Moments after uncorking the most astonishing knockout on UFC 205’s main card, Yoel Romero stood in the center of the Octagon and offered a message of love and compassion for middleweight champion Michael Bisping.
Like almost everything else Romero has done since coming to the UFC in April 2013, it was terrifying.
“I love you, Mike,” Romero crowed into UFC color commentator Joe Rogan’s microphone as cameras showed Bisping standing on the upper deck of Madison Square Garden, alternating between giving Romero a thumbs down and showing him a middle finger. “See you soon, boy.”
Romero had just left former champion Chris Weidman dazed and leaking blood after a sudden and violent flying knee ended their bout 24 seconds into the third round. It was the Olympic silver medalist in freestyle wrestling’s eighth straight UFC win and 11th stoppage in 13 total career victories.
It also solidified him as perhaps the scariest title contender the 185-pound division has ever seen.
Even Bisping found it in his heart to say nice things about Romero’s performance later, in his capacity as an analyst for Fox Sports (video above). In the moment, however, the champion wasn’t impressed.
As Romero finished speaking, Bisping turned one finger into a make-believe hypodermic needle and pretended to inject it into his own backside.
And that’s when we knew the lead-up to the next middleweight title match was going to be pretty fun.
Bisping vs. Romero is going to be like two super-villains squaring off at the end of a big-budget action movie.
Romero is the hulking powerhouse who ends his fights violently and then growls through his post-fight interviews with a voice that sounds like a cartoon monster who has been up all night eating broken bottles.
Bisping is the smarmy Cheshire cat, talking a mile a minute in his bespoke suit as he dares anyone to keep up with his high-pace pressure offense over the course of a 25-minute fight.
“Michael Bisping just speaks to speak, he just talks to talk,” Romero said this week, during an appearance on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani (via MMA Fighting.com’s Dave Doyle). “He just tries to open his mouth so that something can be heard, but nothing’s going to come out.”
These two are going to make beautiful promotional music together right up to the moment they climb into the cage and start punching each other in the face. After first saying he might not recognize Romero as No. 1 contender at all, Bisping now says he hopes the fight will go down in the spring.
When it does, it may not turn out to be overly competitive (Romero will surely be favored) or score an enormous pay-per-view buyrate, but it’s going to be a rollercoaster of all the right kinds of emotion.
Bisping comes in as perhaps the most unlikely champion on the UFC roster, but he has built a long and successful career by being the guy everybody wants to fight.
It was considered harmless fun when he backed into a title fight against Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 after Weidman dropped out with an injury. For years, Bisping has been regarded as a consummate overachiever—good, not great—and awarding him a shot at the championship was seen as a pat on the head for years of loyal service.
Then he won—felling Rockhold via shocking second-round knockout—and the middleweight division feels as though it has never quite got its head back on straight.
But it sure has been fun.
Right up to the moment UFC officials wrapped the title around his waist, Bisping’s true genius had always been rhetorical. He can transform even the most random and underwhelming pairing into a red-hot grudge match if you give him the airtime.
That’s not a bad attribute to have now that he’s the champion.
Against Romero, he’ll have no shortage of verbal ammunition.
The 39-year-old Cuba native has cut a swath through the middleweight division, but he was thought to be facing a two-year suspension after failing a UFC drug test on January 13. Even though Romero’s punishment was reduced to a six-month suspension after tests verified his positive result came from a tainted dietary supplement, not everyone was convinced.
Romero had been turning heads and raising eyebrows with his muscled-up frame since his UFC debut, and to a certain kind of skeptic, the failed test couldn’t be explained away.
Count Bisping among those disbelievers. In the wake of Romero’s victory over Weidman, Bisping reached out to the defeated New York native (with whom Bisping himself has traded barbs in the past) in an uncharacteristic show of solidarity:
If his hand gestures to Romero at UFC 205 weren’t a clear enough indicator, the champion recently doubled-down on accusations that the massive challenger is cheating the drug-testing system, during an appearance on The Luke Thomas Show on Sirius XM.
He said if a fight between him and Romero does indeed go down, it’ll have to be under somewhat special circumstances.
“[Romero] is the biggest cheating [expletive] in the whole sport I would say…,” Bisping said. “I want very stringent drug-testing throughout camp. I want him randomly tested once a week leading up to the camp because there’s all kinds of little tricks he can play these days. Because, I’m sorry, I still don’t buy that he’s clean.”
Whether Bisping is buying it or not, he’s going to have to be ready for war if and when a match against Romero becomes a reality.
Romero’s unorthodox, herky-jerky fighting style has been a puzzle no one in the UFC has yet been able to figure out. Prior to the Weidman win, Romero’s split-decision victory over Jacare Souza was controversial, but he’s still officially undefeated inside the Octagon.
Romero came to the sport late in his athletic life and sometimes appears to still be a work in progress during his fights. He can be listless, seemingly stuck in neutral until he suddenly explodes with a burst of terrible violence.
If anything can be said to be in Bisping’s favor in this fight, it may be the fact that Romero sometimes slows during the later rounds.
He has also never been in a five-round fight, which could mean that Bisping could exploit a cardio deficiency if he can steer clear of Romero’s intermittent eruptions and force the challenger into deep water.
Either way, it stacks up as an interesting matchup of styles.
But no matter what happens physically between these two men, it’s not likely to outdo the strangeness of what they could bring to the table during the run-up.
This will be two of the UFC’s oddest characters fighting for a world title.
If one of the things about MMA that appeals to you is its quirkiness, it’s tough to complain about that.
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