Following an impressive win over Natan Levy
at
UFC Fight Night 239, Mike Davis
revealed how gaming helped him through a dark phase in life.
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Returning to action for the first time since October 2022, “Beast
Boy” picked up an second-round submission win over Israel’s Levy in
the evening’s featured preliminary bout. Davis subsequently
reflected on his love for gaming, even plotting a post-retirement
gaming podcast.
Davis named “The Last of Us’”and “Hell Divers” as his current
favorite games. However, Davis also mentioned that “Halo” saved his
life.
“I like ‘The Last of Us.’ But the game that saved my life was
‘Halo.’ And what am I playing right now? A little bit mixture of
everything, but come, on it’s ‘Hell Divers’ – for democracy,” Davis
said during a media scum. (video via MMAjunkie.com)
Davis shared intimate details about his childhood in New York,
where he was bullied for being Black. The bullying took a toll on
him to the point where he resorted to self-inflicted pain, and a
lack of friends hardly helped. During those times, the only part of
Davis’ day he would look forward to was to play “Halo” with his
gaming friends on the Xbox his mother had worked hard to gift
him.
“When I grew up as a kid — I’m from upstate New York and as you
can probably guess, there’s not a lot of black people. So I got
picked on a lot and I was also really small, like a tiny child,”
Davis said. “So I got stuffed in lockers, man — called names, got
picked up, I got picked up and put on the basketball court. Oh, I
got picked on. And a lot of times I would find myself like in the
bathroom trying to inflict pain on myself. I would take a rubber
band with toothpicks and shoot them into my leg that could cause me
pain. I didn’t have friends, I really didn’t.
“And what saved my life was after school I would go home, I would
turn on the Xbox that I was gifted from my mom. It was amazing, she
worked hard to get it. And I got ‘Halo’ and I met friends, I met
friends in the area, I met friends across the globe. And every daym
the only thing that made me wanna keep going was to jump on ‘Halo’
and play with my friends.”