MONTREAL – Several times on Wednesday, Georges St-Pierre uttered the words that few of his colleagues would ever dare say: I'm scared.





At least five times, perhaps more, he repeated it. Sooner or later, one had to take the UFC welterweight champion at his word and believe that, yes, he is afraid before a fight.

St-Pierre will return to mixed martial arts competition on Saturday for the first time in nearly 19 months when he defends his title against interim champion Carlos Condit before more than 20,000 rabid fans in the main event of UFC 154 at the Bell Centre.

View photos

As he makes his walk down the aisle, he will be, as usual, afraid. The butterflies, he conceded, will be out in full force.

"The key," he said, making light of his nervousness, "is to make sure the butterflies fly in formation."

But no matter how afraid he might be, no matter how much the butterflies may dance in his stomach, St-Pierre can't possibly be as fearful as he was when he first learned he'd torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.

What made St-Pierre one of the greatest mixed martial arts fighters who ever lived was his sheer athleticism, specifically the explosion he would get from his legs when he shot for a takedown.

Those takedowns rely heavily on healthy knees.

[Related: Watch UFC 154 live on Yahoo! Sports]

Suddenly, St-Pierre was confronting the reality that he might never be the same. The success rate for the surgery required to fix his injury was 95 percent, his doctor told him, and that provided some level of comfort.

But it's a long, grueling process and, despite the odds, there are no guarantees. He'd likely make it back to competition, but what he didn't know was whether he'd be exactly the same as he had been. He'd been performing at superhuman levels and was suddenly staring at athletic mortality.

The sport has become extraordinarily competitive and at the elite level, there is very little that separates the top guys. If he had to make any concessions to his knee, if he had lost any of the explosiveness or agility or quickness he once had, the Georges St-Pierre that MMA fans had come to adore during a nearly decade-long string of brilliance might cease to exist.

To St-Pierre, that would be unacceptable. He called himself "a proud person," and isn't the kind of athlete who would be satisfied just being one of the guys.

"I want to be the best," he said.

He'd grown used to being elite and put extraordinary demands on himself to remain so. He traveled the world in search of the finest coaches, the best training partners and wisest techniques.

He tortured himself, physically and mentally, to get to a point where he seemed nearly invincible.

"Georges pays the price to be great," coach Firas Zahabi said.

[Related: Healthy Georges St-Pierre a boon for Dana White, UFC]

He was coming off an easy win over Jake Shields at UFC 129, a bout that drew an astonishing 55,000 fans to the Rogers Centre in Toronto, setting a North American attendance record for combat sports.

He was at his physical peak, and had been making wonderful fighters look amateurish. He outwrestled one of the UFC's finest wrestlers, dismantling Jon Fitch at UFC 87. He manhandled B.J. Penn at UFC 94. He toyed with Thiago Alves at UFC 100.

View photos

Story continues