(Check out our WEC 44 weigh-in gallery here.)
WEC fighter and occasional rapper LC Davis is patiently waiting at the local Meineke in Iowa as his Volkswagen Jetta undergoes an oil change. He purchased the car last summer and while it isn’t as gangsta as a Cadillac Escalade, the choice of vehicle among most MCs, the featherweight tricked it out to his liking.
“I put a little thug twist on it,” the 29-year-old proudly boasts. “I got a nice stereo system, a little DVD player [and] a CD player, so it’s pimped out pretty nice. It’s cool.”
While he spends the next twenty minutes relaxing as his whip gets serviced, the fighter has spent even longer waiting for his chance to throw down in the WEC.
Davis, a Kansas City native, made his MMA debut in 2006 by defeating Nick Wright at regional show VFC 12: Warpath. Soon thereafter, he relocated to Davenport, Iowa to train with Pat Miletich and racked up eight straight victories, including a split decision win over current Strikeforce lightweight Conor Heun in the semifinals of the IFL Featherweight Grand Prix. He would get tapped out in the championship final by current World Extreme Cagefighting contender Wagnney Fabiano in December 2007, and after knocking out Rafael Dias in his next fight four months later, the IFL closed shop in July 2008.
Although Davis had his eye on competing in the WEC, it wasn’t meant to be. So over the next year, he won one-off fights in Conquest Fighting Championship, Monte Cox’s Adrenaline MMA and Affliction Entertainment, the latter of which he planned on calling home except the “t-shirt guys” shut the fight promotion down this past August.
Despite the string of bad luck with folding MMA organizations and a loss to Michirio Omigawa earlier this year in Sengoku, Davis did enough to get noticed by the brass at Zuffa and finally landed a deal at the stable WEC.
“I have been in negotiations with the WEC a long time ago, and for whatever reason, things fell through. Either my opponent fell through or [we] kinda got into contract disputes about money and different things,” the 29-year-old reveals. “I ended up going with Affliction because they offered me a better deal and Affliction fell through. Then [with the WEC], the door opened backed up. I always wanted to be in the WEC, it’s the best organization at 145 and it’s as good as it gets for 145.”
The featherweight made his WEC debut in August against Javier Vazquez and edged him out in a close split decision. Three weeks later, he got the call to fight Diego Nunes and in anticipation for his fight, Davis decided to do something a little different.
While most of his training is at the Miletich camp, the 145-pound sensation spiced his regiment up by spending some time Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I’ve been training at Miletich for three years now, so I just wanted to switch things up, get some new looks and get some different bodies to spar with,” he says. “It was an awesome experience. Gray Maynard, Jay Hieron, and all those guys took me in and helped me out a lot. For this fight, I worked my overall game. (Nunes) is pretty well-rounded, so I just wanted to be well-rounded also and come at him with a mixed bag of tricks.” The fight will take place this Wednesday Night on the prelims of WEC 44.
Davis was also recently in Vegas for the Fighters Summit where, during a Q&A with Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White, WEC talents learned more about Zuffa’s rumored plans to fold the lighter weight classes into the UFC.
“I think Scott Jorgensen brought up. He said, ‘So what’s up with the WEC-UFC merger’,” Davis recalls. “And Dana White was like, ‘Well we just signed another year deal with Versus, so we’re about to have more WEC than ever in 2010. But after 2010, who knows?’ So he kinda dodged the question a little bit, didn’t give us a ‘for sure’ answer, but said basically the WEC will be around for at least another year.”
Other than fighting, training and participating in summits, Davis is known to spit a hot sixteen. In fact, there is a YouTube video of him kickin’ a freestyle in the backseat of what could very well be an Escalade.
But he doesn’t plan to quit MMA and sign with Def Jam. “Occasionally if I hear good beat and I’ve had a couple of drinks, I might spit one out here and there, but I’m not a rapper by any means,” he says with a chuckle. “I just have fun.”
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