Esther Lin/MMA Fighting
After keeping the incident a secret through his UFC career, Bisping is new talking about a jail stint early in his life.
Michael Bisping surprised a lot of people during his UFC Hall of Fame induction speech by bringing up a previously unknown fact about his past: he spent a month in a maximum security prison, the result of a street fight where he kicked someone in the head and knocked them out cold. Apparently his upcoming autobiography Quitters Never Win (out November 1st) lays out the entire situation in detail, but he opened up a little more about the incident on his recent appearance on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show.
”It was a bar fight, I went into a bathroom and my friend was on the floor getting his head kicked in by two people so what are you gonna do?” Bisping said. “A fight starts and it spilled outside and continued out there. And then a guy used a woman as a human shield as a distraction as another guy was inching closer in my peripheral vision, I could see him. Maybe today with my vision a little messed, I wouldn’t have seen him. But back then I had perfect 20/20 vision and my peripheral was fine and he was inching closer with his fist clenched. I knew what he was going to do and after years of martial arts training, the one thing that I chose to put him down with was a high kick to the head.”
”Maybe a little bit of an over-reaction, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Shin on chin occurred, he went down, the cops pulled up and I went to prison for a while.”
As for why Bisping never mentioned the incident before in the countless interviews or podcasts he’s been a part of? He didn’t want the moment to define him.
”I did mention it at the Hall of Fame thing, it kind of slipped the tongue so to speak because it was in the book, I knew it was coming out soon,” Bisping said. “At the time I was trying to put that behind me, become a new person, reinvent myself. Of course when I was younger I made a lot of mistakes, a lot of people do. I’m only human. Maybe I made some more than others. Found myself in trouble with the law a few times. I was never a criminal but I was always quick to get into a fight, go figure I became a pro fighter. But yeah, I went to prison when Rebecca was seven months pregnant, that was obviously a low point for me and her.”
”When I became a mixed martial artist, I didn’t want that to be the stigma, I didn’t want it to be ‘Oh look at this, another tough guy, another criminal coming into cage fighting.’ Because you automatically assume the wrong thing. So I never spoke about that. Of course I wasn’t proud of that, and it was a part of my life or an era of my life that I chose to forget and put behind me and become somebody new. But now my mixed martial arts journey is over and I’ve written a book, so it’s only fair to tell the truth, warts and all so to speak.”
As for his opinion of prison, it’s about what you’d expect.
”It was s**t. I’m not in a rush to go back,” he said with a laugh. “It was terrible. For some reason I went to maximum security prison, 23 hour a day lockup, an hour outside your cell a day to walk around in circles, so it wasn’t fun. But it taught me some lessons.”