Who they put across from him this time, of course, is the aforementioned Covington, a former teammate and as divisive a figure there is in MMA’s present moment. Whether his shtick is real, as Covington claims, or just a character, as Covington also claims, Woodley doesn’t take much stock in either.
“I mean, at the end of the day, nobody unveils the curtain on their own gig. If they’re doing a character, they’re holding character until the job is done…that’s retirement. You don’t tell people ‘I’m playing the heel.’ Who wants to follow somebody that’s playing the heel? You’re basically creating controversy because you feel like, who you are as a person, who you are as a fighter, your skill set, is not enough. So he’s basically telling me and everybody else ‘I’m not enough, as is. I have to create something to get attention because me, myself, and who I am and what I bring to the table is not enough.’ So I feel sad for him. He has to walk around and create antics and look in the mirror and practice these lines when all I have to do is focus on destroying him.”
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In the politically charged environment the world finds itself in, there’s a genuine temptation to make the clash something metaphorically larger, a battle between ideologies distilled down to two men. Woodley rejects this line of storytelling, too.
“I could obviously make it more. I can actually put the weight on it, that people don’t like him, that people want to see him beat up, they want to see me break his jaw, they want to see me do all these other things. There’s 10-15 reasons I could rattle off about why people want me to beat him,” he explains. “If I do that and it makes somebody happy, well, we’ve got to question ourselves as a society. Why are you so happy about seeing somebody else lose? Also, if I need that extra motivation to actually win the fight, I need to question my integrity in this sport.
