MMA Mania's Brian Hemminger conducted an interview with former WEC bantamweight champion Brian Bowles that sheds a lot of light into how Bowles thinks. Hemminger didn't hold back and asked him about the unfair rep he's been tagged with in regards to how his fight with Dominick Cruz ended, and he opened up on his thoughts about fighting Urijah Faber at UFC 139 as well, a guy that he has trained with in the past.  First, he talks about how how his hand is after his last fight with Takeya Mizugaki:

I'm good. It was all swelled up right after the fight. I went to the doc and pretty much by the time I got to the doc, I knew it wasn't broke. I got it X-rayed, it wasn't and a couple days later the swelling was gone. He said that I had a tendon out of place or whatever and he told me to take a week or two off and I did. Now it's perfectly fine.

Then he got to the Cruz fight:

Brian Hemminger: You're scheduled to fight Urijah Faber on Saturday night. Is there any kind of resentment at all because of his five round fight with Mike Brown where he broke both hands and kept fighting? That actually caused some fans to question your toughness after the Cruz fight which was pretty unfair. Is that something you think about at all, like this is an opportunity to redeem yourself?

Brian Bowles: Well, there was more to that fight than just a broken hand. I went into the fight with a pretty bad rib injury and I probably shouldn't have been fighting. When I went out there, my gameplan was to kinda try and keep it standing and within 15 seconds I broke my hand. I couldn't grapple, I wasn't in shape because I couldn't train right, I couldn't clinch because of my ribs would keep popping so I was kinda screwed. I was left out there, I couldn't punch and all I had left was a little jab. I couldn't wrestle, couldn't punch with my right hand so basically I was just stuck out there with nothing but a jab and just getting beat on for no reason. So no, not really. I have no resentment towards Faber for anything.

And his thoughts on training with Faber:

Yeah, I was about to fight Will Ribeiro and I like to bounce around sometimes for my training camps and I knew that he had a lot of good guys and they train hard so a couple of my buddies had been talking to him out there. They asked him if I can come out and train and he said, "Sure, come on out," and I went out there. I stayed like 10 days or so, had some good training and it was towards the end of his camp with Brown and then a few weeks later I fought Ribeiro. There's not really too much to say about it other than it was some good training, good guys and I enjoyed myself.

He also talks about being buddies with Faber but not friends, his fight with Mizugaki, and his thoughts on Renan Barao. You can check out the whole thing here.