A ‘Wonderful’ Return

Former Bellator MMA titleholder and Ultimate Fighting Championship veteran Phil Davis will suit up for the first time in almost two years, as he makes his Professional Fighters League debut opposite Rob Wilkinson when their light heavyweight quarterfinal headlines PFL 2025 World Tournament 4 on Thursday at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Out of action since June 2023 due to the Bellator-PFL merger, “Mr. Wonderful” now gets an opportunity to add another championship to his trophy case.

The long layoff was a difficult challenge for Davis.

“The time away has been mixed,” he told Sherdog.com. “It’s a very mixed bag. Here’s the deal. I got fairly lucky. I was in the UFC. Then I left them to go to Bellator, and by that time, Scott Coker was running Bellator and they had a pretty cool team in place. I had only really worked with very well-oiled machines. I think going from Bellator to the PFL, it was just a lot. It was a large step.”

Fighters only get one shot! Watch the PFL World Tournament LIVE Thursday, May 1 at 10 p.m. ET on ESPN2 and ESPN+.

A fan of the old-school MMA tournament, Davis believes the PFL’s decision to move away from its regular-season points format will prove beneficial.

“It feels more like a sport and less of title shots being given out,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes, the handouts are cool, but most of the time, they’re not. I like the PFL going to tournaments. I like the novelty they had with their playoff system. It worked. People were trying to take each other’s heads off. There is some gamesmanship to be had, but most of the time, it comes down to the fans.”

Davis concedes his sabbatical did bear some fruit.

“I definitely didn’t necessarily want the time off—I wanted to be in the cage—but time off is what I got,” he said. “To be completely honest, there’s been a couple times where I’ve had a year off, and each time, it was accompanied by an injury. This time, the injury was super minor and I was down for a little bit, but I couldn’t get back into the lineup. The time off has helped me to refresh and get stronger.”

Though a showdown with Wilkinson awaits, Davis chose not to concentrate on a specific opponent. Instead, he elected to focus on himself. Being 40 and having little left to prove has its perks.

“It’s entirely about me,” Davis said. “Even though you know who you’re fighting, I just focus on myself, on my performance and on the things that I can control, the things I want to execute in this fight. It gets to a weird area when you’re focused on your opponent because they still have the freedom and opportunity to do whatever they want to do.”

For Davis, the tournament affords him the chance to show he can still excel at the sport’s highest levels.

“It’s never to prove anything to anyone,” he said. “It’s always been pushing myself, finding ways that I can push myself further than I’ve ever gone, raising the bar for myself. I feel when you get out of that, even just showing the fans what you can do, they lead to disappointment. When you have your own setup and standards [and] things that you’re pushing yourself toward, that’s ultimately what pushes you forward.

“You can’t have someone else’s judgment over your head because that is disappointment,” Davis added. “As soon as something doesn’t go your way, that disappointment is going to knock you down further than you’re going to be able to get yourself up.”