A couple of strange things happened as I watched Jon Jones’ latest Instagram video.
This was Sunday morning after UFC 192, when I woke up to discover Jones right back to his old tricks again. The 10-second video the former UFC light heavyweight champion posted (and deleted) late Saturday appeared to show him hinting at a comeback to fighting, but only in the vaguest possible terms.
It was timed perfectly to steal the thunder from Daniel Cormier, as the current 205-pound champion had just completed a hard-fought victory over Alexander Gustafsson in the UFC 192 main event. In this way—not to mention the video’s bizarre vapidity and apparent lack of self-awareness—it was classic Jones.
He's back.... @JonnyBones posted this on Instagram and deleted it But you know @MMAHistoryToday got you covered pic.twitter.com/EodJL0xXZp
— MMA History Today (@MMAHistoryToday) October 4, 2015
“I think I miss it,” the seemingly glassy-eyed fighter says while pulling a variety of goofy faces. “I don’t know.”
We don’t want to read too much into a 10-second video, of course. But since this social media salvo was Jones’ first person-to-person contact with MMA since his bosses told him to go get his head straight, it was jarring to see him carrying on as if nothing had happened.
Just as the short snippet ended—the strange things hit me.
First, if Jones meant to show us he’d learned anything from spending the last five months in legal limbo, stripped of his title and suspended indefinitely by the UFC, this was certainly not the way to do it.
Second, I realized when he finally does return to the Octagon, I don’t want to see this same old version of Jones.
I don’t want to watch his tired act all over again. For a man as obviously talented but troubled as Jones, business as usual just won’t cut it if he wants to count me back among his supporters.
And trust me, I supported Jones as long and as loudly as I could—until one too many car wrecks made that support untenable.
When Jones returns to the cage, I want to see a new guy, one fans can trust will pick up where he left off without any further interruptions. A guy who might even come back better than before.
But the guy in this video? That’s the same old guy. That’s the guy who already did everything he could to screw this up. Honestly, I’m no longer very interested in that guy.
Just four days earlier a contrite Jones stood in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, courtroom asking district judge Charles Brown for another chance after his April hit-and-run accident. Now here he was, shirtless in his kitchen, filming himself with his smartphone as he segued seamlessly back into social media troll mode.
At the moment, we don’t know exactly what is next for the light heavyweight GOAT. The UFC hasn’t yet reinstated him, saying it’ll take the time to thoroughly review his plea deal with prosecutors before it makes a final decision on his employment status.
Add to that uncertainty the fact we never found out exactly what was wrong with Jones in the first place. The police found marijuana in his car after he fled the scene of a wreck that sent a pregnant woman to the hospital, but there was never any hard evidence that he was drunk or on drugs at the time. The accident occurred just before noon on a Sunday.
Three months before the crash, however, we learned he’d tested positive for cocaine in the lead-up to his UFC 182 win over Cormier. That time, we were also told he’d cured himself with a 24-hour stint in rehab.
So you can see how we might already be suspicious of the Jones-gets-his-life-together trope. The idea that the forfeiture of his title and an 18-month probationary sentence would turn him into a new man seemed like a dubious one to begin with.
But we at least thought a guy who had been through so much turmoil would give more thought to crafting his message from here out. We thought Jones would see this as a chance to start fresh, without the baggage of his past and with a new image to go along with the new lifestyle he'll surely be pitching before his UFC return.
Then the Instagram video hit and we all thought: Nope, that looks like the same old Jon Jones.
And that made us nervous.
It bears pausing a moment to note how badly we need Jones back in our lives. He is without question the greatest talent our sport has ever seen. He’s so good we named him the front-runner for best ever years ago, preemptively and based largely on the notion no one would ever come along to take it all away from him.
Later, we discovered the person intent on taking it all away was Jones himself.
Even the man’s staunchest critics—there are many, and they’ve been there since long before he actually deserved them—must admit the idea of a light heavyweight division where Cormier vs. Ryan Bader is the best we can do is not an appetizing one at all.
For all his faults, Jones remains the lifeblood of the UFC’s traditional glamour division. We not only need him back in the light heavyweight mix, we need him back in MMA for the long haul.
That means no more screw-ups, legal or otherwise.
Even a person as blindingly myopic as Jones must know he’s down to his last chance. The next time he winds up in a court of law, or fails a drug test, or wraps his Bentley around a telephone pole, or merely brawls with a rival on stage in front of the nickel slots—it’s going to go a lot worse for him.
If and when Jones returns from his company-mandated suspension, we need to feel like we’re starting a whole new chapter, not just re-starting the same cycle all over again.
Because, look: We don’t want to lose this guy. We can’t lose him. And yet the look of the man in that Instagram video made us think he still has no idea how close he came to losing it all.
Or how close he remains to the edge.
