Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Tony Ferguson – the most cursed fight of all time. MMA fans were robbed of it four times due to injuries, sicknesses and a global pandemic. Then the final nail in the coffin was Nurmagomedov retired.
UFC president Dana White tried to get Nurmagomedov to continue fighting but was unsuccessful. However, this month, White said he was open to the pair of lightweights coaching against each other on The Ultimate Fighter.
Tension
With his experience, coaching The Ultimate Fighter twice, UFC Hall of Famer Michael Bisping believes the tension on the show will be enough to bring ‘The Eagle’ out of retirement.
“I’ve coached the Ultimate Fighter twice…So I know firsthand what that process is like, and let me tell you when you’re around your opponent so much, you want nothing more than to strangle them. You want nothing more than to get paid a ton of money to beat them up,” Bisping said. “For Khabib, he’s loaded. He’s done very, very well throughout his fight career and continues to do well no doubt. He has tremendous amounts of endorsements, appearances, investments, and all the rest of it. So maybe for Khabib, it’s not about the money. It’ll be about smashing Tony Ferguson’s face in.”
“Let me tell you the schedule for The Ultimate Fighter as a coach, it’s brutal. It is a lot of work. All you see is every week is a fight on The Ultimate Fighter. So of course, there are training sessions, there’s a weigh-in, and then there’s the fight. But for the coaches I mean, it never ends.”
Bisping thinks Ferguson will get under Nurmagomedov’s skin so much that he will really want to fight him.
“[The show] designed with drama in mind. You know, they want it to happen. And Tony Ferguson, I mean, come on. Listen, who doesn’t love Tony, the man talks a lot of shit. He’s very confident. He’s not shy one little bit. He wants to fight Khabib crazy as that sounds, he wants to fight and so badly because he believes that he can beat him,” Bisping said. “My point is that over six weeks, or maybe it’s eight weeks now I’m not sure. I believe that he can poke that bear enough and if you poke the bear enough and what happens?”
It is a very interesting point that Bisping brings up but if White, Conor McGregor, and Michael Chandler couldn’t get Nurmagomedov out of retirement, Ferguson doesn’t have a good chance either.
First and foremost ‘El Cucuy’ needs to get back in the win column. He was last in action at UFC 274 when he was brutally knocked out for the first time in his legendary career.
