It continues to feel like two steps forward, one step back for Phil Davis.
Davis got off the schneid Saturday night at UFC 179, putting on a wrestling clinic en route to a unanimous-decision victory over Glover Teixeira. It was a good win, rekindling at least some of the momentum he once enjoyed as a fast-rising prospect in the light heavyweight division.
But on a night when yet another of the fight company’s pay-per-view cards slumped all the way to its stellar main event, Davis’ performance did little to lift our spirits. Even as the judges in Rio de Janeiro announced a clean sweep for the American (30-27 on all three scorecards), it felt as though he hadn’t told us anything about himself we didn’t already know.
Davis can wrestle. When he’s able to implement the grappling skills that made him an NCCA Division I national champion at Penn State, he typically wins his fights.
He did that and more against Teixeira, taking the recent No. 1 contender down at will throughout their 15 minutes together. Davis rode Teixeira like an underclassman on his first day of varsity practice, hanging on his back while peppering him with punches and dragging him back to the mat each time he endeavored to work his way back to his feet.
The end result made Teixeira look slow, borderline helpless. It also accomplished the most important goal of Davis’ night: to get a win and remain relevant after a disastrous loss to Anthony Johnson in April at UFC 172.
Yet if there has been a single, unifying critique of Davis’ near five-year run in the Octagon, it’s that at 30 years old and a dozen fights deep, he still looks fairly one-dimensional. Turning in a three-round drubbing of Teixeira was impressive in its way but didn’t do much to convince us that Davis has closed the holes in his stand-up game.
Afterward, he got on the mic and offered up one of the most out-of-the-blue call-outs in UFC history.
“Lately they’ve been calling me the Brazilian killer, but I don’t really like that,” he told UFC color commentator Brian Stann. “I’m a Christian man, I’m humble, I don’t just go around calling myself a killer, OK? But I have beat a lot of Brazilians and there’s only one guy out there who is Brazilian who I would love to fight and that’s Anderson Silva.”
Just like the victory itself, maybe this seemed like a great idea on paper.
Here was Davis trying to take advantage of a high-profile opportunity to talk his way into a big-money fight. Silva, who is notoriously sensitive to disrespect, was at ringside and had publicly inserted himself into the action by climbing atop the cage to congratulate Fabio Maldonado on a victory in a previous fight.
In practice, though? Not so much.
Davis calling out Silva was a total non sequitur, tone deaf in its complete diversion from reality. It only added a sour note to a night when things already seemed a little out of tune.
Davis hadn’t exactly turned in a virtuoso performance, after all, and therefore hadn’t earned the political capital to call out the greatest MMA fighter of all time. This is to say nothing of the fact that Silva is a middleweight—though he’s made sporadic appearances at 205 pounds—is returning from a potentially career-ending leg injury and is already booked for a fight against Nick Diaz (a welterweight) in January.
The partisan Brazilian crowd was not amused at the suggestion, though maybe they were still just trying to catch up. Davis’ challenge to Silva came almost immediately after he used a tired Wesley Snipes reference as a non-answer to Stann’s first question. The whole thing felt rehearsed, though apparently not rehearsed enough for Davis to realize it was a bad idea.
At the post-fight press conference, he tried to clarify his position, with limited success.
“(Silva is) one of the absolute best Brazilian fighters, and one of the absolute best fighters there is,” Davis said, via MMAjunkie’s Steven Marrocco and John Morgan. “Why not? He’s an amazing fighter.”
Perhaps it’s easy to feel Davis’ pain here. The in-cage antics felt like an obvious but misguided attempt to answer recent criticisms from UFC President Dana White. Leading up to the Johnson fight, the UFC boss questioned Davis’ desire to be the best, perhaps as an attempt to ignite a fire in him after a lackluster win over Lyoto Machida at UFC 163.
“Phil needs to get over that mental hump …,” White had said, via Marrocco. “He’s one of the best light heavyweights in the world…(but) he’s not that guy that comes across to me like, ‘I f—–g want it. I want to be the champ.’”
Still, if Davis wanted to show White (and the world) that he’s still a serious 205-pound contender, why call out Silva? Why not point out that with Johnson out on indefinite suspension, the light heavyweight division needs somebody to take his place?
Why not suggest a rematch with Alexander Gustafsson, who Davis beat during each man’s UFC infancy but who has since leapfrogged him in the rankings? Why not call out Rashad Evans, who defeated Davis in January 2012 and is also now about to return from injury?
Evans and Gustafsson have been linked to a bout against each other early next year, but nothing is official yet. Why not try to take a hammer to those plans?
Certainly nothing will come of calling out Silva. It was such a strange move that it will likely be forgotten almost immediately, as the UFC’s schedule picks up again to close out the year.
Maybe that will be a good thing for Davis.
Better to leave fans with memories of him grinding one out over Teixeira, even if his methods left a little something to be desired. It may not have been the fight we’d all been waiting for, but it was exactly the fight he needed to stay in the conversation.
Then the conversation got too weird to be of any use.
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