Ahead of Michael Bisping’s homecoming fight at the Manchester Arena, former UFC middleweight title contender Demian Maia said it was “important” that the UK had a champion like the Clitheroe native. Not “fantastic”. Not “exciting”. Important.
Bisping is the only British world champion within the promotion, and had to wait a long time for that moment to arrive. After being one fight away from a title bout on more than one occasion, his break came far later than for most of the top talents in mixed martial arts.
It took the withdrawal of Chris Weidman from a scheduled bout with middleweight boss Luke Rockhold - and top contender Jacare Souza not being ready - for The Count to get his chance. And even then, there was a sense among some enthusiasts that he was being handed the opportunity at less than a month’s notice in order to be brushed aside so the next generation could spend the next few years battling it out.
Rockhold had been champion for just 175 days, having beaten Weidman at UFC 194, but there was a sense that another failure would make this the last time Bisping found himself on the UFC matchmakers’ radar for a title fight.
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“He fights anyone, he doesn’t turn down a fight. He’s taken a long time and always been the nearly guy but now he’s here,” says Manchester fight fan Sam Findlay, who is watching Bisping live for the first time.
“He deserves his chance and should get the chance to get whoever he wants, there’s no standout contender [in the middleweight division].”
Bisping has been vocal enough in telling the likes of Weidman, Jacare and Yoel Romero (Weidman’s UFC 205 opponent, who was serving a drugs ban when Bisping stepped in for UFC 199) that they need to do more to get their chance against him, and while there was some dissent at the promotion’s decision to pair him with 13th-ranked Dan Henderson, others understood the logic.
Henderson, after all, was the man who stopped Bisping in his tracks all the way back at UFC 100 when the Brit had won both of his first three middleweight bouts, two of them by first-round TKO. Now 46, the Californian had hinted that this would be the last time he set foot in the Octagon - and while quality matchups can take many forms, the role of narrative and revenge has often been a card on which the UFC has fallen back.
The fight comes almost exactly three years to the day after the last UFC event in Manchester. Bisping was meant to be there on that occasion too, but injury forced him to pull out just four weeks before his scheduled meeting with Mark Muñoz. That means, for many of those who didn’t travel south to see The Count defeat Anderson Silva in London, tonight marks a first opportunity to witness the biggest name in British MMA.
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Even for those who made it along to the O2 Arena in February, watching Bisping as a contender and watching him as a defending champion are hugely different. Back then, he told me “a win is all that matters” - while the sentiment may remain against Henderson, the reasons are different.
Back then, knowing he was due to fight the day before his 37th birthday, he will have known it was likely his last opportunity to even be considered for a title fight, and some of those who have watched him over the years never expected this day to arrive.
“I think he'd probably agree with you if you were to say a couple of years ago that age wasn't on his side,” says Dan Black, a sports journalist with the Burnley Express and Clitheroe Advertiser who has followed Bisping since he first made his UFC bow back in 2006.
“It's been such a competitive division too, there's been some big stars in that division and every time he got close it just seemed to elude him, a big defeat got in the way and he always had to step back down the pecking order and rebuild.
“But that just makes this even more impressive, the fact that he's had to really dig in to pull through and become the champion.“
Mark Carter, a long-time friend of the middleweight, agrees, saying the ability to respond to adversity is one of Bisping's greatest strengths.
"That true lion heart attitude that very few athletes have, combined with a well-rounded game, is what sets him apart from others in my eyes."
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Being the leading light for a country with a growing UFC following has arguably bought Bisping more time and more opportunities, and the depth of opportunities has meant fights with Silva, Luke Rockhold and now Henderson have all drawn huge audiences. But that would still be meaningless without his enduring talent. The O2 wouldn’t have sold out in 27 minutes for just anyone and the Manchester Arena would have taken longer than six to fill up for a lesser athlete.
“We went to the London weigh ins but couldn’t get tickets for the event,” says Michael Springthorpe, a Londoner who has travelled up to Manchester with brother Kenny.
“We went in for Manchester ones as soon as it got announced and they became available.”
And the Manchester Arena is bursting at the seams, with Findlay gesturing towards the upper-tier, where there is barely an empty seat, even for the preliminary card at just after 1am.
“We were talking to fans from Newcastle earlier, from all around. The UK really joins together to support Bisping,” he says.
“[Conor] McGregor has elevated the game here in the UK, but everyone loves Michael Bisping. Every UK UFC fan loves him. He epitomises the British spirit - he just never stops fighting.”
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Much is made of the need for showmanship or even outright dickishness as a prerequisite to flourish in the UFC, but Bisping is proof that this is an exaggeration. His appeal comes from an honesty and earnestness, rather than any bastardisation of wrestling’s heel/face dynamic, meaning any presentation of the Lancastrian as a British version of McGregor will stem from results alone.
That’s not to say Bisping doesn’t engage in back-and-forths outside the Octagon, but they often seem to be deliberately performative, as if he knows what’s expected of him - if you ask his fans what they love about him, trash talk will rarely (if ever) register.
"I'd say he might have been slightly more brash back in the day, but when you're finishing people as convincingly as he was then why not?" Carter says.
"To friends and family and people who knew him there was always a belief that he had a rare never-say-die attitude and a certain air of confidence that this is what he was made to do."
More important, at least when it comes to Bisping's recent rise to the top, is the fact that he’s not the kind to back out of a fight - even if this can be to his detriment. UFC President Dana White felt the need to pour cold water on Bisping’s offer to fight Daniel Cormier at a few days’ notice at UFC 200 following former light heavyweight champion Jon Jones’ positive drugs test.
“[His appeal is] probably the fact that he’s just a normal working lad like me, and a hard-working MMA fighter,” says local fan Lee Mandic, who tells me he discovered Bisping while channel-hopping and finding one of his fights on Bravo nearly a decade ago.
“I was made up for him (when he beat Rockhold). I have to admit I didn’t think he was going to win. I didn’t think he was quite good enough, but I couldn’t be more proud of him. Just proves if you want it enough you can get it.”
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Still, while he takes up the mantle of the only British champion in the promotion, there’s no doubting his appeal at an even more local level.
“Michael's from Clitheroe but he's always wanted to attach himself to Manchester and we've happily inherited him,” Manchester-based UFC journalist Jonathan Shrager says.
“Everyone's proud of him in Manchester, we've had some combat sports legends over the years. Not least Ricky Hatton, have to drop in the Ricky Hatton cliche when talking about Manchester combat sports.
"We have had amazing nights here (Manchester Arena) over the years with Ricky. The last time we had an event here at silly o'clock in the morning was when he fought Kostya Tszyu. So that's the first time in 11 years or something that we've had something to even remotely compare to.”
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Not everyone is here for Bisping, of course, and one of the night’s earlier fights gives an indication that the only British UFC title-holder can ignore any McGregor comparisons and let another man go down that road.
Marc Diakiese was making his UFC debut in Manchester, not that you’d know it. After flying to the top of BAMMA, a move to a bigger and more competitive promotion might have caused others to take a moment for self-reflection, but the Doncaster fighter came flying out of the blocks, almost to his detriment. Even an acrobatic move straight out of WWE wasn’t enough to stop him losing the first round to Poland’s Lukasz Sajewski, but he never looked in any legitimate danger, staying calm under even the heaviest pressure and making short work of his opponent midway through the second.
At 23 years of age, Diakiese could be the answer to the question of what happens when the old guard steps away from the Octagon. He’s got the brash self-confidence that a crowd will always love and is well aware of his own ability. There are times it may work against him - think McGregor at UFC 196 - but that element of always being on the edge of something memorable, positive or negative, has already endeared him to British audiences. Doing the same on a PPV card ought to speed up his rise across the pond.
Diakiese and Bisping couldn’t be more different in terms of style and self-image, but when you hear the crowd chanting the name of the latter, it’s the kind of vocal football-style chanting you’d associate far more with a backflipping showman with a bleached-blond mohawk than with a lad from Clitheroe whose callouts of opponents can somehow feel forced, almost semi-apologetic, as if he’ll not be happy to simply get under his rivals’ skin if the results don’t follow.
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It’s not until gone 5am that The Count finally makes his way into the Octagon, to an atmosphere which is rowdy but not out-of-control, somewhere on the sweet spot of the Venn diagram incorporating crowds from football, darts and pantomime. It’s unashamedly British, but not aggressively so.
Henderson walks out to boos, but once the bout gets underway any negativity towards the American makes way for positive encouragement of the home favourite. Chants of ‘let’s go Bisping!’ and ‘stand up if you love Bisping’ ring out on more than one occasion, and there’s a sense that the overwhelming noise helps pick him back up after being knocked down twice by the underdog in the first two rounds.
“The noise in here tonight was phenomenal,” Black says.
“I'm sure a lot of athletes in boxing or MMA say they zone everything on the outside out, but I can imagine he heard that today and that's drawn some extra strength from him.”
Whether it’s the impact of the crowd or the knowledge that this will undoubtedly be his last chance for revenge over Henderson, Bisping finds something extra and rebounds to take the third and fourth rounds. The fifth is closer, with both fighters staking a claim for victory, but when the judges’ scores are read out it’s the reigning champion’s hand which is raised.
Bisping thanks the crowd before anyone else, saying “The support you guys show me melts my heart every time”.
And, while age is not on his side, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the champ return to the North West for one last hurrah before his career is up.
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