In Defense of Jon Jones
The UFC Great Was Every Bit As Good As Advertised and The Fight With Stipe Miocic is Sick!
I went to Las Vegas for UFC 94 back in the olden times to see a bonafide mega-bout, two legends in action competing across generations and weight classes. The world’s greatest welterweight, a Canadian icon who once talked to me for a good 30 minutes about the evolutionary impact of the compound bow (instead of promoting, well, anything at all), was taking on a Hawaiian lightweight god who earlier that year had walked into the media room barefoot, picked up an entire fruit tray meant for 50 journalists and proceeded to eat it throughout our sit-down interview.1
Georges St-Pierre versus BJ Penn was sold as a superfight and UFC pulled out all the stops, dropping almost $2 million on a preview show called UFC Primetime, their answer to HBO’s groundbreaking reality show 24/7 that had modernized fight promotion. Rightly proud, they screened the show for family, friends and press and I inexplicably ended up in the same section as UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta and Penn’s mother Lorraine. I met Fertitta for the first time that night—his skin glowed, his muscles popped out of a shirt one size too small and he smelled like oak, sandalwood, and money.2
When the weekend was over, however, I wasn’t thinking about GSP or BJ. Lorenzo Fertitta was already a ghost from my past. I had seen the future that night on the undercard, a lanky kid from Endicott, New York, who told us backstage he was creating a new style of fighting, mixing techniques from judo, wrestling and Japanese anime. As crazy as that sounds, it felt both entirely sane and true in the moment. He had even provided a proof of concept that night, utterly dismantling Ultimate Fighter star Stephan Bonnar with startling ease.
Jon Jones had arrived.
It’s easy to forget, perhaps because he’s fought just twice since 2019 and perhaps because his outside-the-cage shenanigans made people subconsciously want to dismiss his accomplishments—but Jones was a revolutionary mixed martial arts fighter, a grappler extraordinaire who developed strategies and techniques to become dangerous at every distance and in every phase of a bout.
In the beginning, young, fearless and strong, he was a cannonball, his opponents the flimsiest of straw men just waiting to fall down. But Jones was no mere bull unleashed on his unwitting foes. There was an elegance and grace to his work, his beautiful foot sweeps and clever elbows creating havoc more often than his pure physicality.
While some wrestlers specialized in techniques they could spam at will, Jones was most notable for his offensive diversity. He demolished Mauricio Rua’s base with a yank of his head, crashed Matt Hamill to the mat with a ground-shaking osotogari and hit Andre Gusmao with a picture-perfect lateral drop.
The Bonnar fight, perhaps, was most instructive when it comes to understanding the sheer creativity of a young Jones. There’s a sequence in that fight I don’t even have to rewatch to recount, so deeply burned in my brain I can see it with my eyes closed exactly how it happened when I watched it cageside that night. Jones launched the former TUF sensation3 with a German suplex, then grabbed his leg as Bonnar attempted to get back to his feet, spinning hard to his right to land a shocking elbow.
No one had done anything quite like it before. In a world of cookie-cutter and risk-averse fighters, perhaps they never will again.
By as early as September, 2011, I had seen enough, declaring Jones “the best fighter in the world.” I traveled several times to see him train in Albuquerque, New Mexico, peppering his braintrust with questions about how they’d keep their rash wunderkind motivated, interested and on the straight and narrow.4
That version of Jones is mostly forgotten more than a decade later, his exploits buried under ink spills from police blotters and tabloid exposes, cynics attempting the magic trick of convincing us this particular devil was never as dangerous as he seemed. MMA fans turn over so frequently, there’s a good chance that even hardcore contemporary fans have only seen him fight live once or twice—or maybe even not at all. He feels like a vestige from the past, something anathema to the MMA community, which tends to slander rather than venerate the sport’s foundational figures and former greats.
The idea that Jones is overrated is, of course, utter nonsense. He was the rare fighter effective at all ranges, using the Mike Winkeljohn oblique kick and long jab at range, timing his slicing elbows to catch fighters attempting to close the distance and engage him in the pocket. In the clinch, he was especially dangerous, a takedown machine tossing anyone foolish enough to grapple with him in a number of ingenious and devastating ways. He joined an army of Greg Jackson-coached fighters who did a good job controlling and pounding opponents once the fight hit the ground. There was nowhere you were safe from Jon Jones.
Even when he was tired, hadn’t trained, or spent the week before the fight in search of white powder, when pushed to his limits, he tended to respond, finding a well of energy and drive in the waning moments of fights against guys like Alexander Gustaffson, his will to win simply stronger than the man across from him’s.
Does this Jon Jones still exist? At 37 (and more importantly five years into a semi-retirement) the answer is likely a resounding “no.” That’s partly why I don’t share the seemingly overwhelming sentiment that Jones fight the latest heavyweight flash-in-the-pan Tom Aspinall, an athlete clearly in the midst of his prime. The pent up desire for that fight is more about seeing Jones potentially punished for perceived transgressions from the past and less about deciding who the best heavyweight in the world is. Is there any wonder he doesn’t want to lead himself to the slaughter?
Instead, his fight with former heavyweight kingpin Stipe Miocic this weekend is best seen as a victory lap, a reward for outstanding service to our sport and the UFC. These are two characters I both know and understand, contemporaries who transformed from wrestlers into multi-faceted martial artists, along the way earning reputations as arguably the best UFC fighters to ever compete in their respective weight classes. It’s a good, evenly-matched fight, a fitting way for each to close a career. The two earned this pay day on the strength of all the legendary moments that helped propel this sport into the mainstream, Stipe’s mumble-mouthed charm and humble hero’s tale the perfect antidote to Jones’ smirking excellence. It’s not a legacy fight—both are too old and inactive for it to say much about who was the better man in their day. Nor is it a contest to determine the sport’s best. It’s a celebration of past excellence, pure and simple, MMA’s answer to an aging Sugar Ray Leonard stepping in the ring one last time with Thomas Hearns, both pretending, if only for a night, they are still 25-year-olds.
Fans might have even been able to embrace it as such, a retirement fight for two legends—it’s only the presence of the UFC’s diminished heavyweight title5 that has created the vitriolic memes that seem to dominate the discussion of the bout online. It might have been better to strip Jones, acknowledge Aspinall, and allow both to move forward on parallel but separate paths, Big Tom taking on current top ten fighters as a champion should and Jones moving into the realm of hand-selected bouts on a de facto legends circuit. It’s the closest the promotion can come to giving out a gold watch and a pat on the back.
I may be alone here, but as a mostly lapsed fan who checks in occasionally on the biggest new acts and the current crop of champions, this fight is of great interest. It feels evenly matched, two decorated athletes from yesterday stepping in there one last time in front of what should have been a crowd giving both the respect earned after long careers at the top of the game. It’s not really their fault the UFC didn’t present it that way—and I’m not inclined to blame the athletes. Nothing in MMA is perfect, especially the promotion. There was a misstep here, mostly in attempting to present this as something meaningful and important to the current state of the sport.
But that’s merely a marketing miscue.
The fight itself? Bring it on!
Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.
Have I ever mentioned that covering MMA could be really weird?
I believe I have now officially digressed.
RIP Mr. Bonnar, all is forgiven.
This was not easy. Google it.
Are we really going to pretend Francis Ngannou isn’t the real champion? Really?
Couldn't care less about the fight but this is a nice piece.
You know what one of the unfortunate side effects is of being constantly at war with your own history? It renders the historical nature of the contests in the present day as null and void. None of them matter including this one, which is both too bad and also precisely what works best for Dana White.