Michael Bisping won a UFC title with one eye, and the only reason he was able to continue competing after going blind was admittedly lying his way through vision tests to ensure he could get cleared to compete.
The former middleweight champion has never shied away from the multitude of eye issues that plagued his career after a head kick from Vitor Belfort in 2013 left him with a detached retina. These days, Bisping actually uses a prosthetic cover over his right eye but he’s been legally blind for several years after multiple surgeries to repair the damage done.
The problems started with that detached retina from the Belfort fight. but Bisping revealed on his YouTube channel that was just the tip of the iceburg when it came to his eye issues.
“Training for my next fight UFC something in Manchester against Mark Munoz, I was sparring pretty hard,” Bisping said. “Here’s how you know you’re sparring too hard: One of my sparring partners broke [his] hand, someone else broke their foot and I re-detached my retina.”
Another surgery followed and over time Bisping developed glaucoma, a condition that damages the optic nerve and can lead to loss of vision or blindness, and he had to go back under the knife again. All told Bisping actually had six or seven surgeries on his eye but one of the final procedures is where he got the bad news that his eyesight was gone.
Despite that fact, Bisping admits he never contemplated retirement from fighting.
“I come around the next day [after surgery], and I find out I would never see out of the eye again,” Bisping said. “However, I was still able to continue to fight. I’m not going to go into details about how I did that but I had to tell a lot of lies. I had to cheat on a lot of tests. It was very, very, very stressful.”
All fighters are required to undergo vision tests before competing, but Bisping detailed how he was able to get around those problems after going blind in one eye.
“I’ll never forget this old Indian doctor, I’m in England and he wanted to do an eye test, and he actually thinks I’m trying to get my vision tested,” Bisping recounted. “What I used to do was just memorize the [eye] charts and all you have to do, as I said, to pass a test you’ve got to have 20/200 vision, which on an old school eye test is the big letter at the top and then the two letters below it.
“I sit down, this nice Indian doctor covers up my bad eye first and he said ‘OK, what can you see?’ I’m like D, L, M, whatever it was and then he doesn’t even spin it around. I pretended I could only see those three and he’s like ‘you’re passed to fight but I’d be very, very careful Michael because if anything ever happens to your good eye, you’re going to go blind.’ I was like I know doc, I’ll think about it. Of course, I wasn’t.”
Bisping kept finding ways to pass those eye tests, which included before arguably the biggest fight of his career when he eventually knocked out Luke Rockhold to become UFC middleweight champion.
“I wanted to fight, and I had to get past doctors, tests and all the rest of it,” Bisping said. “Fortunately, I was able to lie, I was able to pull the wool over people’s eyes, I was able to take advantages of some sweet, innocent, kind doctors.
“I walked out of that doctor’s waiting room [in England] and I was like come on, get in! Because I was passed and it meant I was back and I was able to provide a living for my family and then eventually as I said earlier and go on to become champion of the world. It’s something that I’m very proud of and I did it with one eye.”
When he was still fighting, Bisping’s biggest concern was just getting cleared to compete but as he started embarking on a career in television, he recognized that he had to do something aesthetically to cover his eye that had effectively gone dead after he was declared blind.
That’s what led to Bisping getting the prosthetic cover that he still wears to this day with a hand-painted lens that makes it look like he’s got fully functioning vision, but the truth is he hasn’t seen out of his right eye for many years.
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