What comes to mind when you hear the name Michael Bisping? Of course, there is the accolade of being the former UFC middleweight champ and also role as a UFC commentator. But what else makes him so unique? Well, it’s his eye of course. For the latter part of his career, Michael Bisping competed with only one good eye. The other one? It’s a replacement for his real one – the same one that got damaged by a kick thrown by Vitor Belfort.

Did you know that ‘The Count’ hid his eye condition from the UFC as an active fighter? And he got away with it too! How did he do it? Well, he explained the same in a recent podcast with Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson. Let’s take a closer look (no pun intended)!

Michael Bisping narrates his trick of fooling the doctors

Earlier this week Bisping joined the Jaxxon podcast and spoke about his impaired vision in detail. Let’s go back to 2013 when Bisping’s life changed forever. He suffered a detached retina at the hands of Vitor Belfort’s head kick. His vision was never the same after that and he ended up having to undergo multiple surgeries, resulting in a fake eye being in place of the one he injured. But did this stop his fighting career? Absolutely not.

Surprisingly many fans did not even know about his fake eye until the end of his UFC career. This is because apart from being amazing at fighting he’s also good at keeping secrets. Michael Bisping went out of his way to hide his impairment from the doctors during prefight medical testing and succeeded in doing so for 11 fights! He narrated the trick that he practiced with Jason Parillo. He described his fear before every fight, where he would pay for the training camp and go for the weigh-ins knowing that everything could fall apart if the doctors got to know about his vision impairment.

But Bisping still took the chance for the love he had for combat sports. He talked about his trade secret and said, “So me and Parillo had a thing. I said, ‘Right, if he covers up the eye, for one finger ‘yawning sound’ for two or whatever’. We did that a couple of times. And to be honest, they never even did it. They just went ‘Can you see out of that eye?’, and I am like, ‘yeah?’ And then they go, ‘okay’?” Had Dana White and Co. known of this affliction, they would have done everything in their power to try and have Bisping retired from the UFC.

It is honestly difficult to determine what is more bizarre: The fact that ‘The Count’ competed 11 times with one working eye, even achieving the middle-weight title against Luke Rockhold. Or that for those 11 times, different athletic commissions could not figure out anything about his fake eye! Bisping is definitely a legend in the sport and he even motivated  Sharaputdin Magomedov who can relate to his predicament because he too is blind in one eye.

Sharaptudin Magomedov found confidence in Michael Bisping’s situation

For the unversed, ‘Shara Bullet’ injured his right eye during a training session back in 2016, and this led to serious complications. The undefeated 15-fight winner underwent eight surgeries to try and get vision back in his right eye. Unfortunately, none of that worked, and that led him to go blind in one eye. But despite this massive setback he continued to fight and he is still undefeated.

One of the biggest reasons for his motivation was to see former UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping do the same in his career. He said during UFC 308 pre-fight presser,  “When it comes to Bisping, yes, he is a motivation because he’s somebody who has gone down this path already. He’s laid down the path and he set an example for me, so it’s much easier to follow somebody’s path as opposed to wander around in the dark. I think the way he is a motivator for me and other people is he said that everything is possible.”

This example of Bisping is enough to show that nothing is impossible if you put your determination into it. Did you know Bisping had a fake eye or is this your first time you’ve heard about it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.