Early on Sunday morning, before the birds sing and the church bells ring, Michael Bisping will be at the Manchester Arena, defending the UFC middleweight title he won last June. The Arena has hosted some great late fights before now. Back in 2005, Ricky Hatton’s famous victory over Kostya Tszyu started at 2am, so did Joe Calzaghe’s against Jeff Lacy the following year. But never anything quite like this, a top title fight involving a British champion, slated to start at just after 5am. Indecently early, unless you happen to be in the US watching on it on pay‑per-view TV, where it will be pretty much prime time on both coasts. The undercard starts at 11pm on Saturday and 16,500 fans who have bought tickets will spill out into Manchester city centre just before the sun comes up. “There’s going to be a lot of sore heads on Sunday,” Bisping says, “that’s for sure.” He’s not talking about the fighters.
The UFC says those 16,500 tickets sold out in six minutes. And James Elliott, the general manager of the UFC’s European operations, reckons that despite the timing it could have “sold the event out two or three times over”. He’s likely to be right.
Bisping is Britain’s first UFC champion, and this is his first defence. And though he lives in California now, he remains, he says, “a working-class lad from Clitheroe”, which is just 30 miles up the road. Manchester isn’t exactly his home but it is near enough that he tells people it is. It’s easier that way, he explains, since as a rule the people he meets in the US aren’t overly familiar with the geography of the Ribble Valley. For Bisping, the fight is also a family reunion. It’s the first time in a long while he and his six siblings will all have been in the same place at the same time.
Bisping says he insisted that his first defence should be back in Britain. But the UFC may not have needed much persuading. Over here, he is guaranteed a sell-out crowd whatever time he is fighting, and whoever it’s against. The fact that the UFC has matched him against Dan Henderson only adds to the pull. Because he and Bisping have a back story. They first fought at UFC 100, in July 2009. They had spent the previous few months working as rival coaches on the UFC’s reality TV show, The Ultimate Fighter. Bisping has a lip and back then, when he was still trying to make a name for himself in the US, he was quick with it. “A lot of the time I’m being sarcastic,” he says, “but it doesn’t really translate.” His father, Jan, says it’s his northern sense of humour.
The UFC’s ringmaster, Dana White, put it another way in the run-up to this fight. “I love Bisping,” White said, “and we have a great relationship.” Few last as long as Bisping has in the UFC if they don’t. “But Bisping is a dick. Mike’s a dick, and he doesn’t have a problem being a dick.” He may not have, but the men he fights sometimes do. Henderson knocked him out with an overhand right and then followed it up with a diving blow with his elbow, delivered as Bisping lay flat on the canvas. He did it so swiftly (“Jumping on them is the quickest way I know how to get from point A to point B,” he explained recently) that he beat the referee, who would probably have stopped the fight before the shot landed if he had had a chance.
Soon afterwards, Henderson said: “Normally, I’m not that way in fights. I know if a guy is out and I tend to stop. I knew I knocked him out. I think that last one was just to shut him up a little bit.” He has said since that he was only joking. Regardless, that one blow showed both why some love the UFC and why others see it as being beyond the pale. It wasn’t just a follow-up shot to a falling fighter, but an assault on an unconscious man. It has gone down as one of the most celebrated knockouts in UFC history and Henderson himself uses a silhouette image of it as his personal logo. “It took me an hour just to figure out where I was and who I was,” Bisping says. Nine years later, it’s the humiliation that hurts. “Every time I see that logo, on his shorts, his banner,” Bisping says, “I think: ‘You bastard.’”
Bisping adds: “I don’t stress myself out over it. I don’t sit up at night thinking about Dan Henderson, thinking about revenge. But I do want to set the record straight.” Plenty think he will. Henderson is 46 now and is adamant that this will be his last fight. He is also ranked 13th in the division, which means he is cut ahead of 11 other men. “All the other contenders are coming off losses, No2, No3, No4, they’re all coming off losses, and No5 is serving a suspension for steroids,” Bisping says by way of explanation.
Henderson won his last fight but lost six of the eight before it. “He hasn’t aged like fine wine,” Bisping says. “He has gone the other way. I think he’s retiring for a reason.”
He believes Henderson has a suspect chin. You would never guess it. Up close it’s clear you could break a hammer on his head, which was surely formed deep beneath the earth’s surface sometime in the Cretaceous period.
Henderson says he is retiring so he can spend more time with his family. His eldest daughter is 17 and about to leave home. Otherwise, he says, “physically, mentally, I feel great”. But fighting is a hard business to quit. As Bisping says: “It scares me, thinking about what do you do after. I could have been a doctor or a lawyer. I have a pretty decent head on my shoulders, but I dedicated my life to this. So when you’re done, what do you do next?”
He is 37 and beginning to make plans. He has been playing parts in a few new movies. “Tough guy stuff,” he says, “I can do that standing on my head.” For now, he is happiest fighting. “I love this job. I don’t love getting punched in the face. But I love winning fights. It’s a great feeling. Anyone that’s ever won a fight knows that.”
