For Michael Bisping, temporary loss of vision provided clear view of future

MANCHESTER – In six months, Michael Bisping said he should be back inside the cage, fighting toward a title that’s eluded him in seven years with the UFC.

Right now, though, his progress is measured in smaller increments. Every two days, he drives from his home in Huntington Beach, Calif., to Los Angeles to have a doctor look at his right eye, which twice has suffered a detached retina.

Scar tissue from a corrective surgery performed on the eye is healing slowly, but surely. A small implant helps fluid drain from the eye so he can see. Bisping on Wednesday told MMAjunkie.com prior to a fan Q&A in Manchester that this past week, his doctor told him he must have a guardian angel to recover so quickly – but the process is fragile.

Recently, Bisping said he was driving on the freeway after watching a kickboxing event with his son, and suddenly, half of his vision was gone.

“I thought the eyeball had just packed in,” he said. “It turns out I had internal bleeding in the eye, so the eye had filled up with blood. I couldn’t see through the blood. The doctor told me to lie face down and let it drain, and the next morning I could see.”

He first discovered the injury this past month while training for a headlining fight in his home town of Manchester, England, opposite Mark Munoz (13-3 MMA, 8-3 UFC) at UFC Fight Night 30. (The event takes place Saturday at Phones4u Arena and airs on FOX Sports 2 and MMAjunkie.com.)

As Bisping found out, he’d been fighting with a detached retina for his previous two bouts against Vitor Belfort and Alan Belcher. In the former, he was caught with a high kick on the right side of his head and stopped in the second round. When he received his diagnosis, the peripheral vision in his right eye was gone.

Bisping was scheduled for his first surgery and underwent a procedure to re-attach the retina. He was cleared to resume training and hit the gym with renewed vigor. Then things took a turn for the worse.

“I walked into the gym one day and the light kind of got funny,” he said. “It got worse throughout the day. At the end of the day, I almost couldn’t see.”

Bisping (24-5 MMA, 14-5 UFC) quickly returned to the doctor, who told him that scar tissue from the procedure was causing the retina to again detach. Fighting at the event was no longer an option. He withdrew and was replaced by ex-champ Lyoto Machida (19-4 MMA, 11-4 UFC). He wouldn’t be able to bask in the glory of fighting in front of friends and family.

Meanwhile, his ailments continued to worsen. He began suffering from glaucoma, his eye filling with fluid and then draining out of his corner of his eye. One day, it stopped draining, and he said he endured 15 hours of “excruciating pain” before undergoing two additional procedures.

It’s impossible to continue a fight career with a detached retina. If Bisping’s eye didn’t heal, no athletic commission would clear him to fight, and he might suffer permanent, lasting damage to his vision. Despite the implications of the later, he said he was far more worried about the former.

Bisping felt confident that his doctors were giving him the proper treatment, and he would be able to recover. But the prospect of sitting out and losing time at 34 years of age was too much to bear.

“This defines me as a person,” he said. “This is what I do. I’ve come to a point now where I’ve been in the UFC a long time, but I still haven’t had a title shot. I haven’t been world champion, and I still feel like I have a lot to prove in this sport. And because I’ve been around for a while, I’m toward the higher end of the pay scale, as well.

“So it’s my career. I just bought a house. I was like s–t, is this where it all ends?”

It’s not over for Bisping. If all goes well, he’ll be fighting in early 2014. He’d like to face the winner of Munoz vs. Machida, and believes he’ll be standing in front of Machida if he gets that opportunity. And while he might not be fighting in the Phones4u Arena, he will be there nonetheless, serving as a goodwill ambassador for the event he couldn’t make.

When he returns to his adopted home in the U.S., he will continue to live as if a fight is around the corner, lifting weights and dieting so that he’s close to the middleweight limit when he gets a phone call. He said he’s got a lot left to prove when he returns.

“In some ways, this is going to be the best thing to ever happen to me, because I know it sounds like a cliche, but I had my career almost taken away, and it made me realize how much I have left to achieve in this sport,” Bisping said. “If time was called on my career right now, I wouldn’t be happy with what I achieved. Yes, I get some notoriety and put some dollars in my bank account, but I want a lot more out of it than that. I want to stabilize my future and my children’s future. This now, has made me really even hungrier than ever.”

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.