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Earlier this summer, while chatting in London with former UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping for the launch of his excellent book “Quitters Never Win,” I asked him about how bad his eyesight was during the tail end of his career.
His response was to pull down his eyelid, pluck out his prosthetic eye and hold it, inches away from me, in the palm of his hand.
“Does that answer your question?” he asked me, as I tried not to throw up in my mouth.
The teenage version of me would have fainted on the floor in an instant, but somehow I managed to maintain a modicum of composure, instead merely uttering a couple of expletives that I had to bleep out of the audio I was recording.
Sadly (or fortunately, depending on your view) the interview was an audio-only affair, so the incident wasn’t captured on camera.
Well, now he has done it on camera.
During the latest episode of his podcast “Believe You Me,” Bisping and co-host Luis J. Gomez were chatting when the Brit repeated exactly what he did for me in London a few weeks back, pulling down his eyelid and plucking out his prosthetic eye, leaving Gomez suitably shocked.
As party tricks go, it’s a pretty good one, and I’m sure he’s already done it to unsettle a friend or colleague or two. Of course, while he appears to be having a little fun with it, there is the unfortunate issue of his eyesight being severely affected, as he explained to me during our chat back in London.
To think that “The Count” fought the final 11 fights of his career – a span in which he beat Anderson Silva, knocked out Luke Rockhold to win the middleweight title, then defended the belt on home soil – with only one functioning eye is pretty incredible.
So if he wants to freak out a few people by popping out his fake eye every now and then, just for kicks, that’s totally cool with us.
You can check out the latest episode of ‘Believe You Me’ in full here:
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