Noah K. Murray-USA TODAY Sports
Michael Bisping reveals how an intruder almost set his apartment alight when he was just a teenager.
Michael Bisping may have been one of the toughest and grittiest fighters on the UFC roster, but that didn’t mean “The Count” wasn’t terrified when a masked man tried to set his house on fire when he was just a teenager.
In his book he released this year, “Quitters Never Win: My Life in UFC,” Bisping wrote about an incident in which an intruder entered his house and began to pour gasoline all over his apartment.
“When I opened my eyes, the guy stood there [at the front door] in black boots, black pants, black bomber jacket and a black Ku Klux Klan hood. (H/T Yahoo News)
“You think in those situations, you’d be a tough guy,” Bisping said. “But I s— my pants, and I don’t mind saying it. Behind me was a big block of knives, and I could have pulled out a knife, but I didn’t think of that. I wasn’t thinking straight [because] I was so terrified.”
The intruder had made one big mistake. Coming to Bisping’s house earlier in the day, he thought he had cut the wire for the telephone line so Bisping couldn’t call the emergency services. Little did the man know he cut the wire for the doorbell instead, so when he saw Bisping on the phone to the emergency services and a friend for help, the intruder had realised his mistake and therefore made a run for it.
“Where the phone was, there was a cable and he cut that cable,” Bisping said. “But he’d actually disconnected the doorbell.”
Bisping (30-9) won the UFC middleweight title back in 2016 when he knocked out Luke Rockhold on two weeks’ notice. Defending his title once against fellow veteran Dan Henderson, Bisping retired from professional competition after consecutive losses to Georges St-Pierre and Kelvin Gastelum.
In Bisping’s book, the UFC vet reveals all about his early life and the journey that took him to the UFC. You can buy his book on Amazon for $24.99.