Every week I put out a mailbag prompt on The Feed, and this week, I got a question that was previously a hot-button issue, but cropped back up again over the past few days when Jon Jones revealed he might
be done with his MMA career due to arthritis in his hips. That, of course, brought back up the end of Jones’ heavyweight run and subsequent retirement, leading to this question, which I split off to answer separately.
If Jon Jones never fights again, how is the fact that he didn’t fight Tom Aspinall or Francis Ngannou going to be viewed by history? Will the 0 be all that matters, or is the “ducking” notion real?
Let’s start here: Jon Jones does not have a “0” on his résumé. Jon Jones has a loss on his record, despite the UFC acting like he doesn’t. You can dislike it all you want, but the 1 is real, and it’s there. And if your counter is “he doesn’t have a real loss!” then I would direct you to watch his fight with Dominick Reyes. Either we’re going by the scoreboard or the eye test, but what we cannot do is pick and choose which to use that’s most favorable to Jones.
*Stepping down from my soapbox.*
Now, with that out of the way, let’s address the real heart of the question: is Jon Jones’ farcical heavyweight run and the way he managed things at the end going to have long-lasting, adverse effects on his legacy? No. No, it will not.
Let’s break down the final few years of Jones’ career. Jones vacated his light heavyweight title instead of rematching the guy who most people believe should have beaten him, and then spent three years saying he would move up, only to not do that until Ngannou left the UFC. He then beat Ciryl Gane to claim the vacant belt, which was a good win, but he didn’t beat the champion. And then he took two years to fight a 42-year-old man who had not fought in nearly four years.
And THEN, after beating Stipe Miocic, Jones overtly tried to fight Alex Pereira instead of unify the heavyweight titles, gave the UFC an “eff you money” ultimatum, and when the promotion, allegedly, met his demands, Jones decided to retire anyway. That’s not exactly a dynamite title reign.
And yet, it’s not going to matter. The MMA fanbase churns at a high rate, and new fans aren’t entering the sport and diving into the details of Jones’ legacy. They just have “Jon Jones is the GOAT” blasted at them, and they can look at the numbers, which are staggering. It doesn’t matter that Jones’ heavyweight title run was essentially one big asterisk.
If you need proof, you can already see it happening. A year ago, even the most ardent Jones fan would admit that, at the minimum, the way he handled the end of his career looked bad. But after the weirdness between Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane, all of that has gone away. Jones fans came out in droves to claim a moral victory over Aspinall, and there is simply no discussion of that fight happening now. If Jones comes back, it’s to fight Alex Pereira, the fight he always wanted (which is, coincidentally, the significantly safer matchup).
I said from the very beginning of this whole saga that, for as much as I’d have liked it to happen, I completely understood why Jon Jones did not want to fight Tom Aspinall. Jones is not afraid of Aspinall, but he’s on the final leg of his career, and he’s in full prizefighting mode. He wants the biggest paydays for the least amount of risk, and Aspinall is not that.
Jones could absolutely lose to Aspinall, which, when your entire career story is about being (falsely) undefeated, is not something to consider lightly. And while I believe that beating Aspinall would have been one of the better wins in his career, and validated his heavyweight run, genuinely adding to his legacy, the reality is that in 10 years, no one will remember. Time flattens out all nuance of history, especially in this sport. Sure, a few old-timers will sit around and yell at the clouds, but mostly people are just going to look at the scoreboard, and no one has a better scoreboard to point at than Jon Jones.
