Georges St-Pierre has spilled the beans regarding the historic UFC 217 matchup against Michael Bisping, and how his opponent almost staged the altercation between them in an attempt to sell the fight.
Bisping did it in a promotional way to instigate me: Georges St-Pierre
Throughout his career as the welterweight king, GSP was rarely seen involved in trash-talking or backstage altercations. However, that would soon change when the French-Canadian was set to make his middleweight debut against the then 185-pound champ, Michael Bisping.
Bisping had been trying to initiate a feud with GSP right from the start, resorting to name-calling and also saying that he would knock out St-Pierre, and the latter also stood his ground verbally.
However, things turned up a couple of notches on Oct 13th, 2017 at the media event in Toronto, when during a staredown, St-Pierre pushed Bisping after he got into his face, causing Dana White to step in and separate the two.
The feud continued backstage as Bisping followed St-Pierre while he was interacting with a fan. Curses were exchanged, with threats to fight right on the spot, before Bisping’s tea stepped in to break the two fighters apart.
At the time, the incident created headlines, and many would believe that the grudge between St-Pierre and Bisping was real. However, after five years, St-Pierre revealed that it was all part of Bisping’s plans to hype up their fight.
“…Before we had fought each other, there was a lot of trash talk,” said St-Pierre on the Full Send Podcast. “One of the best things that he did, actually, for leading up to that fight was with a lot of the stuff are like promotional stuff. We do press conferences and things like that, but the best thing that he did, and he’s a. clever guy, we were in Toronto, and after one of the press conferences, we went back to the parking lot to our cars and our cars were in different locations, but to go to the parking lot we had to go through the same spot and when we did that press conference we had a stare down, and he kind of went to touch me, so I had to push him. So when we went to the parking lot after the press conference, I think he saw that TMZ was there, so he walked back to me in the parking lot, and he went face to face with me and said, ‘Keep your F*cking hands on you, because the next time you do that I’m going to smash you.’ I’m like, what F you touch me first, so don’t touch me if you don’t me to touch you.”
“…It wasn’t staged because it was real. Like the way I felt when it happened, I was like, does he really want to fight with me and I was ready to fight if something happened, and I’m sure the same thing for him, but he did it in a promotional way to instigate me, but that was very smart because that went viral. It was crazy,” St-Pierre added. [H/T MMA News]
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