With a taunting, swaggering win over his rival, UFC champ Jon Jones comes into focus

Jon Jones

If you were expecting the rivalry to end with bro hugs and bygones, you haven’t been paying attention.

Jon Jones ended his successful UFC light heavyweight title defense by celebrating during Daniel Cormier’s last ill-fated takedown, then bringing his hands down just long enough to paste his longtime tormentor with one final punch to drive the point home.

And that point? Jones (21-1 MMA, 15-1 UFC) is the world’s best light heavyweight, possibly the best fighter in the world, and one who is well on his way to cementing his place as the best in MMA history. Oh yeah, he knows it, too. And he doesn’t particularly care what you think about it.

For a guy who could recently be seen apologizing to the MGM Grand and all the kids out there – you know, in between profane taunts of Cormier (15-1 MMA, 4-1 UFC) – it’s a major shift. It’s also about time.

But first, the fight, the one that pitted the dominant 205-pound champ against the unbeaten Olympic wrestler who promised to be his toughest test. The matchup made for three very competitive rounds followed by two very emphatic ones.

Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones

First it was Jones, then it was Cormier, and then it was Jones, Jones, Jones. The junior college wrestler took the Olympian to the floor, shrugged off the takedown attempts that came back in response, and then leaned on him in the clinch until the will to fight seemed to slowly drain out of the formerly indomitable challenger.

It was a strategy that seemed to grow and evolve, moving from flashy show-off stuff to slow, steady violence. Cormier was supposed to be all about the grind? Jones seemed to make a point of proving that he could do it too– and better.

That’s Jones’ game, after all. He loves taking the fight to the other guy’s strengths, defeating him as well as demoralizing him. If he can do it to a guy who’s been picking at him for months, so much the better. We knew Jones could be great. Now we also know he can be mean.

If his post-fight remarks are any indication, we also know that he’s done pretending to be anything other than who he is. That’s a step in the right direction for Jones, whose personality shifts were a focal point of the UFC’s marketing for this fight. Commercials showed him being one person when he thought we were looking, and then another when he thought the cameras were off.

They weren’t, of course, because they never really are for a superstar pro athlete. That’s why the accidental byproduct of the feud and the running satellite feed might be a Jones fans can finally believe, whether they like him or not.

Not only did he taunt Cormier and the fans who bought his “Break Bones” T-shirts in his post-fight interview inside the cage, he also took to the FOX Sports 1 post-fight show to explain that, even after winning this five-round fight, he neither liked nor respected Cormier.

“I hope he’s somewhere crying right now,” Jones said. “I’m sure he is.”

That’s the Jones we might have suspected was lurking beneath the choir boy exterior, though we rarely got to see it. Instead we got the version he wanted us to see, which was neither convincing nor accurate.

This one, the guy who knows he’s the baddest man on the planet, and looks forward to putting a hurting on anyone who would dispute it? That’s someone who makes sense. That’s a champion who knows how great he is.

Maybe, finally, it’s also one who realizes how futile it is to pretend to be anybody else.

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