TJ Dillashaw holds nothing back in recent interview.
On Saturday at UFC 217 former UUFC UFC Bantamweight champion TJ Dillashaw recaptured the belt with with a highlight-reel, second-round knockout of his former teammate Cody Garbrandt. But the fight was far from a cake walk.
Late in the first round, Grabrandt dropped Dillashaw with a signature hard right hand, leaving the challenger on skates until the bell. Reflecting back on the sequence on Monday, on the MMA Hour, Dillashaw revealed that he had a little bit of help clearing out the cobwebs between rounds from his former Team Alpha Male teammates in Garbrandt’s corner.
“I walked back to the corner and I heard their cornermen being jerks, just like they’ve been the whole camp, saying they’ve got my number,” Dillasaw explained Monday on The MMA Hour. “‘We’ve got your f’ing number, Dillashaw! We’ve got your f’ing number!’ I heard that. As soon as I heard that, I turned back to my corner and was like, ‘Alright, let’s get our sh*t together.’
“I kinda hit my hands together and I was like, ‘Alright, I’ve gotta change it up.’ So I sat down in the corner and just listened to (coach) Duane (Ludwig). He’s the one looking from the outside in. That’s why he’s in my corner, he’s got great eyes and we changed up the tempo. We decided to come out for the second round a different fighter.
“I could hear them talking sh*t the whole time, actually,” Dillashaw said. “Stuff like when I’d eat a leg kick or something, like, ‘You’re too slow! T.J., you’re too slow! All you’ve got is a right hook!’ All of this stuff, just trying to just continue, just continue to break me, you know?”
Dillashaw said that bad blood hadn’t all boiled over after the fight. While he and Garbrandt embraced inside the Octagon, Dillashaw said that only one of his former coaches and teammates at Team Alpha Male approached him backstage once the dust had settled.
“In the back, the one guy who was willing to come up to me and shake my hand was (Team Alpha Male coach) Justin Buchholz. All of the other guys still seemed pretty bitter. They put a lot on this. They put their whole legacy of Team Alpha Male behind Cody. They put a lot of pressure on that guy to live up to what they wanted him to be, and I didn’t feel like that was really fair to him either. But they put all of their eggs into Cody, and I smashed them. I smashed their dreams. I smashed who they were, and they’re all bitter about it.”
In the aftermath of the fight, Dillashaw explained that the constant publicized animosity between him and his old team had become tiresom. Unsurprisingly, increased exponentially leading up to the fight, complete with steroid accusations and a video of Cody knocking out Dillahsaw in a sparring session released the night before UFC 217.
Despite their post-fight embrace, Garbrandt was not exactly looking to bury the hatchet at UFC 217’s post-fight press conference, calling Dillashaw “a piece of sh*t teammate” and insisting that, “I’m still the better fighter in there and I’ll show that in the rematch.”
For his part, Dillashaw had some cold analysis of Cody:
“He will be around, but he’s going to have to have some tough fights to even get back to me, so who knows if I showed his weakness. You know, I don’t think he actually has a chin. Even Cruz hit him a couple of times and wobbled him, and Cruz is no power puncher. So I think if people aren’t that scared, he drops his hands — always dropping his hands, they’re real low. That’s why I caught him with a head kick. Every time he throws a punch, he drops his opposite hand. He gets away with being fast and having power, so I think he’s got a long road ahead of him.”
What do make of TJ Dillashaw and his epic victory at UFC 217?
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