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29th May 2018
10:52am BST

Those digits don't illustrate how he refused to pack it in after Vitor Belfort detached his retina with that seismic head kick. An injury which left him visually impaired and at a huge disadvantage in his profession. It can be fixed with surgery, but he opted to delay going under the knife to pursue his goals in fighting.
They don't explain how he exacted revenge upon Dan Henderson for perhaps the most humiliating knockout in the history of the sport. Nor do they show how he picked himself up after nearly being decapitated by Anderson Silva's knee to win a unanimous decision, or how he refused to tap against Georges St-Pierre, or how he stepped in to fight Kelvin Gastelum just three weeks after that loss.
Bisping entered the UFC as a villain to American audiences who weren't a fan of his arrogant antics on the Ultimate Fighter, which he won. This negative image was only perpetuated by all the shit-talking and the infamous spitting incident during the Jorge Rivera fight. However, Bisping won over supporters with his sheer stubbornness.
No matter how much this unforgiving game wanted to chew him up and spit him out, he just refused to go away. That is until he absolutely had to.
"Obviously I've teased this for a long time now. 'I might fight again.' 'I might not.' Unfortunately, it's not a fight I'm announcing. I'm going to announce my official retirement from mixed martial arts. It's been a long journey. I started in 2003. So 15 years as a professional fighter. 12 or 13 years in the UFC. You know, you can't do it forever. I've done it for a long time."Bisping's issues with his right eye have been well-documented. However, he revealed on the podcast that he actually started having problems with his other eye after Kelvin Gastelum knocked him out.
"Alright, I'll get into it. After the Gastelum fight, I went to a party with all my team and my friends who had flown in to watch. We went to a club and because it's dark, I kept seeing this flash out of the corner of my good eye. I'm like, 'What the hell?' and I keep seeing the flash, so I keep looking. Doing that constantly." "Then I realise there's no flash going on, it's just my eye. Every time I look left, it just flashes. And it still does it now when it's dark. So I started freaking out thinking, 'Oh my God. I can't believe this. I've got a detached retina in my good eye. I have problems in my bad eye. It doesn't look good.' So obviously, I was freaking out."
"In this movie, Journeyman, it's about this boxer who has a great life, nice wife, kid and everything. He almost dies after a fight and he has severe brain damage, he loses the power of speech and all this type of stuff. It's very sad - I was watching this movie last night and I thought, 'It ain't worth it.' "I mean, what else am I going to do? I won the belt, I've had tons of wins, I've done everything that I set out to achieve. What's the point in flogging a dead horse? Not that I'm a dead horse, I've done everything I set out to achieve and fortunately now I've used my platform to open other doors. You've got to know when to walk away. I'm almost 40 years old, so the time is now."Thank you for making this crazy game that little more interesting, Bisping. Your future in the Hall of Fame is already sealed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w102xwNDysI
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