Daniel Cormier said he’d like to face Jon Jones in a wrestling match for Real American Freestyle, and the promotional brass would love to make that happen.
Ahead of RAF 5, which takes place Saturday at Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Fla., RAF co-founder Chad Bronstein reacted to Cormier’s challenge, saying that because of Cormier and Jones’ relationship with RAF promotional figureheads Ben Askren and Izzy Martinez, that match could be something that could get put together.
“Ben’s pretty close to Daniel,
and so is Izzy, and then Izzy obviously trained Jon Jones for quite some time,” Bronstein told MMA Fighting. “So far [with] RAF, you’ve seen that matches, all matches, can happen. So I’ll leave it at that, that anything’s possible.”
RAF 5 features a slew of past and present MMA fighters and champions from the UFC and beyond. The event is headlined by former interim UFC welterweight champ Colby Covington facing past middleweight champ Luke Rockhold, while current middleweight Bo Nickal takes on multi-time title challenger Yoel Romero. Current UFC lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan faces former, two-time PFL season champ Lance Palmer in the featured bout.
Former two-division UFC champ Henry Cejudo is set to face Urijah Faber in the main event of RAF 6 in February. While Cormier discussed his interest in facing Jones on the RAF mats, former welterweight champ also said he’s love to face Covington, a two-time UFC opponent, in a wrestling match under the RAF banner.
Seeing the interest of MMA stars seeing the value of competing for RAF is music to Bronstein’s ears.
“I think it’s wrestling — to all of them, to me, to Izzy, to Eric [Bischoff] — I love wrestling,” Bronstein explained. “So it’s actually just more so that we’re seeing that the people’s true love for the sport and wanting to compete, it’s bringing back competitive juices to people who are done with their careers, and they think they can still wrestle.
“So, to answer your question, I’m excited every time I hear that we’re drawing more attention to the sport of wrestling.”
Bronstein says that the UFC also sees value in their fighters competing on the mats for his promotion, and hopes it’s a relationship that continues to thrive for years to come.
“I mean, the UFC’s been great to us,” Bronstein said. “We’re not competitive. I think we’re additive to all of MMA, as well as other organizations, because, [with] the UFC, the top fighters fight three times a year at max, right? Some maybe four, like Merab [Dvalishvili] who had a lot of fights this year. But I think we’re additive because we’re giving the ability to their MMA superstars to actually continue to compete, continue to train, and build their brand.
“So UFC’s been great to us. They’ve approved a lot of their fighters to wrestle, and I think that also, wrestling tends to have less injuries. So to your point, it’s less risk for them to come wrestle and then get injured for their fight. So I think that’s why we’re able to allow wrestlers to come and wrestle, and still fight, because it’s part of their camp anyways. They’re training wrestling every day, so the chance for injury for a UFC fight wrestling training, or for training for wrestling for ours is the same.”
