Fighting hasn’t gotten old for Jim Miller. On July 8, Miller will enter his 39th professional mixed martial arts (MMA) bout. He’ll do battle with former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight title holder Anthony Pettis. The bout will be part of the UFC 213 card. In a recent interview with Flo Combat, Miller said he […]
Fighting hasn’t gotten old for Jim Miller. On July 8, Miller will enter his 39th professional mixed martial arts (MMA) bout. He’ll do battle with former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight title holder Anthony Pettis. The bout will be part of the UFC 213 card. In a recent interview with Flo Combat, Miller said he […]
Max Holloway and Jose Aldo may have been trading verbal barbs, but that hasn’t caused “Blessed” to lose respect for his UFC 212 opponent. This Saturday night (June 3), interim featherweight champion Holloway will battle 145-pound title holder Aldo in a unification bout. The action takes place inside the Jeunesse Arena in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. […]
Max Holloway and Jose Aldo may have been trading verbal barbs, but that hasn’t caused “Blessed” to lose respect for his UFC 212 opponent. This Saturday night (June 3), interim featherweight champion Holloway will battle 145-pound title holder Aldo in a unification bout. The action takes place inside the Jeunesse Arena in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. […]
The UFC and Samsung have partnered together to present MMA in a new way beginning this Saturday with UFC 212. The event will be broadcast from Brazil in virtual reality, giving fans another way to see the action as real as ever. “We’ve always felt that the potential of combining UFC events with virtual reality […]
The UFC and Samsung have partnered together to present MMA in a new way beginning this Saturday with UFC 212. The event will be broadcast from Brazil in virtual reality, giving fans another way to see the action as real as ever. “We’ve always felt that the potential of combining UFC events with virtual reality […]
Without a truly bankable star having fought in 2017, the MMA world was waiting with great anticipating for the return of longtime former welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre when it was announced “Rush” would meet middleweight champion Michael Bisping at a later-to-be-determined date sometime this year. That is, until the saga of St-Pierre, who appeared alongside […]
Without a truly bankable star having fought in 2017, the MMA world was waiting with great anticipating for the return of longtime former welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre when it was announced “Rush” would meet middleweight champion Michael Bisping at a later-to-be-determined date sometime this year.
That is, until the saga of St-Pierre, who appeared alongside “the Count” at a highly-publicized press conference the day before March’s UFC 209, took a strange turn after he released a video revealing he wouldn’t be able to fight until November. UFC President Dana White then revealed that Bisping would fight number one contender Yoel Romero instead, a fight that ultimately couldn’t be book on accord of “The Count” having a nagging knee injury he had surgery on earlier this year.
Romero was booked to face surging contender Robert Whittaker at UFC 213 in July, and St-Pierre then revealed the real reason why he needed a long-off date for his rumored match with Bisping. An eye injury that will keep him out of sparring until September is to blame, and during an interview on today’s The MMA Hour, he discussed why he didn’t want to reveal that to the public at the impromptu presser earlier this year:
“When the fight got announced with the press conference, we knew that we couldn’t fight in the summer. UFC knew as well that I couldn’t fight in the summer. They knew that I had an eye injury, but we still did the press conference, and I felt very uncomfortable during this whole time.
“Everybody has advisors, and I was advised to not talk about it, not talk about my eye injury. As an athlete, you don’t want to talk about these things. If you know about it now, it’s because this whole thing became out of proportion, it turned into a very negative thing. As athletes, we all have injuries and don’t want to talk about this, because it gives you weaknesses, something that your opponent can exploit.
“It’s an eye injury, and it’s a long healing process. I had surgery done and everything is OK. It’s just, there’s a lapse of time, minimum time, that I need to wait before I go back and train, especially if I take a risk to get hit on my eyes, because it can damage (my eye permanently), because my vision has not recovered 100 percent yet. It will be fine, everything is fine. It’s just, I need to wait for the lapse of time that the doctor asked me to wait for, and it’s in September that I can start sparring again.”
Photo: Joe Camporeale – USA TODAY Sports
St-Pierre also said he hadn’t been informed that his fight with Bisping was officially off yet – signifying it could still happen – and he attributed White’s announcement to his emotional attitude before praising the successful promoter:
Just what I’ve heard in the news. But Dana, he’s a very emotional person. He’s a very emotional person, and I understand that. You need to be emotional in this game. The way he is, Dana is the best. Like I said, he’s the best promoter, pound-for-pound, of all-time, and he can sell you every fight. It’s crazy. He’s the best. He can sell you anything, like, he’s so good at it. And I’m sure if he still wants to make this fight, we can make it. It’s up to him.
“Things with Dana are hard. I have people that their job is public relations and they deal with the UFC people, and sometimes all the stuff that I hear from Dana is from the reporters. Stuff that I hear, all the time, are [from] the reporters. It explodes like a bomb that I didn’t know. So I guess it’s the same thing for him on this fight.”
So while the fight may be off for now, St-Pierre reaffirmed his desire to face Bisping at some point because he simply wants to hurt the brash veteran ‘real bad’:
“I want to fight Michael Bisping. For me, personally, that’s the man I want to fight. As much as I respect him as an athlete — even though he’s been very arrogant and cocky with me, I respect him as an athlete — but if I fight him, I’m going to hurt him real bad. That, I can promise you.”
Finally, St-Pierre revealed that when he does finally come back to the sport he dominated after four years off, he’s going to try to make more history. However, “Rush” closed by saying that if he loses at any point during his comeback, he will retire for good:
“I’m at one fight for retiring for good, this I can tell you for sure. If I come back and I lose, this is it for me. Yes, his is it for me. If I come back and I lose, it’s finished; this I can tell you for sure. Because it’s over, I don’t wanna hang there and become a punching bag for younger people. I do not believe I’m gonna lose, I think I’m at my best, my trainer believe I’m at my best.
“I put a lot on the line, and I know that if I come back, it’s because I believe I’m a much better person that what I was and I wanna go back to another shot and rewrite history, but if down the road, if I lose, I pass the torch, it’s over, it’s finished. It’s a lot of pressure, and that’s why I will be fighting at my best because I will be fighting like there’s no tomorrow.”
Georges St-Pierre wants to return to the Octagon, but his comeback could be brief if it doesn’t go the way he wants.
“One thing I can tell you for sure is that I’m at one fight for retiring for good,” St-Pierre said on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helw…
Georges St-Pierre wants to return to the Octagon, but his comeback could be brief if it doesn’t go the way he wants.
“One thing I can tell you for sure is that I’m at one fight for retiring for good,” St-Pierre said on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani, via Mike Heck of Fansided. “If I come back and I lose, this is it for me. If I come back and I lose, it’s finished.”
St-Pierre hasn’t competed in a UFC match since 2013.
The 36-year-old has discussed a comeback for more than a year and was set to face Michael Bisping until the bout was called off earlier this month, per Fox Sports Australia. The fight was set for July, but St-Pierre wanted to wait until after October.
UFC President Dana White was unwilling to wait for the veteran, instead moving forward with another fight for Bisping to defend his middleweight title.
“Georges St-Pierre is saying he will not be ready to compete now until November,” White said. “Who knows if that’s even the case. It could be next year.”
Prior to his leave of absence, St-Pierre was the UFC welterweight champion with a 25-2 record. His nine consecutive title defenses were the most in the league’s history until he vacated the belt in 2013.
Add UFC women’s bantamweight Cat Zingano to the list of fighters unhappy with this past week’s UFC fighter retreat. Zingano recently joined Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour to talk about her experience at the Vegas event, and it wasn’t a good one. In the midst of the event Zingano was left wondering the same […]
Add UFC women’s bantamweight Cat Zingano to the list of fighters unhappy with this past week’s UFC fighter retreat.
Zingano recently joined Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour to talk about her experience at the Vegas event, and it wasn’t a good one. In the midst of the event Zingano was left wondering the same thing her fellow combatants were – why are they still broke when the company is spending money bringing in people such as Kobe Bryant, Michael Strahan, and Snoop Dogg? (quotes via MMA Fighting):
“If this retreat was meant to tell us about all the newness that is happening, not only the millions of dollars that they probably spent on this event, and the carpets at the event that will be used once, and wall fixture that will be used once, and how much money went into bringing Snoop in and Michael Strahan in, and Kobe Bryant — what did these guys get paid to come do this?” she said. “When we’re sitting here broke, or struggling. Or the people that are still on top in the world are wondering what they’re going to do next in their career.
“It was really hard for me personally seeing how they’re throwing out all these companies making all this money, and we should be honored to be considered on the same level of popularity of these companies.”
“Alpha” went on to state that she doesn’t think the UFC is considering everyone’s positions when speakers are telling them how to invest their money, and they don’t have any money to actually invest:
“That was more insulting than anything, and I don’t know if they considered that when they were creating the content, when they were like look, we get this many viewers, we sell this many fights to this many homes a year, blah blah blah, and all of us are still sitting there knowing exactly what we get f*cking paid,” Zingano said.
“How much is Kobe getting to be there? And I love the man. Don’t get me wrong, I love Michael Strahan. Michael Strahan is actually one of the producers that did my documentary [Religion of Sports], so I have an invested emotion in actually liking this guy because he was delicate with my situation and my story. I do care about these guys, but it’s like, how much did it cost to get them there? How much did it cost for Snoop to be there for a private concert? And every carpet in this hotel saying ‘Fighter Retreat?’ Why not spread that money out over us? Or get us health insurance? We’re getting welcomed to a family, this professional athlete family, a world family. Kobe’s telling us how to invest our money. Tell me how do I invest and intelligently get a return on f*cking five thousand dollars?
“I don’t feel they were considering at all our positions.”
The former 135-pound title challenger also stated that one speaker, who was being ‘extremely condescending’ to the fighters, told them they wouldn’t be ‘sh*t’ if they lost and that they should ‘be Conor McGregor’:
“There was a guy on stage, being extremely condescending to us, and I thought that was product placement,” Zingano said. “I thought it was. And no, he’s out there representing us, promoting ourselves and our brand, telling us if we lose we aren’t sh*t and they don’t care about us, and to be ourselves.
“That was the best quote of the whole seminar, was ‘be yourself, be Conor McGregor.’ I was like, done.”
One thing that really set Zingano over the top was the 50 percent off coupon that Reebok gave fighters. Zingano is frustrated that the ‘the company that took all my money’ now wants more:
“They gave us these boxes, these UFC boxes, which had shoes and sweatpants or something in it,” she said. “On the bottom of the box, it had this coupon, and I pick up the coupon when I got home. Someone had said while we were there, dude, f*ck all of this, how are they sitting here educating us about Reebok when Reebok is already taking all of our money? Everyone’s upset about it, that we lost so much money, lost any credit with any sponsors ever.
“So I get home and I find that thing on the bottom of the box, and I was like — so, this is really what I’ve worked this hard for? This is me, I’ve made it, I’m one of the best in the world at something, I’ve f*cking made it — and this is what I get from the company that took all my money, is they want more?”
Georges St-Pierre wants to return to the Octagon, but his comeback could be brief if it doesn’t go the way he wants.
The former 135-pound title challenger also stated that one speaker, who was being ‘extremely condescending’ to the fighters, told them they wouldn’t be ‘sh*t’ if they lost and that they should ‘be Conor McGregor’: