Georges St-Pierre is one of the best UFC athletes of all time. St-Pierre reigned over the welterweight division and had a number of high profile matchups including BJ Penn, Matt Hughes, Nick Diaz and more.
St-Pierre was in the same bag as other veterans when he made his UFC debut – his purse was $3,000 to show and $3,000 to win for his UFC debut against Karo Parisyan at UFC 46 in 2004.
But he also bet on himself big to change that. At UFC 87, against Jon Fitch, St-Pierre’s contract was set to expire. And unlike many current and past UFC aces – GSP wouldn’t re-sign before the contract expired.
“You read I made $400,000 a match? No. I made a lot more than that. A lot more than that. Millions. When I was at the peak of my career, I was making many millions of dollars.” St-Pierre once explained.
But despite the fact he’s financially in a good place there are two bout he’s sad he never had – against Anderson Silva and Khabib Nurmagomedov.
‘Well, I always wanted to be known as the best and be the best. And there is two fights that never materialized that we that could have been made. But, you know, certain reason did not materialize. The first one was against Anderson Silva and the other one was against Khabib. But for certain reason, it did not happen.’ GSP told Helen Yee.
Yee also asked St-Pierre to rank the difficulty of three men he recently listed as interesting match ups for himself: Usman, Khamzat Chimaev and Khabib Nurmagomedov. He got to answer which one of them would present the toughest matchup stylistically.
“Usman is an incredible athlete, you know, when he’s very well rounded, he’s a beast, you know, it would be it would have been a very physical ”
“Same thing with Khamzat, Khamzat is size and his his wrestling is very physical. ”
“Khabib in terms of knowledge. You know, I think he’s he’s very physical. He’s a great athlete who is an amazing athlete. But I think it would have been very challenging in terms of technical aspect and knowledge, you know what I mean?”
“So, yeah, it’s if we’re if we would have live in a parallel universe, these are the guys to beat that if you want to be if you do this sport to be the best, you get to compete against the best, you know?”
GSP also went on to pick Adesanya to beat Pereira at UFC 281.
“Things are very different. The timing is different. The distance control is different. And they’re they’re allowed to do different things now. And I think I don’t know. Pereira But I know Israel Adesanya is a very smart guy, very clever athlete. So I know he’s going to be very well-prepared”
“it’s not that I have inside information, but we might see one of them go for or for takedown. That would be kind of funny, you know, not funny, but it’s allowed, you know what I mean? So maybe one of them will have the audacity to to try to take his opponent by surprise, maybe outside of his comfort zone.”
“I think Adesanya will get it. You know, I’m biased. I’m friend with Israel Adesanya.”“