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Here’s my first thought upon hearing that Vitor Belfort would be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame this summer: Wait, he’s not already in the Hall of Fame?

Right after that, my second thought was: Wonder what Michael Bisping thinks about this.

That’s not sarcasm, just to be clear. It’s an honest admission that, more than anyone else, Bisping has a right to feel some type of way about it. That’s because back in 2013, when Belfort and Bisping clashed in the headliner of a UFC Fight Night event in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Belfort landed a knockout kick that eventually cost Bisping his right eye.

The kick was clean. Belfort? Not so much. As we suspected at the time, and later had confirmed in the most hilarious way possible, Belfort was juiced up with synthetic testosterone. We didn’t necessarily need lab results to tell us this (though we did eventually get them). All we had to do was look at the action figure physique he’d suddenly sprouted in his mid-30s and then apply some basic math.

Belfort, who’d already been busted by one drug test nearly a decade earlier, was far from the only one taking advantage of the MMA world’s laissez-faire approach to testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) at the time. Chael Sonnen and Dan Henderson had helped stamp “TRT” into the fight fan vocabulary, claiming they needed the hormonal boost due to their abnormally low testosterone levels.

This was absurd, of course, but maybe we were living in an absurd time. Belfort simply took it to the next level by aggressively flunking the eye test while piling up highlight-reel finishes, which played a major role in eventually forcing the state athletic commissions to admit that the whole thing was too ridiculous to continue.

That’s about when TRT was finally effectively ended in MMA, but it was shallow comfort to Bisping. Banning Belfort’s supplement of choice didn't restore the vision in his right eye. There was arguably no one more harmed than Bisping by the TRT era in MMA. He fought and lost against at least three known users — Henderson, Sonnen, and Belfort — and suffered devastating knockouts in two of those fights.

Since the Belfort loss cost him the most, at least physically, you might think Bisping would have some complicated feelings about enshrining the man in the UFC Hall of Fame. You’d be right about that. But only to a point.

“Was he a massive cheater? Of course,” Bisping told MMA Junkie’s Mike Bohn recently. “Did he take a lot of steroids? Of course. Were there a lot of other people doing that at the same time. Absolutely there was. So I was like, I get it. But then when I thought about it, I lost an eye because of this guy. I’m like, no, he can stick his Hall of Fame up his ass."

Bisping then added: "But he does deserve it.”

This is where it gets tricky, for all the reasons Bisping just outlined. Just going by the official record, you have to admit Belfort had a great career. He burst onto the scene as a teenager in the wild west days of mid-'90s MMA, and was somehow still around — and very much in title contention — by the time the UFC had new ownership and a network television deal in the mid-2010s.

Josh Hedges via Getty Images

That right there is incredible all on its own. His UFC titles at heavyweight and light heavyweight also look good on paper, though they’re arguably a lot less impressive under even the lightest scrutiny than the middleweight run that came later.

Really, the only possible justification to keep a guy like Belfort out of the UFC Hall of Fame would be the doping stuff. And if you were doping in one or more of MMA’s notorious doping eras (see also: the entire history of PRIDE Fighting Championships), how much can we hold it against you just for doing it less discreetly and more successfully than others?

Belfort lived many different lives across many different eras of this sport. He also inhabited several different bodies while doing it. You couldn’t not notice this. He practically forced us to form some kind of opinion on it, one way or another.

Usually fight fans get more forgiving of that stuff the further removed we are from it. While it’s happening in the moment, sure, it’s cheating and that’s bad (especially when it’s not your favorite fighter doing it). But give us a decade or so and we’ll decide it was actually really fun to watch and we miss it.

Bisping’s missing eye makes that a little tougher to do in the case of Belfort. Professional fighting is the hurt game, as we know. There’s not a doctor anywhere in the world who would tell you it’s good for your health, and everyone who steps in the cage knows it comes with risks. Bisping could have easily lost that eye against a clean fighter. But he didn’t.

Should Belfort still get a place in the UFC Hall of Fame despite all that? I think so. But that doesn’t mean we can’t feel more than one way about it. And if you’re Bisping, I don’t think anyone would blame you if you skipped the induction ceremony entirely.

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