LAS VEGAS – The biggest fight on the biggest card of the UFC’s biggest week also showcases its biggest question mark.
Interim light heavyweight champion Jon Jones will bid to regain his championship Saturday when he meets champ Daniel Cormier in a title unification bout in the main event of UFC 200 at T-Mobile Arena in a fight that should go a long way to answering two of the sport’s most pressing questions:
• Is Jones still the dominant athlete he was from 2011 to 2015, when he won the world title, defeated six current, former or future UFC champions and went 9-0 in one of the great runs ever?
• Has Jones finally solved his turbulent personal life and fixed the issues that seemed to be the only thing that could threaten to end his reign as MMA’s finest fighter?
It is somehow appropriate that Jones is in the main event on this card, which will be the culmination of a wild 72 hours in which the UFC will stage 33 bouts, including five title fights, and will feature 11 current or former champions.
With all due respect to Fedor Emelianenko, Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre, there has never been a champion as talented, accomplished and as seemingly unbeatable as Jones.
He’s 22-1, and only a disqualification that resulted from a mistake by the referee prevented him from being unbeaten. He’s had only one close fight, his gut-check unanimous decision over a tougher-than-expected Alexander Gustafsson in which Jones rallied after a poor first round.
He’s had only one other scary moment from his perspective, in 2012, when a testosterone-enhanced Vitor Belfort briefly caught him in an arm bar.
Other than that, it’s been unabated dominance in a division that during his tenure has always been filled with elite opposition.
He’s so great that when he isn’t breathtakingly impressive, such as in his decision win over a rather ordinary Ovince Saint Preux in April, talk immediately began that he’d declined.
Jones, who will turn 29 10 day after the bout, is perplexed by the reaction to the verdict, particularly since Saint Preux was never in the fight.
“I had one bad performance and everyone is questioning who I am and all this weird stuff,” Jones said.
Much of the talk is fueled by Cormier, his bitter rival whom he routed at UFC 182 on Jan. 3, 2015. He did that despite having tested positive for cocaine less than a month earlier when he was at a critical juncture of his training camp.
Jones wasn’t the first professional athlete to use cocaine, and he won’t be the last. The shocking part is that he so willingly broke training to party as he did.
He briefly went into a rehabilitation center the day that Yahoo Sports broke the news that he’d been caught with cocaine in his system. He said his issue was smoking marijuana.
Cormier argued that while Jones is still a young man calendar-wise, all the partying Jones has done has taken a toll on his body.
“He’ll always be tough,” Cormier said. “He’s a good fighter. But nothing’s free. You know, nothing’s free. The Jon that showed up against Ovince Saint Preux is the guy who’s going to be in the Octagon on July 9. That is who he is today. Nothing’s free, man. All the other stuff, all the partying, all the other stuff, you have to pay for that. Now you’re seeing him where it’s time to pay the costs. He’s paying for all the outlandish living and burning the candle at two ends.
“Now we’re getting to the middle where it’s starting to die out. We’ll see the same guy. That’s who he is today. He’s not the guy [from] before. Maybe he’s 28 years old in reality, but he’s lived on this Earth much longer with the long nights and all the other stuff he’s done. I haven’t burned it at both ends to become a middle-aged man at 28 years old. That’s [Jones] today.”
Jones has had far more than his share of outside-the-cage troubles that allowed Cormier to form that opinion, whether it is accurate or not. In May 2012, Jones wrecked his Bentley into a pole in Binghamton, N.Y. He pleaded guilty to driving under the influence.
On April 27, 2015, only a month before he was to defend his title against Anthony Johnson, Jones was involved in a hit-and-run accident in the earning morning hours. His car hit a pregnant woman and he fled, though he returned to the vehicle to recover some cash before fleeing again. When police checked the vehicle, they found a pipe with marijuana in it.
He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, and was given probation and ordered to do community service.
And then, as he was training for Saint Preux, he got into a verbal altercation with an Albuquerque police officer who pulled him over.
There have been plenty of other incidents, including allegations of making a homophobic slur via social media, battles with MMA media and a brawl against Cormier following a news conference in the lobby of the MGM Grand.
The answer to the first question will be plainly obvious on Saturday. Cormier, too, is one of the elite fighters in the world. He was a dominant heavyweight and is good enough that he’d probably have already been the UFC heavyweight champion if he’d decided to campaign in that weight class.
And Cormier is one of three men, along with flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson and bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz, who deserves to be in the conversation for best fighter in the world not named Jon Jones.
A win over Cormier is a significant accomplishment and if Jones comes up with his second win over the one-time captain of the U.S. Olympic wrestling team in 19 months, it will cement his status as the world’s greatest fighter.
The unanswerable question, of course, is how Jones will conduct his life. At this point, he’s saying all the right things publicly. He seems sincere. One wants to believe he’s changed when he says he’s been sober for 10 months and is no longer a party animal.
He says he had too many yes men around him. And while it’s true that successful professional athletes who make a lot of money attract those kinds of people in droves, it’s not the yes men who caused him to drive into a pole in Binghamton. It wasn’t the yes men who made him T-bone a pregnant woman’s car and then leave the scene.
It wasn’t the yes men who encouraged Jones to get into an argument with a police officer when he was pulled over during a traffic stop.
All of that is, and was, Jon Jones’ fault.
Jones told Yahoo Sports that “for the first time in my adult life, when I go out, I’m just looking to have good clean fun.”
On a conference call, he told reporters, “My career isn’t a coincidence. It’s not luck.”
It’s not. He’s a brilliant fighter who uses his physical attributes expertly and is a genius in the cage who knows how to exploit an opponent’s weakness.
It is luck, though, that he didn’t kill someone while driving under the influence.
The overriding question with Jones is whether or not he’s fully come to accept how lucky he’s been. These traffic accidents he’s had could have been significantly worse. He could have seriously injured, or killed, himself.
He’s lucky that neither the pregnant woman nor her unborn baby were badly injured by his reckless act.
UFC president Dana White, who has had more than his share of battles with Jones, told Yahoo Sports, “A Jon Jones with his head screwed on right is a scary, scary dude.”
Cormier admits Jones’ physical greatness, but he’s repeatedly recoiled at his recklessness in his personal life.
He was so angry, he has said repeatedly, about what he called “his crimes against society,” that he was in a way acting as a vigilante and was looking to beat up Jones on behalf of the public he felt Jones had offended.
“I couldn’t understand how someone who had so much to lose was so willing to toss it all away,” Cormier said.
Jones said he’s fixed the problem in time.
We’ll see.
If Jones is telling the truth and he’s cleaned his life up, he’s good enough to stay on top for another five years.
Only Jon Jones knows, however, whether he’s telling the truth and has really changed, or whether he’s living a lie.
A clean, sober and motivated Jon Jones, however, has the ability to hit a standard that may never be matched.
