Anthony Johnson is just a few short months away from challenging UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Daniel Cormier for the gold at UFC 210.
Johnson fought Cormier once before at UFC 187 in 2015; Cormier submitted Johnson with a rear naked choke to win the UFC Interim Light Heavyweight Championship.
Despite the loss in the first fight, Johnson says that Cormier should know what's coming.
“Hell, it feels like it’s natural now at this point, we’ve done it so much,” Johnson said on The MMA Hour. “But DC and I are professionals, we know how to control our emotions and say the right thing and be respectful. There’s no point in being disrespectful to each other and making ourselves look dumb, look stupid. So we definitely have to have respect, and we do what we have to do to get everybody tuned in, but come April 8th, somebody is getting f*cked up. He can yap all he wants. He knows what’s coming.”
Johnson took a long time to recover from the first loss to Cormier and it took him quite a while to watch the first fight.
“One day I was just laying in bed,” Johnson said. “I didn’t perform to the best of my ability, and I think it was probably six months after that I finally watched the fight. I just woke up at like two in the morning and decided to watch the fight. I woke up and it was on my mind and I just watched it to see what my mistakes were, and I was like okay, they were bad mistakes but they weren’t mistakes that were so bad they couldn’t be fixed. Nobody wants to watch themselves lose,” Johnson added. “It was a weird feeling in my stomach, because like I said, I didn’t perform at the best of my abilities. I think that’s what disgusted me the most. It made me disgusted. So the next time, it’ll be a different story on my end.”
UFC 210 takes place on Saturday, April 8 from the KeyBank Center in Buffalo, New York with Daniel Cormier and Anthony Johnson headlining.
