Last November, former UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping first brought up the idea of possibly fighting his retirement fight in London on March 17. But after conversations with his family and peers, “The Count” may have to scrap these plans.
During a recent episode of his Believe You Me podcast, Bisping said there currently is a fight for him in the works, but due to constant urges from his family to just let go of the idea and retire, he is now doing some thinking himself.
“I’m just debating whether or not I take the fight,” Bisping said (transcript via MMA Fighting). “For me, whether or not those people can see, I have a bad eye. I have a bad eye and my wife doesn’t want me to continue fighting, and my manager doesn’t want me to continue fighting. I see out of that eye but not as well as I used to, and I’m still a young man so it’s kind of the reason I may hang the gloves up.”
“My wife and manager and friends and people close to me say, ‘Mike, what do you want to do that for?” he added. “You’ve done it. You’ve had the belt.’ I’ve done it. I’ve done what I set out to achieve.”
“I kind of want to go do one last fight in England and they’re like, ‘So what? Five years from now or a year from now, people are gonna forget about all that and you can injure yourself even more.’ but you can injure yourself in any fight, whether or not you’re at 100% health or not. So that’s what we’re up to and I don’t know.”
A rematch against Vitor Belfort was brought to the table, but it is a fight that Bisping is not interested in taking. As of the moment, he is caught in the middle of the retirement promise he made to his wife, and the desire to continue fighting.
“It’s not a case of the time or the opponent or anything like that,” Bisping said. “It’s either am I going to continue fighting or am I not? I promised my wife a long time ago that I was done fighting, promised a ton of people, but I still seem to be slogging on and doing it.”
“Maybe we’ll have an announcement tomorrow, maybe we won’t.”
The 38-year-old Bisping is currently on two straight losses. His most recent one was via first-round knockout courtesy of Kelvin Gastelum in Shanghai, China last November, three weeks after he was choked out by Georges St-Pierre at UFC 217 in New York City.