knockout than almost anyone in the sport.
