UFC News: Georges St. Pierre May Be Interested In Fight With Anderson Silva — Will It Happen?
Stephane Patry — who is a fight promoter and manager, and is very in touch with the Montreal fight scene — knows that the UFC is getting closer to returning to Montreal, and he is predicting that former UFC Welterweight Champion Georges St. Pierre — who is from Montreal — will come out of retirement for one more fight in his home town.
“Georges is going to come back for one fight. I can’t say he’s going to come back and go on a title run and do 10 fights, but I know for sure he’s going to come back for one fight.”
UFC President Dana White isn’t sure that St. Pierre will ever return to the octagon, because GSP turned down the opportunity to fight at UFC 186, which is being held in Montreal this Saturday night. But Patry believes that St. Pierre turned the opportunity down due to a lingering knee injury, and not due to not having the desire to have one more fight.
“It’s one of those things where, Georges got injured, which is something that wasn’t expected, and Anderson Silva got caught with steroids, so I mean, there’s a lot of things that have happened in the past few months that can change the scenario a little bit. But I know that Georges has the will, and he wants one more fight. He doesn’t want to leave the sport with that fight with [Johny] Hendricks, I know that for a fact.”
Patry — who is St. Pierre’s former manager — also added that St. Pierre isn’t interested in coming back to have a fight that won’t have any historical significance, and if he’s going to come back, he wants to do the long-awaited super-fight with Anderson Silva. But, Silva’s recent drug test failure may get in the way of St. Pierre accepting a fight with Silva any time soon.
“He’s going to come back for that one fight everyone wants to see. Everyone points to Anderson Silva, if he was going to fight on that card, then Dana didn’t offer him Anderson Silva. So he’s not going to come back for one fight that doesn’t mean much in the history of mixed martial arts. He wants to make history with that one fight. With what happened with Anderson in that one fight and his problems with the commission, I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”
Georges St. Pierre is the greatest welterweight in the history of the UFC, and is one of, if not the, biggest pay-per-view draw in the history of the sport. He retired following his controversial split decision victory over Johny Hendricks back at UFC 167 in November of 2013, citing personal issues as his reason for the somewhat abrupt retirement.
St. Pierre has also been very critical of how the state athletic commissions and the UFC handles drug testing, but he has admitted that he’s been impressed with the progress that the UFC has made regarding the issue. One of the reasons St. Pierre has stayed away from the sport over the past couple of years is due to him worrying that it’s not a clean sport, and he doesn’t plan to return until he’s sure that it is.
[Image via UFC]
