UFC Fight Night 239 Winner Mike Davis Shares How Video Games Saved His Life

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.

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.”