Contender on the Cusp

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When opportunity knocks, Tyron Woodley rushes to meet it. So when Evangelista “Cyborg” Santos was forced to withdraw from a scheduled bout against Paul Daley due to injury, Woodley moved to take his place on just five weeks’ notice. Woodley will collide with Daley in a featured welterweight matchup at Strikeforce/M-1 Global “Fedor vs. Henderson” on Saturday at the Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates, Ill.

Woodley boasts a perfect 8-0 record, with five wins by submission and another by technical knockout. He has pushed for a title shot for quite a while and originally thought the fight against Daley would be for the welterweight crown vacated by Nick Diaz, who left Strikeforce to prepare for a bout against Georges St. Pierre at UFC 137. Plans changed, and the match was then designated a title eliminator -- with the winner left standing.

Woodley, who considers himself the top 170-pound fighter left in Strikeforce, seems unfazed.

“It’s water under the bridge,” he tells Sherdog.com. “After the fight, great things are going to happen, title included. Doors are going to open up for my family and me.”

The way that Woodley and Daley carry themselves can perhaps be best described as night and day. Daley has been vilified for punching Josh Koscheck after the bell at UFC 113 and for failing to make weight -- which he has done on five occasions. Woodley comes across as a true professional in every sense of the word.

“I come to fight. I give it everything I can. I show up on time. I make weight,” he says. “It’s not just fighters; there are people watching, kids watching, families watching, people getting involved in this, and it’s important to believe in what you do. If you see me on the street, I should be the exact same person as I am inside the cage.

“So you’re going to see me run through this guy on July 30, and you’ll see me give God glory afterwards, and you’re going to see me keep [my] integrity,” Woodley adds. “That’s what’s going to happen at the end of the day.”

Daley has been quick to write off Woodley’s record, insisting that his opponents were carefully handpicked. Woodley, 29, takes it in stride.

“If I had to read a fiction book, I’d go to the library,” he quips. “Whether my opponents were handpicked or shuffled or they picked numbers up, I beat all the guys I faced, and not only did I beat them, I beat them all in different manners, in different ways.”

His Strikeforce victories include three different submissions -- an armbar, brabo choke and an arm-triangle -- along with a technical knockout against multiple-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion Andre Galvao and two decisions.

Woodley sees Daley’s hype as strategic.

“I think Paul Daley’s going to say a lot of things, and I personally think he doesn’t believe many of them,” he says. “Some people need to pump themselves up for fights. Paul Daley’s an entertainer, and to be honest, he does a lot for the sport. And he’s good for the sport and he’ll be around for a long time because he talks a lot of crap, but he doesn’t go over the top. He’ll talk some crap, and then he kind of stops there, which is actually refreshing for the fans.

“But he can say whatever he wants to say,” Woodley adds. “He can talk and pump himself up; Muhammad Ali used to say he was the greatest over and over again to pump himself up, and he can do that if that’s what he wants to do. But you don’t fight fights over back-and-forth conversation. You don’t fight on paper. You fight in the cage, and that’s where I’m going to do my fighting.”

Woodley believes some of Daley’s histrionics are born out of concern.

“Thing is, this fight is dangerous for Paul,” he says. “He doesn’t like this fight. I don’t care what he says. If I was such an easy guy to beat, why not take the fight a long time ago? The opportunity was there.”

Holding to smart strategy, Woodley does not plan to play into Daley’s hands.

“He wants someone to stand there and bang with him,” he says. “This is not K-1. This is not muay Thai. This is not boxing. This is not kickboxing. I’m a complete fighter, and that’s what he’ll see on July 30.”

Although Woodley did not have time to engage in a full training camp, he looks at that difficult circumstance with his eyes firmly fixed on his faith.

“I kind of feel that God is in control of everything,” he says, pointing out that he had actually been training for three weeks before the opportunity to fight Daley arose.

In addition to his MMA coaches, Jay Glazer and Antonio McKee, Woodley has surrounded himself with boxing coaches Eric Brown and Jose Ponte, muay Thai coach Edmund Bileasoo and strength-and-conditioning coach Derek Fairchild.

“The great thing is that he has five of us that specialize in different things,” Glazer says. “He is growing in so many different areas, and everything’s coming together at the right time. Even though this is an abbreviated camp, he’s in the best shape he’s ever been in his life, and he was already a world-class athlete to begin with. We’re taking him to a dark place in this training camp; we’re putting him through stuff he’s never been through before.

“We’re making sure he owns that cage,” he adds. “We’ve been working on that, too; [you have to] break that man’s will across from you. Every single day, we’ve been pushing that breaking point and taking him to a totally different level than he ever thought he had. It’s not going to feel good for anyone in the cage on July 30. It’s going to be a bad day, and that’s what we want.”

Woodley has never faced a striker of Daley’s caliber but claims he is not nervous about facing the Brit’s punching power. Daley is known as one of the best strikers in the sport, with 20 of his 27 victories coming by knockout or technical knockout.

“He’s also only known for being a striker,” Woodley says. “He’s not known for taking guys down. He’s not known for ground-and-pound. He’s not known for submissions. He’s not known for takedown defense. He’s known for knocking people out.”

Woodley, a two-time NCAA All-American wrestler at the University of Missouri, thinks Daley’s one-dimensional nature makes the UFC veteran’s preparation for this fight far more complex than his own.

“The things he has to think about and prepare for, he really doesn’t even know what he has to prepare for because I haven’t given one equation of how I fight,” he says. “Every fight that I’ve fought is a completely different fight, and this fight is going to be a completely different fight.

“So I’m going to super glue my hand to my face and watch out for his hook, his jab [and the] jab to the body,” Woodley adds. “But wrestling’s not Double Dutch. It’s not easy to learn. It takes years and years of training and muscle memory. His preparation? No way is he going to pick that up in four weeks; I don’t care who he’s training with. He could be training with gold medalists, and it’s still not going to make up for 18 years of experience.”

Glazer admits it is no secret that Woodley plans on using his wrestling to take the fight to the ground, where Daley has proven most vulnerable.

“You want to win a fight with your bread and butter,” Glazer says. “A lot of fighters get so wrapped up when they start adding new weapons in their arsenal that they forget to focus on what they’re great at.”

Woodley predicts his attack on Daley will be far more aggressive than what people have seen from him in the past.

“It’s not going to be just a takedown and lay-and-pray, like everyone thinks I’m going to do,” he says. “I’m going to be inflicting pain and making him real bloody. Nobody’s seen that part of Tyron, and it exists; I can fight like that and they need to see that, and that’s what we’re going to see.”

Glazer echoes the sentiment.

“You’re going to see a really, really aggressive Tyron Woodley,” he says. “He’s not trying to just beat someone up but really trying to break someone’s will. He’s got a whole different level of aggression you haven’t seen in the past.”