Buckle up kids, this story from Michael Bisping about Carlos Condit is well worth hearing.

When you’ve been in the UFC as long as Michael Bisping, you’ve probably got a good few stories to tell and this one about Carlos Condit is well worth your time.

Speaking this week on his ‘Believe You Me’ podcast this week, Bisping recalled a story back from 2008 when he was invited by the UFC to visit the armed forces who were serving out in Afghanistan. Bisping, who’d just beaten Jason Day at UFC 85 in London, agreed to go on the trip alongside Urijah Faber, BJ Penn and Carlos Condit, and this experience where he grew respect the “Natural Born Killer.”

We’ll let Bisping take it away from here:

“We did some very cool stuff and one of the things we did was go to an outbase where there was a very small camp set up, very little people and it was where some special forces, badasses basically, a small group of hardcore special forces guys and they had a tiny little gym set up. “In that gym was a boxing ring and we went in there and we were meeting these guys and just shooting the s*** talking to them and then one of them says ‘would you like to spar?’ “I was like ‘alright cool. I’ll spar with you.’ So we put the gloves on and I’m just messing with the guy throwing out a couple of light jabs.”

The story continued… enter Condit stage left.

“To be fair, the guy was cool. We had a nice friendly spar and I threw a few jabs and I took it easy and that was that, we finished. “One guy then says to Carlos Condit, another one of the special forces guys, ‘do you want to spar’ and Carlos Condit says ‘yeah, sure, no problem.’ “Oh, and by the way, they call him the Natural Born Killer, that guy is cool as f***. He never raises his voice and he’s super mellow.”

This is where it gets interesting…

“They put the gloves on and the special forces guy says ‘how hard do you want to spar?’ “Carlos replies ‘I’ll hit you, as hard as you hit me,’ which is a fair answer, but it was a very cool answer because he was [saying] ‘if you want to go hard motherf***er, we will go hard, but if you want to keep it light and friendly then we can go light and friendly, the ball is in your court.’ “So the guy says ‘cool’ but then all of a sudden, right then and there the special forces guy BANG … he sucker punches him as hard as he can and I mean a f***ing hard shot and Carlos goes down to the floor.”

Engage Natural Born Killer mode…

“It was a big heavy shot, but Carlos gets up, shakes his head, get’s his s** together, and then just goes at the guy. “Jab, right hand, left head kick, BOOM, knocks the special forces guy straight through the ropes onto the floor, unconscious, out cold. “Everyone in the room was looking around like holy s***. “I was like ‘oh Carlos, I’m not sure that was the best thing to do,’ but fair play, ever since I saw that I was like he’s a bad motherf***er man. He’s a great guy.”

Watch the footage in this video to see what we believe is how the incident played out:

You can listen to the full episode of Believe You Me #50 – Circle To The Left below”