Michael Bisping Details How He Became Friends With Jorge Masvidal
In case you didn’t know, Michael Bisping and Jorge Masvidal were heated rivals. Not anymore at least.
When Bisping was the middleweight champion prior to his retirement in 2017, he engaged in a war of words with Masvidal that stemmed over the former ripping up the Cuban flag during a Yoel Romero fight.
Masvidal did not appreciate that one bit as the pair almost came to blows multiple times, with the most notable case being when they met in a hotel before Bisping’s title fight with Georges St-Pierre. At one point, Masvidal was even open to fighting Bisping in the Octagon.
However, they have since squashed their beef with Bisping heaping praise on Masvidal’s recent accomplishments. Compared to how they were interacting with each other before, “The Count” finds their current situation hilarious:
“It’s absolutely hilarious,” Bisping said about Masvidal to MMA Fighting. “Because a few years ago, I couldn’t stand that guy, and I’m pretty sure he was trying to f*cking have me stabbed or something if I ever went to Miami. You know what happened, what went down, it all stems from that thing with Yoel [where I tore a Cuban flag in half].
“I’ve got nothing against Cubans, I’ve never been to Cuba, I don’t know anything about Cuba, but I’m fighting Yoel Romero, he’s talking sh*t and there’s a Cuban flag in a cocktail sitting in front of me. What’s Michael Bisping the fighter going to do? There you go.”
Bisping Wished Masvidal Good Luck At UFC London
Things started to change at UFC London last year before Masvidal’s emphatic knockout of Darren Till. Bisping came across “Gamebred” the night before and rather than start anything, wished him good luck ahead of his fight.
“So that all started from there,” Bisping explained. “We went back and forth, and he was shooting me all sorts of sh*t on f*cking Instagram and what not, and he was fighting Darren Till. A buddy of mine had a fight [on the card], and he was in the workout room the night before the weigh-ins, and we’re walking down the hallway, there’s like four of us and they’re all big guys. We’re walking down a dark corridor and there’s someone walking towards us and I didn’t know it was Masvidal. Whoever it was stood on the other side of the wall to let us by, and I saw it was Masvidal.
“I stopped, put my hand out and said ‘good luck, Jorge,’ and I think he thought I was going to be an assh*le because I was there with my friends and all that sh*t had happened, but I’m not going to do that. He’s got a big fight the next day. I’m not that guy. I just said, ‘Hey Jorge, good luck buddy,’ and he took that and he was respectful. He was like ‘Mike, you could have been a d*ck there, but you didn’t, and I respect that,’ and we’ve been good ever since.”
Had things worked out differently from the start, Bisping and Masvidal may even have been friends a while ago:
“When you meet somebody under different circumstances, like somebody who has been your enemy, if you met them in a different way you could be friends,” Bisping added. “Like Luke Rockhold. I always said if Daniel Cormier can be such good friends with Luke Rockhold, he can’t be that bad of a guy. But we’re just rivals, so we’re not meant to like each other.
“But since then, [Jorge] has been awesome. How can you not be a fan of what he did last year? How can you not be a fan of what he did to Till, [Ben] Askren and then [Nate] Diaz. The way he’s handled himself the last year is just cool as f*ck. I wish him nothing but the best.”
What do you make of Bisping and Masvidal being friends now?
