“I just want to say, listen, Georges St-Pierre, absolute legend of the sport. Absolute legend. God bless and good luck in everything that you do from here on out.”
Michael Bisping talked a lot of trash in the lead-up to his middleweight title bout against Georges St-Pierre at UFC 217, but the outspoken Brit has nothing but respect for GSP in light of ‘Rush’s’ retirement from MMA.
St-Pierre, who choked out Bisping to win his second UFC title, officially announced his retirement at a press conference in Montreal on Thursday.
Bisping, who is also retired from mixed martial arts competition, joked that he beat St-Pierre into retirement at UFC 217.
“It’s what I do. He was in there and he took those right hands, it wobbled his brain, he went to the hospital, had a brain scan, right before he choked me out unconscious, he was in a bad way, and he was like, ‘I don’t want to go through this again,’” Bisping joked on a recent episode of Believe You Me (h/t Jed Meshew of MMAFighting). “‘I don’t want to experience the hardship of a fight with Michael Bisping ever again.’”
On a more serious note, Bisping wished GSP the best of luck in retirement, hailing the former two-division champ an ‘absolute legend’ of the sport.
‘The Count’ also believes St-Pierre should be a role-model to the younger, up-and-coming fighters in the UFC.
“I just want to say, listen, Georges St-Pierre, absolute legend of the sport. Absolute legend. God bless and good luck in everything that you do from here on out,” Bisping continued. I always said that Georges St-Pierre was the person that a young fighter should model themselves after. They really should. Always strive to learn new training methods. Training smart, fight smart, professional in and out of the cage.”
Reflecting on his trash talk prior to UFC 217, Bisping said he ‘talked a ton of sh-t’ to make the fight interesting, but says none of it was scripted or fabricated.
“Of course I talked a ton of sh*t leading up to the fight because that’s what you’ve got to do to make it interesting,” he said. “But I had a lot of respect for GSP. That’s not to say I fabricated everything. I meant what I was saying to him at the time. We’re gonna fight, he thinks he can beat me? I take that personally.”
Bisping went on to joke that St-Pierre only won the fight because of his notoriously ‘bad eye and broken ribs.’
“Had I not had a bad eye and broken ribs, I would’ve beat you. So you got lucky Georges,” he joked. “Bum knee, bum ribs, bum eye, my wrist, I mean Jesus Christ it’s amazing that I made it to the octagon. Not to take anything away from Georges because that’s not what I’m trying to do here. These are just facts.”
St-Pierre retires as one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters of all-time and a legacy as the greatest welterweight champion in the history of the sport.