As a fight promoter and manager, Stephane Patry has long been plugged in to the goings-on in the Montreal fight scene.
And as the UFC gets set to make it’s return to to the city, Patry is convinced his most famous former client will step back into the Octagon one more time sooner or later.
The former manager of longtime welterweight star Georges St-Pierre said on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour that he believes Montreal’s favorite son will return for one more fight.
“Georges is going to come back for one fight,” Patry said. “I can’t say he’s going to come back and go on a title run and do 10 fights, but I know for sure he’s going to come back for one fight.”
UFC president Dana White seemed discouraged that the longtime former champion will ever return after St-Pierre turned down an opportunity to fight at UFC 186. But Patry believes this was due to a combination of circumstances, including St-Pierre’s knee injury and the lack of a compelling performance.
“It’s one of those things where, Georges got injured, which is something that wasn’t expected, and Anderson Silva got caught with steroids, so I mean, there’s a lot of things that have happened in the past few months that can change the scenario a little bit,” Patry said. “But I know that Georges has the will, and he wants one more fight. He doesn’t want to leave the sport with that fight with [Johny] Hendricks, I know that for a fact.”
Patry, who ran the Montreal-based TKO promotion and was St-Pierre’s manager through his initial rise in the sport and through his first title reign, believes it’s going to take the right fight to get St-Pierre excited about fighting again.
“He’s going to come back for that one fight everyone wants to see,” Patry said. “Everyone points to Anderson Silva, if he was going to fight on that card, then Dana didn’t offer him Anderson Silva. So he’s not going to come back for one fight that doesn’t mean much in the history of mixed martial arts. He wants to make history with that one fight. With what happened with Anderson in that one fight and his problems with the commission, I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”
If it was up to Patry, though, he’d advise St-Pierre to stay out of the cage.
“If Georges would ask my opinion, should i come back for one fight, I would say absolutely not. You’ve done so much for the sport, so much for the UFC, you’ve done everything, there might be no one out there who did what you did. Just enjoy life.”