UFC 179's Phil Davis: 'Obviously, somebody is lying in every single fight'

RIO DE JANEIRO – UFC light heavyweight Phil Davis is not as crazy as he sometimes sounds.

He may give colorful interviews from time to time, but they’re to serve a purpose, he said. And in the run-up to his previous fight against Anthony Johnson, he was working an angle he hoped would put him in line for a title shot.

“Every fight, every single fight, both guys say they’re going to knock the other one out,” Davis told MMAjunkie. “Obviously, somebody is lying in every single fight. So when I say all this silly rhetoric toward Jon Jones and people say, ‘Well, you’re overlooking Anthony Johnson,’ is it possible I didn’t know I was going to fight Anthony Johnson? No. Not at all. I was well aware. It was just a matter of I had to be with the champion at the time.

“At the same time, I’m preparing for a fight with Anthony Johnson. I’m understand very clearly that Anthony is coming with his A game. He’s in the UFC. He’s excited to be back. He’s trying to make a statement. I understood that very clearly.”

Despite his understanding, Davis wasn’t able to deliver when he met Johnson in April at UFC 172. In his words, he “just didn’t have the night I wanted.” A unanimous-decision loss brought a temporary halt to his run in the division after three straight wins. Despite his intentions, he appeared to have talked himself into a corner.

“Obviously I wasn’t too happy about it,” he said. “I was definitely down to do what we had to do to fix it.”

Davis (12-2 MMA, 8-2 UFC) is a lot quieter heading into his next fight, a co-headliner opposite Glover Teixeira (22-3 MMA, 5-1 UFC) at Saturday’s UFC 179 pay-per-view event at Maracanazinho Gymnasium in Rio de Janeiro. But he said he’s no less focused for what lies ahead.

“I say, ‘Man, he hits other people real hard,'” Davis said. “I’m not going to say he’s not good at what he does. He absolutely is good at what he does. He’s just not going to do that to me.

“Is there preparation that needs to be taken into account? Of course. You need to prepare for a guy like him. But you know, he’s never fought a guy like me, either. Everything is about the matchup. He’s not going to be able to do to me what he’s done to other guys just because I’m going to present different challenges that maybe they didn’t have.”

Like Johnson, Teixeira brings heavy hands every time he fights. Naturally, that presents a stylistic foil to Davis, whose decorated amateur wrestling career has made the transition to MMA a smoother one.

Although Davis wasn’t able to keep Johnson on the mat, he’s not looking at Teixeira as a chance to right the wrongs from his previous outing.

“When I’m thinking of this fight, I don’t like to think about any other fight,” he said. “I can say, ‘Because of the last fight, I need to do this or that.’ No, no, no. This fight is its own fight, and I’m going to approach this fight as if it was my last fight or my first fight. I’m just going to go in there, be impressive and do everything I know how to do.”

For more on UFC 179, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.