Going on to become an
Ultimate Fighting Championship champion with one eye is a feat
only Michael
Bisping (30-9) has achieved and it wasn’t easy for the Brit in
any aspect.
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A perennially ranked middleweight contender, Bisping (30-9) took on
Vitor
Belfort in a title eliminator back in 2013. Bisping suffered a
second round knockout loss that also left him with a retinal
detachment and eventually loss of vision. The eye injury was not
immediately detected and had worsened further by the time it was
diagnosed.
It should be noted that Belfort is known to have been using
testosterone replacement therapy until 2014, when the Nevada State
Athletic Commission banned its approved use.
Despite doctors advising him to retire, Bisping continued fighting,
hiding his eye injury the best he could for fear of losing his
career. When Bisping went completely blind in the right eye, it was
a huge challenge for him to pass the pre-fight tests for vision.
While Bisping would scrape by most tests, he was still highly
anxious until the day of the weigh-ins, when the state athletic
commission does another vision test. Bisping recently revealed that
he devised a code along with head coach Jason Parillo in case the
doctor covered his good eye. Parillo would use specific gestures
like coughs and yawns, based on the number of fingers the doctor
put up, to convey the number to Bisping.
“I would pass tests somehow but even one site in the commission at
the day of the weigh ins, they want to check your vision… The fight
was the easy part. Because I was always terrified – I’m spending
all this money on a training camp, I putting all this effort into
it, I’m going to fly off to wherever it is and day before the fight
I’m going to get pulled from the fight,” Bisping recently said on
the Jaxxon podcast. “So the stress was major… The stress was
insane. So anyway, me and [Jason] Parillo had a thing. I said,
‘Well if [the doctor] covers up the eye, go [coughs] for one
finger, [Yawn] for two or whatever. We did that a couple of
times.”
Despite being blind in the right eye, “The Count” went on to
dethrone Luke
Rockhold via knockout in a massive upset in 2016 in a fight
that he took on 17 days’ notice. Bisping retired from the sport in
2018 with a 20-9 UFC record and now has a career with the promotion
as a color commentator.