Michael Bisping opens up on eye injury that hindered his performance against Luke Rockhold in first fight
When Michael Bisping fought Luke Rockhold for the first time in 2014, he did so with an injury to his good eye.
The Englishman could barely see out of one eye. But, before the Rockhold bout, he injured his other eye due to a cut suffered in camp. It then immediately opened up when he fought Rockhold. During an appearance on the UFC Unfiltered Bisping revealed just how bad that injury was.
“The fight with Rockhold, a few days before I flew out to Australia I got head-butted in training and I had stitches in my eye,” Bisping said (via MMA Fighting). “This is all in the book. Obviously, everybody knows I’ve got one bad eye that pretty much, well, I have a fake eye in there now so it doesn’t work. [Laughs]. But my good eye, I had stitches all on the top of the eye and they actually took the stitches out as I got to the arena because they said, ‘Mike you can’t fight with stitches in your eye.’
“So they took the stitches out and at the start of that fight against Rockhold. He headbutts me and opens the cut. I couldn’t see a f*cking thing,” Bisping continued. “It was like somebody taking a tub of paint and pouring it on a windscreen. Then you put the windshield wipers on and it will wipe the paint off but it will just smear. So the blood was going into my eye. I would wipe the blood like this, and then I could kind of see for a second. Then the blood would run into my eye again so I would wipe it again.
“Then while I was doing that, boom, I got head kicked. I had no idea what f*cking happened because I couldn’t see sh*t,” he added. “But I couldn’t say that at the time because I still wanted to carry on fighting. You know what I mean? So when I got my opportunity for a rematch, even on two weeks’ notice, of course I f*cking took it because I knew I could beat that guy.”
Michael Bisping would go on to rematch Luke Rockhold at UFC 199. There, he won by first-round knockout to become the nenw middleweight champion.
