Dillon Danis is going back on the offensive.
In his first public interview following his bizarre loss to Logan Paul, Danis took aim at the man who bested him at Misfits Boxing’s PRIME Card this past Saturday in Manchester.
“It didn’t feel like a fight. It felt like he was running away,” Danis said Tuesday on Piers Morgan Uncensored. “Every time I tried to engage with him and tried to get in there and trade, he would run away. He was scared.
“Even Conor [McGregor] was saying it. He was running. He was on the back foot the whole time. I was trying to push forward. I wanted to fight, I wanted to clinch, I wanted to fight. I was like, ‘Let’s go.’”
Danis suffered a disqualification loss to Paul in a lackluster showing in Saturday’s co-headliner. Competing in his professional boxing debut, Danis was soundly outworked and outstruck for five rounds before igniting an in-ring melee with a failed takedown attempt followed by a failed guillotine choke attempt in the sixth round. Security ultimately stormed the ring and the bout was called off, leading to Danis’ disqualification and Paul’s victory.
Danis on Tuesday said that his failed takedown attempt was him “was just messing around a little bit, letting him know what a real fight is,” but denied working for a guillotine choke.
“I wasn’t actually trying to, but he was smart — he vasolined his head up, so I guess he knew I was trying to go for his neck,” Danis said. “But at that moment, I actually wasn’t. I was just grabbing his head and he just kind of shrugged me, and the vasoline [slipped me off], and then he threw that punch [on the ground] and then I upkicked him.”
Danis reiterated multiple times that boxing is only “half of a fight” and called upon Paul to meet him in a rematch, but this time under a mixed martial arts ruleset.
“He shook my hand. If he’s a real man, he should,” Danis said. “He didn’t defend his fiancee, in my opinion. If a man talks the way I did about your fiancee, you should knock me out.”
“If me and you got into a street fight, we’re not going to be like, ‘Hold on a second, let’s go get these gloves and throw it all on and box.’ We’re fighting. And he knows I would strangle him unconscious within 30 seconds in a real fight. That’s why he didn’t do the real fight. In MMA, the bag was bigger than the boxing bag actually, so he turned that down.”
“It wouldn’t last more than a minute,” Danis added. “I would play with him. I could take him down, mount him, and literally slap him around. It would be embarrassing actually. It would be so fun.”
Danis’ unremitting trash talk of Paul’s fiancee Nina Agdal was a central theme of the promotion for his bout against the YouTube influencer and WWE star, to the point where Danis was hit by a restraining order as well as a lawsuit by Agdal.
Danis’ tactics nonetheless drew significant attention to the bout. The jiu-jitsu specialist and Bellator veteran said Tuesday that he earned “over $1 million” from the bout.
“I thought Logan would be a better promoter. He was terrible at it,” Danis said. “I carried this whole promotion on this card. Better than Tommy [Fury], did better than KSI. They didn’t give me any pay-per-view points, they treated me like s***, everything was against me. The steroids that he was taking, he was taking EPO. The refs were on his side. He picks the refs, he picks the judges, he picks everything, so I was handicapped the whole time.
“Beat me in a real fight. He’s boxed for five, seven years — he couldn’t have rattled me? He was trying to say he would knock me out in the second. Every MMA guy, Joe Rogan, ‘He’s going to get knocked out in a minute. He’s going to get knocked out like this.’ Look what happened to Ben Askren. He didn’t do anything to me. A couple smacks, that’s it.”
Danis added that he’s shifted his goals now toward a run at the octagon and made an appeal to UFC CEO Dana White to pick up the phone and call him.
“I want to go the UFC. I think the UFC now will see my potential in selling fights and everything like that,” Danis said.
“Sign me. Let’s do it. Give me the biggest fight, give me anybody you want. Just don’t send anybody you want back. I’ll beat them all. And I want to prove what I’m saying is true, because it pissed me off that people don’t believe in me. So I want to go out there and I’ll fight any one of them.”