Quitters Never Win by Michael Bisping

Author:Michael Bisping
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781473568105
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

I parked my car in the tiny, broken tarmacked car park across the road from the Liverpool gym just before 10am on 3 January 2011. The car boot opened and I grabbed the large blue bag which contained all my training gear. I slammed the boot shut. UFC 127 was now eight weeks away.

It was bitter cold out. Not as cold as the record-breaking, ball-numbing December had been but frigid enough to make the grass between the car park and gym white and crunchy underfoot. Training bag swung over my shoulder, I hurried to the gym door which – as usual – was locked from the inside. All I could do was bang away at it with my fist, praying someone would answer before my ears froze off.

Eventually, Paul Kelly opened the door. As I stepped inside, I realised it was actually colder in the gym than it was outside with the frozen white grass. Paul saw the look on my face. ‘Wait till you get on the fuckin’ mats,’ he said. ‘It’s like March of the fuckin’ Penguins in ’ere.’

I’d recently begun training Muay Thai with a new coach – a master of the eight-limbed art named Daz Morris – several times a week and how I missed his centrally-heated Salford gym that morning.

Training at the Liverpool gym during the winter was like swimming in a freezing pool – you just had to commit to jumping in and getting your body temperature up. I pulled a T-shirt over my rash guard and joined my teammates doing shuttle runs from one side of the gym to the other. The whole squad bounced from wall to wall and you could see breath swirling out of our mouths and shooting out of our nostrils. In a few minutes, those of us working the hardest had sweat literally steaming off our skulls and necks.

With hindsight, I could have been a little burned out. I’d fought 4 times in 11 months already. Put another way: I’d spent 29 of the previous 48 weeks of my life doing exactly what I was about to do for the next 8 weeks.

But Rivera himself was about to provide all the motivation I needed.

A month out from UFC 127, Rivera’s camp began putting out a series of YouTube videos designed to hype up the fight and annoy me. It was bizarre stuff; him and his team working their way through every British stereotype and jerking themselves through rehearsed dance routines and yelling penis jokes cribbed from South Park. The videos kept coming and continued to get more personal until there was a reference to my family. The following Monday, Callum, aged nine at the time, came home from school upset. The kids at school had been playing Rivera’s videos.

Now I couldn’t wait to fight him.

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