UFC champ Michael Bisping rants at Cape Town after late-night “mugging”

Michael Bisping has won the lot in the UFC and remains one of the sport’s most successful athletes. But the 40-year-old found that, for all his training and notoriety, he was no match for the mean streets of Cape Town.

Speaking on his Believe You Me podcast, Bisping revealed that things got a little hairy after a night of drinking with some fellow crew members. The fighter is filming scenes in the Mother City for Warrior, a new HBO series which is set during the Tong Wars in late-1870s San Francisco.

Michael Bisping details Cape Town “mugging”

His story is ultimately plausible – he got out of a taxi at 3:00, couldn’t find his hotel and encountered some trouble with the locals. Or, “hungry motherf******”, as he affectionately calls them.

Bisping claims that a group of about 10 or 15 people threatened to steal his phone and kill him, unless he did what they said. He alleges that a bogus cop car tried to offer him refuge before he ran away to safety. In fact, the whole story is a pretty harrowing yarn:

“I get out the Uber at 3:00, I don’t know where I am. I’m stumbling around a little bit and all of a sudden, lo and behold, the freaks came out, the thieves came out, the muggers, the nasty f***ing criminal b****rds.”

“Before I knew it, I was surrounded by 10 to 15 homeless people begging for money, and then they started getting kind of nasty. They were dangerous, trust me, I could see the look in their eyes. “They are screaming at me – give me your phone or we will kill you!'”

“I’m backing up, there was a little opening, I was screaming and I just f***ing ran. They didn’t chase much, and I ran down the street and, lo and behold, there was my f***ing hotel. You motherf***ers, don’t ever tell me this town is not dangerous.”

Michael Bisping

Listen to UFC champ’s story here

Bisping remains in Cape Town as filming continues on the series. But it remains to be seen if he’ll be hitting the streets at night again. The podcast – which you can listen to here – is complete with some slightly offensive South African accents, and a host whose first impression of the Western Cape was “tribes”.