Franklin still believes he won the Henderson fight

Former UFC middleweight champions Rich Franklin insists he still believes he won the Dan Henderson fight and he will go to his grave doing so.

Franklin is clearly still unhappy with the judges in his fight against Henderson.

He said in an interview with FanHouse.com: “I believe I won that fight. I’ll stand behind that for the rest of my life. On the feet, it’s clear I dominated the fight. I didn’t just win, I dominated on the feet. I did not get hit flush on the face or the body one time the whole fight.

“Dan took me down on several occasions, most of which I was able to stand back up. While I was on the ground, he was not capable of mounting any kind of damage. In the first round, he had me against the fence. He started throwing punches. I covered every single one. Not one of them broke through my defense. He had to resort to kneeing me on the back of my thigh because he had no other option and didn’t know what else to do.

“On other occasions I was on the ground, it was the same thing. He threw punches, none of them landed. If his objective was to take me down to the ground, he couldn’t really mount any offense while we were there.“

He added: “Couple that with the fact I was head-butted twice and poked in the eye once. I would think that maybe the first one was incidental. I would assume that after you have a couple head-butts and then you poke me in the eye, perhaps as a referee you’d think about taking away a point. I don’t see how a judge should give him that decision.”

Tags: Dan Henderson, Rich Franklin, UFC