Twitter Mailbag: Does Bisping really want GSP, and does Harrison really want MMA?

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, the UFC middleweight champ keeps trying to pick fights with everyone except the top middleweight contenders. Plus, a two-time judo gold medalist says she’s coming to MMA, but is she really about that life?

All that, plus thoughts on one fighter’s Photoshopped love of Nike and another aging legend’s love of crushing symbolic objects. As always, you can ask your own question by tweeting it to @BenFowlkesMMA.

I totally get why Michael Bisping would ask for a fight with Georges St-Pierre. For one thing, he’d make a lot of money. For another, this thing he’s doing where he picks off past-their-prime legends by extremely narrow margins? Yeah, fighting the former champ from a lower weight class after he’s been out for three year fits nicely with the current Bisping plan.

What’s weird and a little disappointing is Bisping’s (30-7 MMA, 20-7 UFC) attempt to talk St-Pierre (25-2 MMA, 19-2 UFC) out of his contract standoff by saying, “We all want more money. But let’s go, sign the papers.”

Really? You all want more money? Because I only see one guy willing to do what it takes to get it. And if he succeeds, he might end up making life better for all of his peers. If Bisping really wants to sign some papers and defend his title, there are plenty of actual middleweights out there eager to oblige him.

Pump the brakes, Jeff. At the moment, the only firm MMA-related plans for Kayla Harrison are ones that involve talking into a microphone for WSOF. It’s a long road from that to the UFC, and there will be plenty of opportunities for unexpected detours and maybe even a total U-turn.

As you may recall, Harrison raised some fairly valid doubts about pursuing MMA pretty recently, and that was before she’d even been punched in the face. Ronda Rousey talks about being motivated to fight just so she could stop living in her car. If Harrison doesn’t face that same choice, will she still end up making the same decision?

Even if she does, we don’t know that she’ll be anywhere near as good as Rousey, or that she’ll stick with it as long. This sport has a way of revealing the truth about people. And if you don’t really, really want to be here, it will reveal that too.

Let’s think about the unstated assumptions driving this question. In your scenario, Jon Jones wants to dope, but he also must think there’s at least some chance he’ll be caught, otherwise why bother ensuring that he’s only using performance-enhancing drugs that can be blamed on over-the-counter supplement? The only reason to do that is to lay the groundwork for a defense once you pop positive.

And how is that defense going, by the way?

The answer so far seems to be: about as well as it can, and still pretty terribly. Jones (22-1 MMA, 16-1 UFC) missed out on a monster payday at UFC 200. He’ll likely end up with some kind of suspension, even if his team effectively argues it down. Plenty of fans have already labeled him a cheater for life and won’t budge from that position no matter how many bins of contaminated creatine he produces as evidence. He even had to leave his own press conference in tears, producing Jon Jones Sad Face™ photos that MMA websites will use in their stories for all eternity.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to how these things typically go in MMA would have had to expect all of that as a result of a failed drug test. And anyone who hasn’t been paying attention probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble and expense of setting up this defense in the first place.

I’m not saying your scenario is impossible. If Jones were scrambling around like Brock Lesnar right now, testing everything in his medicine cabinet and still finding no answers, I’d be a lot more skeptical. But purposely seeking out tainted supplements doesn’t make much sense when the only reason you’d bother to do it that way is because you know the testing is good enough to catch you. Looking at Jones now, we see a man who is proving that even one of the best defenses for this infraction still ends pretty poorly.

Has he, though? From Max Holloway’s perspective, this probably looks like the best of a bad situation.

Obviously, Holloway (16-3 MMA, 12-3) would prefer to fight for the UFC featherweight title. But Conor McGregor has the real thing and he’s not giving it back for at least another month, and maybe not even then. Jose Aldo has the interim version, but he says he’s not even interested in fighting for the UFC right now. So what could the UFC have done to improve Holloway’s situation?

I guess it could have stripped McGregor of the title, though that creates all new headaches with the sport’s biggest star and the UFC’s most dependable cash cow. It could have also stripped Aldo’s interim belt, but a) talk about hypocritical, and b) who wants an interim title, anyway?

At least Anthony Pettis (19-5 MMA, 6-4 UFC) is a name fighter with an exciting style. People will watch that fight. They’ll care about the outcome. And besides, Holloway’s beaten just about everyone else who matters in the division. As he waits for everyone else to get their acts together, this is about the best he can hope for.

I think it’s part protest, part business strategy. And why not? Fabricio Werdum (21-6-1 MMA, 9-3 UFC) didn’t agree to any deal with Reebok. He doesn’t owe Reebok anything. Publicly disavowing the brand might be his best shot at convincing Nike that he’s open for business.

This is one of the (many) problems with the UFC’s Reebok deal. Reebok paid to get its logo on a bunch of fighters who had no reason to feel any loyalty to it, and plenty of reasons to feel resentful about it.

Reebok paid the UFC millions for, essentially, exposure. But the people it relies on to do the exposing were forced into it. They got zero say in the matter, and in many cases suffered a financial setback because of it. Seems to me stuff like this was inevitable.

There’s a chance, but probably not any time soon. If the UFC thinks it might actually lose a court battle over its contract with St-Pierre, it would almost certainly rather release him than risk a court judgement that could have far-reaching impacts on its entire roster. But first, why not slow-play the situation, forcing GSP to consider how much money and time he’s willing to lose over it?

Maybe he decides to sign a new deal more favorable to the UFC. Maybe he just drops it and stays retired. Worst-case scenario, you let him go after you’ve put a little more distance between him and his athletic prime, by which point his value and overall ability will likely have decreased. That’s the promoter playbook, whether in MMA or in boxing, and the UFC seems intent on following it.

I kind of like this idea. Sort of like a lifetime achievement award, but in belt form. I just wonder if Urijah Faber would actually want it.

One thing about Faber (33-10 MMA, 9-6 UFC), he’s the rare fighter who, when he says it won’t bother him to retire without ever winning a UFC title, I actually believe him. He’s always struck me as someone who has a healthy perspective on this sport and his place in it.

Besides, he’s done so much more in and for MMA than plenty of the other guys who have taken their turn holding UFC straps. And every current UFC fighter at 145 pounds and below should be very glad he did.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.