You'll have to forgive Tyron Woodley if he’s less than enthused with Carlos Condit’s request to face the winner of the UFC 189 bout between Rory MacDonald and Robbie Lawler.
It’s not that Woodley wasn’t impressed by Condit’s gritty performance in his win over Thiago Alves last Saturday night. Woodley has trained with Alves for years, and he knows how tough the Brazilian fighter is. During his earliest days at American Top Team, Woodley dreaded his inevitable sparring sessions with Alves. He knows that Condit’s win was a big deal, and he’s not taking anything away from the former interim welterweight champion.
But Woodley also believes Condit was encouraged to ask for the shot.
“In his post-fight interview with Jon Anik, he said he wanted to fight a top guy, or to fight someone the fans wanted to see him fight. I almost would have bet my left leg that he was going to say he wanted to fight me, but he didn’t. He said he wanted to fight whoever,” Woodley says. “And 10 minutes later, he’s in the back with Heidi Androl, and now he wants to go skip over and go straight into the title shot.
“So I think somebody got into his ear and told him he had had a great performance. And he did have a great performance. I think he lost the first round to Thiago, but he came out and made adjustments and was out for blood. But even with that performance, you can’t just ignore the fact that his losses were to the No. 1 and No. 3 guys who, in my opinion, are ahead of him in line. Maybe with another victory over a top guy, that makes sense. But you can’t just completely blot out the thought that you lost to these two guys."
Compounding all of this is the fact that Woodley owns a win over Condit, back on March 15, 2014. It was a TKO by injury; Condit suffered torn ligaments in his knee that kept him on the shelf until last weekend. Woodley’s leg attacks at least partially caused the knee injury, and he felt he’d earned the TKO. But fans and onlookers seemed to credit the knee injury more for Condit’s loss than anything Woodley did, and that irked him. It still irks him, in fact.
“Who would have known that if I didn’t kick him in the leg and tear his ACL, that things wouldn’t have gotten worse? I could have kicked it into another gear. Even if I could have only done more of what I was already doing, that would have been enough to win all three rounds. So I feel like people seem to discredit my performance. And the thing is, they didn’t just match us up. I asked for him. I wanted to face the most dangerous and toughest fighter in my division. And I rose to the occasion.
“Look at how Condit performed against other guys. He didn’t look like that against me. He didn’t win a striking exchange! He didn’t just slip on a banana peel and hurt his knee. I outstruck him, and I punched him so hard that it looked like he got snatched across the face with a ratchet. I was literally too much for Carlos. I looked in his eyes in the weigh-ins, and I saw that he hadn’t quite figured out my Rubik’s Cube. I was too much for him.”
After the win over Condit, Woodley dropped a unanimous decision to MacDonald. He admits that he didn’t perform to his full capabilities, not by any measure. He gives all credit to MacDonald and says he didn’t beg for a rematch for a specific reason.
“I didn’t want to take anything away from him like people try to do with my win over Carlos,” he says.
But he has rebounded from that loss and put himself back on the verge of title contention. Still, he finds himself waiting on the sidelines, saddled with an undeserving reputation as a boring fighter despite all but one of his wins in the UFC being finishes.
That doesn’t sit well with Woodley. He feels that title shots should be based on what you’ve done in the Octagon, handed out to the most deserving fighters, instead of finding their way into the clutches of those the fans may think are more entertaining. But he, perhaps more than anyone, understands the true nature of mixed martial arts in the UFC: It’s less about what you do and more about how you do it.
“The thing I hate about mixed martial arts is that it’s no longer a sport. It’s a big-money business and it’s an entertainment industry. Fans—and sometimes the promotion—we get too invested in what happened that night. We make irrational decisions based on emotion,” Woodley says. “It’s 100 percent entertainment now. I knocked Jay Hieron out so hard that he faceplanted. And I have one of the most brutal knockouts in UFC history over Josh Koscheck.”
He sighs. “It’s just comical how short-term people’s memories are.”
Woodley has been vocal about wanting a shot at former champion Johny Hendricks, who appears to be content to wait on the sidelines and get a title shot against the Lawler/MacDonald winner. Hendricks was scheduled to face Lawler after losing the belt to him last December, but fan outcry on social media forced the UFC to go in a different direction in giving the shot to MacDonald.
Woodley sympathizes with Hendricks on that front. But he also says it makes no sense for Hendricks to wait eight months on the sidelines when he could be fighting another top contender.
“He fought four months before the UFC 189 bout, and he’ll have to wait at least four months after,” he says. "So for eight months, you’re going to sit around and get fat and live the country life while other contenders like me want their chance at the title? Why do we have a rankings system, and people risking their spots in the rankings system by taking hard fights, if they aren’t going to get a chance to fight for a world title? That doesn’t make sense to me.”
Woodley may want to fight Hendricks, but he also recognizes that the former champion has a unique opportunity to wait for another chance at gold. Put in the same position, Woodley says, he would do the exact same thing.
“If you give him the damn choice, who wouldn’t do that? If I was Johny, would I fight me if I had a chance to make more money and not risk a loss before I get that title shot? No. It’s a risky fight,” he says. "I think him not wanting to take that risk makes sense. If I was in that position and I had the opportunity to make that same choice, I would do the same thing. But the fact that he was even granted that opportunity to make that choice was very surprising to me."
Woodley has been criticized for turning down fights before. Last August, he was offered a shot against ATT teammate Hector Lombard; Lombard accepted the fight and told Dana White that Woodley was a "two-faced phony” and that he wanted to "beat his ass.” But according to White's comments in a media scrum, Woodley demurred.
"I called Woodley and said, 'Here's what your teammate just said, and he wants this fight bad.' And he said, 'He can say whatever he wants, he's about him and he's always been about him. This fight doesn't work for me and my brand.' He started telling me all the reasons why he doesn't want this fight and I just said, 'Whatever kid, whatever.' He wants nothing to do with Hector. Hector wants this fight, Woodley does not."
There is a method to Woodley’s madness. He says he isn’t just turning down fights for the sake of turning them down, regardless what anyone might think.
"If a guy isn’t in a position to fight for a world title, or if he’s not in a place where I can intercept his road to the title, don’t offer him to me,” he says. "I’m not in this to just fight guys for the sake of fighting. I’m not in this to make friends with the people who work in the organization.
"This is a business, and I have to do what’s best for me. I have four kids and wife. I want to leave a legacy behind. I want the chance to measure myself against the top guys, and to have them bring out that champion within me in the Octagon. That’s what I’m here for.”
Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.
