Tyron Woodley on Johny Hendricks: 'I wanted to punch him in the face' in 2005

Tyron Woodley

SASKATOON – Tyron Woodley said he won’t allow his history with Johny Hendricks to alter his approach when the two top welterweights clash at UFC 192 in October.

Woodley (15-3 MMA, 5-2 UFC) and Hendricks (17-3 MMA, 12-3 UFC) share a history that extends more than a decade. They met in a critical wrestling match during the 2005 Big 12 wrestling tournament, and the result lingers in Woodley’s mind to this day.

According to Woodley, the bad blood developed in tournament final, where Hendricks “fish hooked me with three fingers and said I bit him,” which led to a costly point deduction.

Hendricks, representing Oklahoma State, won the 165-pound match over the University of Missouri’s Woodley. Hendricks later added an NCAA Division I national title to his Big 12 championship while Woodley settled for a Big 12 runner-up finish and All-American honors.

Woodley said he held a grudge against Hendricks for several years after the incident. However, he said he recently learned to let go of his feelings and plans to approach the contest free of emotion.

Johny Hendricks

“I was trying to win the Big 12 title and set records for my school; I wanted to punch him in the face after that happened,” Woodley said Saturday at a Q&A session in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. “I was so pissed off, and it lingered for a couple years. If I would have competed against Johny earlier, I would have really been fighting on emotion. I’d be trying to fight instead of compete and probably would have lost to him.

“Now I’m mature and we joke about that. … I got the fight, and I’m going to compete instead of fighting him. I don’t resent him. I respect him.”

Woodley pursued the matchup with Hendricks for several months following his split-decision win over Kelvin Gastelum at UFC 183 in January. At first he thought it was an unrealistic proposition because Hendricks was pegged as the next challenger to champ Robbie Lawler’s 170-pound title.

The matchup came to fruition when Hendricks, who’s ranked No. 2 in the NOS Energy Drink MMA welterweight rankings, was skipped over for the shot and Carlos Condit was granted a title fight against Lawler at UFC 193 in November.

The winner of the bout between No. 4-ranked Woodley and Hendricks, who meet at the Oct. 3 pay-per-view event at Houston’s Toyota Center, will likely be in position to challenge the winner of the UFC 193 title fight. However, Woodley said the UFC title is not part of his current mindset.

“There is no ‘after the Johny Hendricks fight,'” he said. “The only thing is Johny Hendricks. There’s no title shot in my mind. There’s no ‘what’s next?’. There’s no whether I’ll sit (and wait). I’m focused on this night. I plan on focusing on him, getting this fight in the bag. Then after that, any door that could open is going to be all positive. My mindset is just to beat him. That’s it.”

Woodley will face a former UFC champion for the first time in his career when he takes on Hendricks. He knows he must be error-free to emerge victorious.

“When you get to the top three, it’s razor-thin; you can’t make mistakes in these fights, so I don’t think it’s easy to knock any of those top-three guys out,” Woodley said. “Anything that’s worth having done is not going to come easy at all. I’m going to try for 15 minutes. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.

“I’ve shown I can do everything, and the goal is always to put everything together on one night in the octagon. When I do that I think I am the best welterweight in the world. I can punch hard. I think I have the best boxing. I think I have great grappling. I’m approaching a black belt soon in jiu-jitsu, so a lot of people don’t understand the type of ground game I have.”

Woodley said he’s going to enter the bout with hopes of earning the most spectacular victory possible. That won’t be easy against Hendricks, a fighter who’s never been stopped inside the distance.

“It’s hard to tell how Johny is going to come out; my training camp is based around he’s going to feel disrespected and that he should have got the title shot,” Woodley said. “He’s going to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and he’s going to come out trying to prove a point. I will meet him in the middle and take over the octagon. If he comes out any other way than that, it’s going to be a long night for Johny.”

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