Jon Jones is the GOAT, but no one is inspired to watch UFC 309

Tom Aspinall has no fan base but people are pissed Bones Jones is ducking him.

Jon Jones is supposedly set to retire after his UFC 309 bout with Stipe Miocic. Or at least vacate his UFC Heavyweight title.

I can’t let the moment pass without issuing some fiery missives.

I got shit to say about this motherfucker. It’s personal.

I spent a decade and a half on this fucking sport hoping to see MMA produce the Jack Johnsons, Rocky Marcianos, Muhammad Alis, George Foremans, and Mike Tysons of the 21st Century.

Instead, we got… well, we got Georges St. Pierre and he’s pretty great but of limited cultural significance. Unless you’re Canadian that is. GSP’s greatness and massive popularity in Canada should have been the beginning of an era of great Canadian fighters.

But that would require a healthy regional scene (or several of them) and no regional scenes survived once the UFC started flooding the TV market with MMA on 75% of weekends.

UFC has ran several cards over the last decade in Canada with Max Holloway, but a major and iconic Light Heavyweight or Heavyweight clash? Go back to 2013 at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto. UFC 165 featuring Alexander Gustafsson vs. one of the UFC’s three biggest legends and A-Holes.

Speaking of Jon Jones…

Back in the day, I was the only writer on a major MMA site doing detailed posts on the techniques behind the fights. I called my posts “Judo Chops” based on an Austin Powers joke.

And I wrote dozens of the damn things. My favorite topic was Jon Jones.

William Watts had a nice piece this week at Open Note Grappling summing up the magic and majesty of Jones’ approach to fighting:

look at the insane dilemma Jones puts his opponents in. If you stay outside, he can touch you but you can’t touch him. When you approach him, he’ll simply meet you in a way that immediately puts you off balance so you’re falling on your face. And if you don’t immediately fall over, he’ll find the clinch position he needs to launch you onto his highlight reel.

…
I’ve never seen anyone make better use of their gifts than Jon “Bones” Jones. Love him or hate him, you can’t afford not to learn how he was always able to reposition himself to end up a winner.

Jonathan Snowden makes many worthy points in his well-written appreciation of Jones but let’s focus on why he’s not joining in on the hate against the Jones-Miocic fight headlining UFC 309:

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.

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 two 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 title—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.

The password is hate. As in hate-watching. Jon Jones does have a lot of hate-watchers. That is undeniable.

OK, I’m thinking, yeah, Jon Jones is the GOAT. He’s done a lot of great shit inside the cage that thrilled and dazzled.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t done anything dazzling inside the Octagon since 2018. How many UFC fans are left from 2018?

But nonetheless, all these old MMA heads talking me up had me leaning in a pro-Jones direction.

Ariel Helwani’s interview with Aljamain Sterling in which they discussed Jon Jones pushed me even more in that direction.

Key quotes:

Aljamain Sterling: I remember (Jones) telling me on the way to the Gustafsson fight walking out (at) UFC 165, he was thinking to himself, ‘I can't believe I just spent the whole week partying and I'm about to fight this guy. I can't believe I did this to myself.’

Like I can't even imagine what he was doing that week to say that. …And again I've seen this firsthand. When he offered me a couple shots at the bar and I was like ‘I'm fighting in four or five weeks’ and he was fighting in like two weeks!

I was like am I doing something wrong, like the math ain't mathing right now, but then I watch him on TV. He's going out there. He obliterates the competition and I'm like I think there's something to be said about that.

Now that part was lurid gossip but then Sterling clarified something about Jones that really caught my ear:

It's not saying like go once in generation athlete. Yeah, I think he's physically gifted.

I think he does all his homework.

I think he he's very meticulous in his preparation with getting the looks that he needs to see.

He didn't take that short notice fight with Chael Sonnon. He's not that guy. He wants to make sure he's got the utmost edge on you in terms of knowing you inside and out before he's accepting a fight and knowing that he knows you better than you know yourself.

I think when you have someone who's that dedicated to what they're trying to do that's a dangerous person to stop. I don't know if a couple drinks are going to stop you, coke, whatever it is.

I don't think any of that is going to stop you I think as long as you're in shape you're ready to go and here he is all these years later. It's remarkable.

The dude won the belt in 2011 and I know he had a long layoff there but just imagine anybody else doing any of these things. They probably would crumble.

So kudos to him. It's nothing sort of inspirational.

I'm not saying (he’s a) role model. Like ‘yeah party’, that's not the role model messaging, but it's also the role model messaging of put your mind to something put the work in and truly do the SMART work and you get the results that you seek.

I almost had the warm fuzzies about Jon Jones GOAT of MMA.

Especially because it reminded me of my all-time favorite fighter, Frank Shamrock, and his game-plan based approach to fighting.

I interviewed Frank about it, way way back in the day.

But then I saw this latest little bit of bullshit special pleading from Jon Jones and enabling by the UFC.

And then I remembered, oh yeah, we’re still dealing with the same old scumbag asshole.

And unlike Mike Tyson — a literal orphan from some of the meanest streets in the country, Jon Jones was a middle-class preacher’s kid with two brothers in the NFL.

Even at his early peak, Jones was purely celebrated for his athletic feats. No one I’m aware of was buying into his claims of being a role model based on his religious upbringing.

And those claims were dashed on a shoal of performance-enhancing drug use, recreational drug use, a hit & run car wreck, and domestic violence allegations.

It’s hard enough for fans to relate to physically-gifted athletes whose mastery of strategy takes them to the top when all we know about them are good things.

When we know very little about Jon Jones personally except that he’s awful and that his brother Chandler has some profound mental health issues, it’s hard to care about the guy.

So I’m going to have to quote some of the hate MMA Guru has been pouring on Jones lately because this is what the modern MMA fan thinks of our GOAT.

MMA Guru: (Jon Jones is) a man who's made a career fighting people that are 5’11” and skinny. (He’s never fought) a person his size or bigger that's well-rounded in his entire career.

But then after five minutes of listening to Guru rant with his undertones of racism and explicit homophobia, I feel compelled to remind him that Jones twice beat former heavyweight champ Daniel Cormier.

OK, so one of those fights was ruled a no contest because steroids, but I don’t care about steroids and the fight I watched was won by Jones.

Also, yeah, yeah, Cormier is shorter than Jones so technically that meets Guru’s criteria.

But fuck all that. Cormier was a serious threat to Jones and Jon rose to the occasion and won the fights in a big way.

But none of that really matters. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

UFC 309 has plenty of premium tickets still for sale at Madison Square Garden.

And on Google Trends, UFC 309 is getting smoked by Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson.

What are we even doing at this point?

Is this really how Jon Jones wants to cap off his career?

At best, he’ll be remembered as a fighter who showed flashes of greatness inside the cage but whose story never adds up to more than the sum of the parts — and many of those parts are bad.

If UFC 309 disappoints like it appears to be on the way to doing, how will UFC re-calibrate their future marketing plans for Dana’s pound-for-pound guy?

His reasons for ducking Tom Aspinall won’t win him any new fans:

Jon Jones: If I'm being completely honest, I feel like Tom's been such an asshole that I don't want to do business with him.

His fans have been so annoying and obviously you don't get this far in a career being affected by fans or or whatnot but he's just an asshole.

I'm like bro if you had a little bit more respect then maybe we could have worked something out. But I just don't even want to do business with him.

At the end of the day this is a business and fighting me gives him an opportunity to change his life forever and I don't even want to give him the opportunity.

Apparently, the only fight he’ll take is a “BMF” title fight against Alex Pereira.

And it almost seems like he’s insisting on that as a big F.U. to fans who want to see him face a much tougher challenge in Tom Aspinall.

Does Jon Jones really just want to be remembered for 12-6 elbows, fucking up, and refusing to give the fans what they want? He looks comfortable with how much cash he has made in his career, seemingly priding himself on always being the smartest one in the room — and the cage.

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw newsletter on Substack.