MMA icon Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson is not a fighter known for showing his emotions, but there was one fight in particular that brought him to tears.
Interestingly, it wasn’t even one of his own.
Speaking on the JAXXON Podcast, ‘Rampage’ revealed that Michael Bisping’s brutal knockout loss to Dan Henderson at UFC 100 was the first and only time that he had cried during his 20-year career in the fight game.
“I never cried, but me and Bisping, we was like brothers, especially back then,” Jackson revealed on his podcast. “We’re not as close as now because some bullsh*t happened between our managers. Me, [Cheick] Kongo, and Bisping we was all like brothers.
“I never cried when I got knocked out, but when Bisping got knocked out the one time — it was [Dan Henderson] — I cried in the locker room! He got knocked out that bad, I felt really bad. I’m almost ashamed to say it” (h/t MMA Fighting).
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Bisping’s second-round knockout loss to ‘Hendo’ is still considered to be one of the UFC’s most vicious KOs of all time.
‘The Count’ earned some redemption seven years later, scoring a unanimous decision victory over Henderson at UFC 204 to retain the middleweight world title, but it did little to erase the memory of the ‘H-Bomb’ that Henderson detonated on Bisping’s chin in the late noughties.
“I felt like, at the time, maybe I didn’t help him good enough in training or something,” Jackson added. “It was something like that, and I just felt bad for him. I remember crying in the locker room like what the f*ck is wrong with me. Why am I crying? I never cry, it’s weird.”