Mixed emotions greeted Damon Wilson upon learning he’d be getting a shot at the UFC as part of Dana White’s Contender Series this year.
“I thought about this moment for a long time, thought about that specific phone call for a long time. So right away I’m elated, over the moon excited, but I kind of came down a litlte bit pretty quickly, just because the job’s not done,” Wilson (9-2) told The Top Turtle MMA podcast on Cageside Press ahead of the fight. “I still won’t have those three letters on that glove that night for that fight. So you know there’s still work to be done. A good hard training camp and a tough fist fight ahead of me. I’m looking to sign that contract, I’m not resting on my laurels just yet.”
Wilson has been competing for Cage Warriors of late, an American competing for a U.K. promotion and having considerable success doing so. With back-to-back finishes by knee strikes, getting the call for DWCS wasn’t exactly a surprise.
“I’ve been somewhat expecting the call for a while now, just because of my fight style. I knew that I needed to get on a win streak; I went on a three-fight win streak, two KOs in a row, both those KOs were pretty brutal with the knees,” recalled Wilson. “I headlined a main event, I took a fight on short notice. I’m doing all these things I felt like were necessarily and that you need to do to get eyes on you.”
“I knew the eyes were probably going to be on me. That’s the reason I took that short notice fight,” he added.
Like himself, Damon Wilson knows that for Márcio Barbosa, this shot a the big time is well-deserved. That said, he’s confident he’ll be getting the job done on Fight Night.
“I think he’s top in Brazil right now in the featherweight division, so I think he’s got a good reputation over there,” acknowledged Wilson. “It’s probably been a long time coming for him to get this opportunity as well, but there’s not a man that will stand in front of me on August 26 that’s going to take this moment from me.”
Watch our full interview with Contender Series Week 3’s Damon Wilson above.
