Not only is Michael Bisping facing a talented champion who beat him just 18 months ago, he will be coming in on just two weeks notice, and just after filming a new movie. The longtime UFC veteran is against tough odds on his first ever title shot, but his coach still believes he can pull it off against Luke Rockhold. In fact, he even upped the stakes with a bet.
“Do I want a full camp? Do I wish we had the three months, the ten weeks? Of course we do. But do we think we would have got a shot any time soon? I don’t know, it doesn’t look that way,” Jason Parillo told Submission Radio. “You know, when we started putting all the pieces of the puzzle – Jacare, Weidman going to surgery, he’s gonna heal, he’s gonna get a rematch, there might be a trilogy, some Joe Blow might come in, somebody might get hurt, Anderson Silva might…you know what I mean? There’s a lot.”
“Mike’s been playing this f*cking game for years and he hasn’t got a shot yet. So the company calls him, says ‘hey, here’s your shot’. Two weeks, two days, two hours, he’s gotta take that. So what are we gonna do? And he’s gonna win it.”
“Listen to what I’m saying. Everybody can slap me in the face after if it doesn’t go that way, but he’s gonna win this fight. Michael Bisping’s gonna be champion of the world. Would it blow your mind?”
Despite not being the optimal way of getting that long elusive title shot, Parillo’s confidence comes from the years of experience Bisping has.
“He’s doing a movie. What can he do? He’s going on a treadmill, he was doing maintenance probably for the most part. We didn’t think we were probably fighting till August, realistically. Exercise compared to actual training is a whole different ball game,” he said. “People are going to get sick and tired of me saying how mental it is, but fighting is very mental. And Mike comes in the gym on the first day of camp… He performs at the same level, same minutes, same amount of rounds, same amount of output, he performs that same way as he does the last hard training of camp.”
“So that’s just Michael. Michael’s a guy that his work ethic and he just doesn’t not know how to work extremely hard. And I say it, he’s got a resting heart rate of 35 beats a minute. That’s a gift he’s got.”
“Am I worried about his exhaustion or him getting tired? Of course. Who wouldn’t? Of course I worry about it. Do I think he did the right things [being] out filming XXX, hanging out with Vin Diesel and that type of shit? You think I think he was out there getting sharp for a f*cking world title fight? F*ck no. He wasn’t. But Michael’s got a tank that can go twenty-five minutes. He’s trained his last six fights for a five-round fight. His last six fights in a row have all been five rounds. He knows how to go twenty-five minutes, he’s got the mind for it and he’s got many, many years of doing this. This is what he’s been training his whole life [for]. I know he put this up on his social media, you know ‘I’ve been training my whole life,’ he’s exactly right.”
Listen to the entire interview above. Parillo’s segment starts at the 33:48 mark, and he also discusses how much Bisping’s game has changed since his loss to Rockhold four fights ago.
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