Athletes
Andre Fili Chasing Consistency
The Featherweight Veteran Believes He Has All The Talents To Make A Serious Run And He's Confident That If He Find His Rhythm At UFC 296 It'll Be The Right Step
Welcome to the UFC, Andre Fili.
A moment of silence, then we both laugh. No, the 33-year-old featherweight isn’t stepping into the Octagon for the first time on Saturday to face Brazil’s Lucas Almeida. But in announcing his 21st UFC fight on social media, Fili wrote that he was making his debut on December 16th.
So what’s the method to the madness?
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“I'm looking at this like 2.0,” Fili said. “This way that I'm going to fight in two weeks is something that people haven't seen from me yet. I've shown flashes of it, but I'm excited to have 15 minutes or less of perfect fighting, of capitalizing on the potential that I've shown before. And I’m at a place where I'm only 33, but I'm a decade into the UFC, and I have a lot of experience. I've had some high highs, some low lows, some high highs again, and I'm just ready to capitalize on this opportunity. We only get this one go-round, and I'm not happy with the way that my UFC career has gone thus far. I'm happy for it, I'm thankful for it, but I'm not happy about the way that I've fought. And I think being too concerned with the outcome and being too concerned with all these other things has stopped me from just letting go and fighting. And I'm excited to just let go and fight, find my flow early on, and just let it rip.”
If you’ve watched Fili compete for any length of time, it’s evident that when he finds that flow and lets it rip, he can beat any featherweight in the world on any given night. But finding that happy place has been a struggle at times, and even when he does, he’s been on the wrong side of close or controversial decisions, or completely nullified by an opponent’s game plan. That’s the fight game, and yeah, it hurts, but Fili isn’t bitter.
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“Yeah, they're playing the game of fighting, but they're not actually in a fistfight,” he said. “And there's a couple of decisions in there that I think I won, there's certain things in the fights that I go back and I watch and I go, ‘I could have done that better.’ I'm not going to go back and harp on things, but there's definitely fights that didn't go my way and I think should have. I think that Nathaniel Wood fight was close, but I think I did enough. I dropped him twice. I've never met another person that thinks that Michael Johnson won the fight that we had. And so there's these fights I can go back and point to, and that's not a knock to any of the guys I fought. They're doing their job, I'm doing mine. But there's a couple fights that I think probably should have gone my way that would make my record look a little prettier. And then there's other fights like Bryce Mitchell. I like Bryce Mitchell, he's a good guy, nothing bad to say about him, and he won that fight, but if you look at the way both of us look at the end of the fight, it looks like he'd just been through a horror movie, and it looked like I had just done my warmup. And again, that's not a knock on him; it's my fault for not turning it up.”
Those days are over as far as he’s concerned, and 2.0 begins on Saturday against Almeida, a fighter unaccustomed to playing the game of fighting. If he’s in the Octagon with gloves on and a mouthpiece to bite down on, he’s going to fight, and that’s music to the ears of Fili.
“I don't think there's ever been a person who's ever just beat my ass,” he said. “It hasn't happened. No one has ever really beat me up. I've lost some close decisions, I've had other people play the game better than me. But no one's ever gone in there and just beat me up, and I don't think they ever will. There was a saying growing up, and it was, ‘You might kick my ass, but you're going to have to,’ and that's something that I'm going to make you do.”
This weekend, Fili may be in that beautiful place where his fate is determined not by judges, but by what happens between him and Almeida over the course of 15 minutes or less. That way, he doesn’t have to explain why, sometimes, winning a fight doesn’t mean winning a decision.
“It’s just so subjective,” he said, comparing MMA judging to a baseball game. “I could hit a home run and he could hit five singles. And maybe the judges think that the five singles are more impressive than the home run. So, it's like I land a flying knee that rips his face open, but he took me down five or six times, and I don't know which one counts for more. I've won fights on takedowns, too. I beat Dennis Bermudez because I took him down a bunch. It was a real close fight. I thought getting out of the cage that there's no way that fight was that close. And then I went back and watched it and I saw what people were talking about on Twitter. It was a close fight. So I'm at a place where I'm done blaming anyone else. If you try to hold someone else accountable for the way things went, you have to take radical ownership of your own outcomes and you can only control the controllables. That's something my strength conditioning coach, Amadeo Novella, is always harping on - control the controllables. And that's all you can do.”
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As for the explaining part…
“I’ve gotten to a place where I'm done explaining myself to really anybody,” Fili said. “There are people that are close to me, or some of the younger guys on the team, where I'll explain myself to them so they can have a deeper understanding, and they can help navigate their own careers as they start to get in the UFC. And if it's someone who is capable of understanding on a deep level, I'll take the time to articulate my experiences.”
There’s plenty for Fili to tell. He’s seen it all during his decade in the UFC, and he’s one of those rare individuals who has shown the propensity to do whatever he wants in this world, with little of it to do with fighting. That’s a gift in life, but not always in fighting, a sport where a hundred percent focus is often a prerequisite to get to the top. So, at 33, with so many options, is fighting still number one for Andre Fili?
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“Yeah, it's number one,” he said. “There's not even a close second, to be honest. I'm more in love with it than I've ever been and I'm better at it than I've ever been. The challenge in front of me now is taking what I have in training and applying it and utilizing it in the fight because I have a lot of information and I have a lot of knowledge. But then sometimes I go back and watch my fights, like my fight with Nathaniel Wood, and I'm just making all kinds of stupid choices. If I was coaching me, I'd be very frustrated. So it comes back to that radical ownership of what you can control. And at this point, the only thing I control is myself. I need to take all this knowledge I have, and I need to filter it into a system that I can use to win fights and win fights on a consistent basis. That's the only thing in the sport that has eluded me.”
UFC 296: Edwards vs Covington took place live from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on December 16, 2023. See the Final Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC Fight Pass!
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