After making his UFC comeback in 2017 and becoming the middleweight champion, Georges St-Pierre was purportedly done with MMA.
Although he did later on flirt with the idea of fighting Khabib Nurmagomedov, St-Pierre wasn’t too keen to fight in the sport again.
However, he is seemingly in line to compete in the UFC Fight Pass Invitational grappling competition, which is still yet to happen due to an injury he suffered last year.
And if he had had his way, the all-time great would have also fought in a boxing match.
Legendary boxer Oscar De La Hoya was reportedly being set up to fight GSP in a contest on Triller, where they would wear sparring gloves and donate the majority of the income to charity.
Back in 2021, St-Pierre said he was disappointed that this fell through due to a disagreement with UFC president Dana White.
GSP started by talking about why he was interested in this option in the first place.
“Oscar is almost 10 years older than me. I don’t have the audacity of saying that I’m a better boxer than Oscar in his prime, no way, Oscar was one of the best of all time. Oscar in his prime would have beat me in boxing easily, but because I’m younger than him and I think I have less mileage than he does, I think it would make a fair fight and I think I would have beat him in boxing.”
St-Pierre had stated in the past that it was the UFC boss that had stopped the fight from happening, to which he added further context in the interview.
Several UFC stars such as José Aldo and Jorge Masvidal have been granted permission by the promotion to pursue boxing despite still being under contract with the UFC after retiring from MMA.
GSP says that in his case it wasn’t necessarily the what but the who that prevented White from granting the former welterweight champion’s wishes.
"It did not happen because Dana White told me, Dana White hate Oscar De La Hoya and my contract with, after you retire, you still have a few years depending on the contract but my contract, the way it’s made is I still have ties with UFC up to’ I can’t remember the number exactly. I can’t say it because I don’t want to be inaccurate, but I still had ties with UFC.
“Dana, when I asked him for permission, he’s like’I can’t say it the way he say it to me. ‘Beep, beep, beep, F that guy,’ okay Dana, it’s alright. So that’s why and then he called me after, he said he wanted me to fight Khabib but Khabib already retired and I already retired so then he could say ‘oh he doesn’t want it’, whatever, it’s in the past.”