Georges St-Pierre is back!
Well, maybe not so fast.
The former UFC welterweight champion’s road to a comeback took its most interesting turn this week, as St-Pierre appeared on UFC Tonight to proclaim himself fit and ready to return to the Octagon.
GSP asserted that after nearly three years of semi-retirement, he feels better than ever and is performing at the top of his game in training at Tristar Gym in Montreal. The only thing that remains is a financial agreement with the UFC for his return.
“Look, I want to get back; I want to come back,” the 35-year-old St-Pierre told hosts Kenny Florian and Daniel Cormier. “They know the terms that I want, and trust me, I’m very reasonable. So, it’s up to them. My agent tried to reach them, and they’re hard to reach, but I guess they’re going to come back [with an answer] soon. We’ll see.”
Are we on the verge of witnessing the greatest welterweight of all time back in the cage? With changing UFC ownership and a vastly different landscape since St-Pierre walked away near the end of 2013, will the new-look fight company pay him what he wants to return?
Here, Bleacher Report’s Chad Dundas and Mike Chiappetta debate the merits of GSP’s potential comeback and whether the UFC will pony up the dough to make it happen.
Chad Dundas: Mike, there’s a lot to unpack regarding a potential return to the Octagon for St-Pierre. The longtime 170-pound titlist took some time away to get his head together. Now, he’s declared himself ready to roll again, is targeting the UFC’s December 10 event in Toronto and even mentioned current champion Tyron Woodley, Nick Diaz and Demian Maia as potential opponents when pressed by Cormier and Florian.
Yet, it might not be as simple as that. Things haven’t seemed right between St-Pierre and UFC brass ever since UFC President Dana White needlessly ripped into him at the UFC 167 press conference following what was a hard-fought and emotional victory over Johny Hendricks.
Since he’s been out of action, GSP has given off far less of a company-man vibe and has been outspoken about things such as the UFC’s need for increased drug testing—something the company eventually handled by bringing USADA into the fold.
Meanwhile, White has not been complimentary about St-Pierre’s prospects upon his return. The UFC honcho has implied he thinks the French-Canadian phenom doesn’t have it anymore. When confronted on UFC Tonight by the boss’ words, St-Pierre fired back.
“He doesn’t know anything about me,” St-Pierre said of White. “I’m a smart guy. I’m not the kind of guy that you’re going to say that and [I say] ‘OK, I’m going to sign to fight for peanuts.’ I’m a smart person. It doesn’t work—these things—on me. But I’m going to tell something to Dana. Let me fight once, and you’ll see in the first minute of the fight that what you just said is wrong.”
What do you think, Mike? What’s it going to take to get this new GSP and the new UFC on the same page? Can it happen before December 10?
Mike Chiappetta: White is known to say some bizarre things, but I have to admit I was a bit taken aback by the impudence of his recent comments on The Herd (via Fox Sports) that St-Pierre “doesn’t have that drive and that desire that he once had.”
That is an incredibly disrespectful statement to make in the midst of a negotiation.
White may have decision-making powers over the resumption of St-Pierre’s career—which is a separate problem—but he doesn’t get to determine how another man feels. It seems especially egregious given GSP’s role in building the Canadian market while being the consummate professional.
I understand that business is business, but this goes beyond that and is something of a veiled shot. It’s an opinion that, if I’m guessing, is rooted in White’s irrational anger about how St-Pierre walked away after UFC 167. St-Pierre was a building block for the promotion, and he deserves to be treated with a level of respect befitting of a legend.
That said, this is a battle many saw coming. The UFC has never been an organization to make quick concessions in its dealings with talent. Although it is under a new regime, the current public spillover of the GSP negotiations suggests nothing has changed.
On a positive note, St-Pierre’s appearance on UFC Tonight suggests there is still hope for optimism. The promotion maintains quite a bit of control over the production, and if it wanted GSP shut out of appearing, he wouldn’t have been there. Hopefully, it’s a sign they are close enough to a deal to find some common ground.
The Toronto show in December seems like such an obvious pairing that I would be surprised if they aren’t able to strike a deal soon. Could they possibly revisit Canada without a marquee talent on the bill?
Dundas: Especially since UFC 206 is scheduled to go down at the 20,000-seat Air Canada Centre, it feels like his ideal landing spot. If there’s one major reason to believe everyone will eventually come to the table and sign on before that, we all know what it is: money.
There’s no way to overstate how much St-Pierre meant to the UFC during his heyday. According to pay-per-view buyrate estimates from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter (via MMA Payout), we’re talking about a guy who sold 770,000 PPVs for his title defense against Dan Hardy at UFC 111, 785,000 against Josh Koscheck at UFC 124 and 800,000 against Jake Shields at UFC 129.
That’s about 2.36 million PPVs sold during about a 12-month period in 2010-11, all from GSP fights. And that’s just three out of the 13 UFC events where he appeared in championship bouts. For the UFC, if it could get St-Pierre to fight twice in one year, it was like adding an additional PPV to its annual live-event slate.
Think of the millions of dollars in revenue he generated for the company during that time. The UFC would never think of it like this, but you can make an argument the organization owes it to St-Pierre to give him whatever he wants.
If nothing else, this will be an interesting test case for new UFC ownership. This may be the group’s first high-profile, superstar contract negotiation, so it will be telling to see how things progress. Even more so since GSP is a client of the Creative Artists Agency, a major talent company and a chief competitor of WME-IMG, which led the group that recently bought the UFC.
I’d say a deal gets done regardless of that—or of any harsh feelings between St-Pierre and White.
Mike, assuming GSP makes that walk at least one more time, who would you most like to see him take on?
Chiappetta: There’s only one answer: Conor McGregor.
Here’s the deal about GSP: We already know his ceiling. That’s not a question anymore. Even though it would be amazing to see if he can climb the mountain one more time, there’s nothing original to that story.
He already won the title, lost it and won it back. He’s proved his mettle and resiliency. He’s cemented his legacy. There is no need to try to recapture past glories, unless that’s what he wants. But he’s already said that’s not the case.
Instead, he wants to fight “the best, the biggest name,” as he said on The MMA Hour (via MMA Fighting) earlier this year. While Tyron Woodley would be a fine and intriguing matchup—one I wouldn’t object to—can you imagine the attention that GSP vs. Mystic Mac would generate? All-time MMA pay-per-view buyrate record, away you go.
Does it seem possible or even probable? Well, on the surface, no. But then again, St-Pierre has noted that he’d have an easier time cutting to lightweight than he would moving to middleweight. Can you imagine a 160-pound catchweight fight between them? No belts on the line, but it would be a whole lot of fun.
More realistically, a bout with one of the Diaz brothers or Woodley seems the more likely outcome.
To get back to your earlier point about the agency conflict, well, it is something that is bound to continue happening. There’s no easy fix, but this is another situation that shows how helpful it would be to have a fighters’ union or association.
St-Pierre wants to fight, but if both sides dig in their heels, he has no way to force a resolution aside from legal action. That could take years and run out the remainder of his career. Meanwhile, the UFC can say “no” as long as it wants without repercussions. Business is good for it right now, and it doesn’t need him in a financial sense.
St-Pierre has no moves to make except to negotiate from a position of weakness and hope the brass has the decency to meet him somewhere in the middle. The UFC suits are banking on that to draw the terms closer in their direction. It’s not pretty, and it’s not right.
So far, the new regime isn’t showing itself to be any more fighter-friendly than the old one, and the rest of the roster would be wise to take notice.
Dundas: St-Pierre told the guys on UFC Tonight that his return won’t just be a one-off thing. He plans to make another extended run through the promotion’s ranks. If that’s the case and GSP sticks around for a while, it’s hard to think the PPV gold of a fight between him and McGregor would go unmined.
For starters, though, we’re more likely to see him take on Woodley or Nick Diaz. While it would be a bigger hit at the box office, I would feel a little bit let down by the prospect of a Diaz rematch, since St-Pierre trounced him so soundly in their first meeting at UFC 158.
If he were to beat Woodley, however, and recapture the 170-pound title for a third time, it would cement his legacy as the greatest MMA fighter of all time. For that reason alone, I couldn’t argue with such a booking.
Here’s an idea that might be an extreme long shot but one I can’t leave off the page: Imagine a scenario where St-Pierre wins back the welterweight title from Woodley and McGregor defeats Eddie Alvarez for the lightweight strap.
It could be that all those champion vs. champion superfights we missed out on a few years ago might have been setting us up for the real thing. Under those circumstances, a bout between GSP and McGregor wouldn’t just break PPV records; it might send the world spinning off its axis.
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