There were three current champions, two former champions, a No. 1 contender and a commissioner on stage, but there was only one star: Michael Bisping.
The Englishman was clearly comfortable on the mic and was ready for anything, whether it was from his opponent, Georges St-Pierre, or from the crowd.
“Do you know how stupid you look?” Bisping bellowed at a group of fans wearing St-Pierre’s iconic white martial arts headband. Grabbing a silver fabric lanyard off the table in front of him, he wrapped it around his head to mock them.
“Relax. Calm the f–k down,” he told the fans with a big smile.
“G! S! P! G! S! P!” the crowd responded whenever Bisping got back to talking.
“Shut up,” Bisping calmly responded.
Later, when he was asked about calling St-Pierre “fat,” Bisping cut the questioner off.
“No, no, no, I said he looks impregnated by aliens,” he said.
While Bisping did his best to bring some energy to the proceedings, he could not compete with history. At a press conference at MSG at this time last year, Conor McGregor showed up fashionably late in a white fur coat, with the tags still on it, and proceeded to create mayhem. Chairs were thrown, words were yelled, and the fans in attendance ate it up.
Bisping couldn’t match McGregor — no one can, to be fair — and the other fighters couldn’t keep up with the middleweight champion Thursday afternoon.
The closest thing anyone else got to real heat was when bantamweight champion Cody Garbrandt and T.J. Dillashaw got into their normal back and forth about treachery, backstabbing and generally not liking each other. They used to be teammates, they used to train together, they broke up like high school sweethearts, and they remind the world of that storyline whenever they sit in front of a microphone.
The crowd mostly didn’t care, although a few particularly animated fans hissed at Dillashaw whenever he spoke. The sound was a reference to Garbrandt constantly calling his former friend a “snake.”
The least animated of the pairings by far was women’s strawweight champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk and her opponent, Rose Namajunas. Jedrzejczyk couldn’t get anything going through her still-improving English while Rose was the picture of calm throughout. Elbows on the table, she clasped her hands in front of her mouth and stared straight forward for most of the event.
Finally, there was UFC president Dana White, the only commissioner in sports who elicits cheers as big as his athletes.
White didn’t have much to say other than to brag about ticket sales — which haven’t been great. Be that as it may, White expects UFC 217 to bring in the third-largest gate in MSG combat sports history. No. 1 was set by UFC 205 in November 2016, which brought in $17.7 million, while second place was a boxing match between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield in 1999 that garnered $11 million in ticket sales.
“New York’s been very good to us. We’re going to continue to come. I want to be No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3,” White said when asked about the future of the UFC in New York City.