ORLANDO – Last month, at UFC 171 in Dallas, Dana White was fairly convinced that former welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre — who voluntarily surrendered his belt to take a break from fighting — would at some point fight again.
This was in the midst of St-Pierre’s campaign to clean up the sport of MMA with drug testing, and of course before St-Pierre very casually tweeted that he had blew out the ACL on his left knee and would undergo surgery to correct it. Now in late April, White says, “I have no idea.”
The 32-year old St-Pierre, who held the 170-pound belt for nearly six years, previously tore the ACL in his right knee, which took him out of action for more than a year-and-a-half. Though he was able to successfully come back from that through rigorous rehab, this time the motivation might be different.
Asked if this latest ACL changes the certainty of which he spoke in March of GSP’s inevitable return, White said, “yeah, it definitely changes it.”
Even if, as some people have intuited, this latest setback might serve as additional motivation to drive St-Pierre towards a return?
“It’s tough to come back,” White said. “I just think giving up your belt is crazy, and then you have a plan, I’m going to give up the belt, I’m going to take some time off, I’m going to handle my stuff and come back, and then you blow your ACL out. You never know. Life throws all these curve balls at you, you never know what’s going to happen.
“It’s like [Fabricio] Werdum, and we were talking about that today. He was off for so long, and then Cain [Velasquez] gets hurt and I’m like, you’ve got to fight man. You can’t do this stuff. You can’t take this time off because you never know what’s going to happen.”