It’s strange to think of UFC 179 as a must-win situation for Phil Davis.
Theoretically, Davis is still in the thick of his fighting prime. He’s a respectable 12-2-1 and continues to hang around the UFC’s light heavyweight Top 10. Before April’s decision loss to a resurgent Anthony Johnson, he hadn’t tasted defeat in more than two years, and his three-fight win streak included a victory over former champion Lyoto Machida.
Nonetheless, Davis’ Saturday showdown with Glover Teixeira feels steeped in uneasy implications. If he wins, Davis will have vanquished the man who most recently challenged for the 205-pound title and who himself began his UFC career with five straight wins in 2012-13.
If he loses, Davis could well see his dreams of being a serious contender for the light heavyweight crown crumple for good.
How ever did we get here?
Good question.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Davis was being bandied as perhaps the biggest future threat to Jon Jones. He possessed the sheer physical size to (maybe) hang with the champion in the cage, and his status as a former NCAA Division I national wrestling champion provided the perfect launching pad for success.
Early results were encouraging. He won four fights in the Octagon during 2010, including choking out future No. 1 contender Alexander Gustafsson at UFC 112 and tapping Tim Boetsch with a submission that would eventually be named for him at UFC 123.
Four months after the Boetsch victory, Davis scored a unanimous-decision win over highly regarded veteran Antonio Rogerio Nogueira in a nationally televised main event bout. It pushed his professional record to 9-0 and made him a legitimate candidate for No. 1 contender status.
And that’s about when things started to go south.
A knee injury sidelined Davis for the next 10 months, and when he finally did make it back to action, he lost a title eliminator to Rashad Evans. An accidental eye poke leading to a no-contest turned a supposedly easy comeback bout against Wagner Prado into a two-fight ordeal that further sidelined his momentum. By the time Davis scored his tepid and controversial win over Machida at UFC 163 in August 2013, opinions on him had cooled considerably.
Leading up to his April bout with Johnson, UFC President Dana White had some fairly unflattering things to say about Davis in the press. White’s preference for athletes who fight first and ask questions later is well documented, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t sound like he thinks Davis fits that mold.
“I like Phil, and I don’t want to throw Phil under the bus,” White said, via MMAJunkie.com’s Steven Marrocco, “but Phil needs to get over that mental hump… He’s one of the best light heavyweights in the world… He’s not that guy that comes across to me like, ‘I f—–g want it. I want to be the champ. I want to be the best in the world.’ He’s just sort of, ‘Eh.’”
Davis had already tried to ramp up the ballyhoo prior to UFC 172, aiming verbal barbs at both Johnson and Jones during his media appearances. Compared to his previous laid-back persona, the sudden shift didn’t resonate with fans. It didn’t help, either, that he ran into a buzz saw in Johnson. Davis looked fairly helpless in conceding the lopsided loss, and with it any semblance of hype he had left.
Today, he’s a bit more than a month past turning 30, and the prospect label no longer fits. It seems as though he’s at risk of becoming that most common of cautionary sports tales: the guy who started with loads of promise but ultimately fizzled.
We don’t want to prematurely pull the plug on anybody’s aspirations. Especially not in this sport, where Mark Hunt rebounded from going 0-6 from 2006-10 to this week be inserted into a fight for the interim heavyweight championship. Still, the Teixeira bout seems like an important moment in Davis’ career.
Given the UFC boss’ wavering opinion on him, it would take a lot of hard work to rehabilitate his image if he suddenly finds himself on the wrong end of back-to-back losses. Granted, if everything goes as planned (yeah, right), Jones’ dance card is pretty well filled out through 2015. That means no matter what happens on Saturday, Davis will have a lot more time to rebuild his legacy before there’s an opening at the top.
Still, it’s hard not to notice the gulf between possible outcomes here.
A win over Teixeira, and perhaps Davis can go right back to being considered among the division’s elite (especially with Johnson out on indefinite suspension).
A loss, and you couldn’t blame some people for giving up on the guy.
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