Michael Bisping successfully traversed the line between professional athlete and analyst in his latter career, hosting a successful podcast as well as being talking head on Fox Sports. He will soon be a part of the UFC broadcast team as the company moves forward with their new partnership with ESPN.
But given he is now essentially a media member, Bisping is coming to grips with the fact that sometimes his words will rub fighters the wrong way. This happened last weekend during UFC 232, prior to Jon Jones’ win against Alexander Gustafsson in the controversial card’s main event.
Discussing the incident on his Believe You Me podcast, Bisping recounted how Jones didn’t like the line of questioning presented to him by the former middleweight champion.
“I don’t care about asking difficult questions and I asked Jon Jones some questions, which apparently he didn’t like because after the fight…we interviewed him again and when we were on commercial break he was talking f*cking shit,’” said Bisping.
“To whoever the powers may be were at FOX, he [said], ‘Is that motherf*cker Michael Bisping going to be asking questions again, with his f*cking dumb sh*t,’ and all this and I was like, ‘Ohhh yeah.’”
“Here’s what we never spoke about: he tested positive in August, he tested positive in September and he tested positive in December. Now they’re saying that they are metabolites and they’re saying the presence of Turinabol can stay in his body for a long time. So, if you put that all together, he’s probably going to test positive after fight,” he continued.
As far as the topic went, Bisping says that Jones had no interest in going down that particular path.
“He said, ‘Well, you know, I’m just looking forward to this fight, this fight’s going to be great and blah blah blah—he just totally ignored the question. So then I went back at him again, I slightly reworded [the question] and once again he ignored it. You could see he wasn’t happy.”
Bisping, ever the realist, says that this is just part of the game. He has seen both sides of the interviews now and says that this is just how the UFC’s promotional machine continues to move.
“I wasn’t trying to be a dick with Jon. I love watching Jon Jones fight; he’s incredible. I’ve been around him enough during my fight career and Jon’s always been cool with me. I’ve always liked the guy, but being in that position that we’re in, we’ve got to ask those f*cking questions.”
