It takes years of dedication, hard work, and extreme care of one’s physical abilities to make it to the UFC. To win a title under its banner, you need all that complemented by a thousand random acts of chance. But to be able to win it with one eye is an anomaly that only Michel Bisping understands.
Back on a UFC on FX card in 2013, Bisping took on Vitor Belfort, where an attempted head kick resulted in a detached retina, costing him his right eye. Now, years later, Bisping has opened up about the fight that changed everything while revealing he’s finally replaced the old prosthetic peeper he’s been rolling with for years.
“This is my new one. It is a bloody work of art I will tell you that right now”, he said with the excitement of a kid showing off a new toy. And it’s not like he’s throwing away the old faithful. By his own admission, he’s just old and sometimes forgets where he keeps it. So, having options helps.
But it wasn’t always so delightful for the English fighter.
For years, Bisping was seen as the “nearly man” of the middleweight division—always close but falling short. One of the biggest setbacks came in 2012 when he lost a razor-close decision to Chael Sonnen in a title eliminator that many felt he should’ve won.
Then came the Belfort fight in Brazil and it nearly cost him everything. In a video posted on his YouTube channel, the former middleweight champion recalled how he’d reach for a drink and his hand would “turn into a stump.”
Still, he kept the injury quiet, barely scraping through medicals while essentially fighting legally blind. “How did I fight with one eye?” he joked. “With great f***ing difficulty!” added Bisping with an air of levity amid painful nostalgia.
He even had to change his style completely—no more jabbing at air. Without the benefit of depth perception, he needed contact to find his range.
And yet, when he was called to replace Chris Weidman on 17 days’ notice for a title fight against Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 in 2016- an opponent he had previously lost to; Bisping saw it as an opportunity to make history. He would KO Rockhold 3:36 minutes into the 1st round to win the title.
But how did he even pass the medical?
Bisping details how he tricked the system
“I just lied my a** off in every test”, he told Quinton Jackson on his podcast. The former middleweight champion revealed that his longtime coach Jason Parillo, and he even came up with a code to help him sneak through the vision exams.
“I would pass the test somehow, but then even on site, the commission, at the day of the weigh-ins, they want to check your vision”, Bisping said, laughing.
But he would be stressed before every single test. He was afraid someone was going to ask him how many fingers they were holding, and that would be it. All that time, effort, and money spent on camps would go to waste, not to mention the prospect of fighting ever again, had the news of him being blind in one eye become official.
“I was always terrified they were going to say—because I didn’t have this [cosmetic eye] then… my eye looked terrible,” Bisping said, noting, “The fight was the easy part!”
