On Jon Jones, Daniel Cormier, and the ethical lessons of a prizefight

On the UFC 214 pre-fight conference call, Jon Jones lost his patience. He just couldn’t understand, he said. Why did UFC light heavyweight champ Daniel Cormier insist on making him out to be the bad guy? Why did one guy have to be the villain just so the other could be the hero?

“This whole thing has become an attack on Jon Jones’ character,” Jones said. “I feel like when Daniel loses, he’ll be able to say, ‘Well, I’m a (expletive) good guy. I’m a good guy, and at least people will respect me for a being a good champion when I had that belt in Jon’s absence.’ And I think that he deserves respect because he is a good guy, but you don’t have to (expletive) on other people to try to make yourself seem that much better, Daniel.”

It’s tough to know how seriously we’re supposed to take those remarks. Isn’t Jones (22-1 MMA, 16-1 UFC) the same guy who was on Instagram just last week mocking Cormier’s (19-1 MMA, 8-1 UFC) questionable use of a towel at his last weigh-in? Isn’t he the same guy who rubs Cormier’s nose in his loss, as well as in his past failures as a wrestler, every chance he gets? To go back even further, isn’t this the same man who once asked: “Hey (expletive), are you still there?”

If he’s decided that it’s a bad thing to elevate yourself while denigrating someone else, it’s a new development in his thinking.

And yet there is at least a hint of sincerity there. On this call Jones tried to lure Cormier into some sort of civility pact, suggesting at one point that the two fighters answer the questions put to them and refrain from addressing one another.

“Can we be professional?” Jones asked.

As if these two haven’t already brawled at a press conference in the lobby of MGM Grand. As if the animosity and the lack of professionalism that resulted from it aren’t a major force in selling the rematch.

But questions of character and reputation seem to be on the former champion’s mind these days, and it’s not hard to guess why. The first time he lost his UFC light-heavyweight title, it was after he’d fled the scene of an accident that injured a pregnant woman. The second time, it was for a drug-test failure that torpedoed the planned rematch with Cormier at the biggest UFC event of the year.

That doesn’t even touch on all the smaller controversies of Jones’ career, from testing positive for cocaine to wrapping his Bentley around a telephone pole to the countless social media shenanigans over the years. Many of those mistakes were chronicled in the UFC’s almost-cinematic promo for this event, which focused heavily on the rise and subsequent self-destructive fall of MMA’s bratty wunderkind, the misbehaving prodigy named “Bones” Jones.

Here, in highlight form, were the man’s most public failings of character. It was an honest accounting, too, as Jones admitted this week. So can we blame him if he’s feeling a little tired of playing the role of the dirtbag we love to hate?

We can’t seem to resist those narratives in buildup to a big fight. We also ought to know by now that they usually have zero bearing on the fight itself. Nice guys get knocked out all the time, and some real scumbags have paraded around in shiny gold belts. The outcome of a fight tells us nothing about the ethics of the participants.

That’s something we might want to remember as we get caught up in the drama of this particular redemption tale. If Jones gets his belt back, it won’t be proof that he’s turned his life around. His life inside the cage was never anything but perfect, even when he was out of control as soon as his feet hit the arena parking lot.

All a Jones win would do is return us to the established order at light heavyweight. Jones back on top, Cormier back to the sympathetic embrace of his teammates, the MMA world back to wondering whether or not this time will be any different.

That’s the tough part about changing this narrative. If the story is that you suck, all you have to do is be good. If the story is that you choke in big fights, you win the big fights and you shut everybody up.

But if the story is that you’re a bad guy who can’t behave himself like a decent person when he’s not locked in a cage on TV? The only way you can undo that is by not being that guy anymore, which requires a sort of proof through inaction. It becomes about what you don’t do, and you have to not do it for a sufficiently long time to overcome our hard-earned skepticism.

That’s not so easy. For someone like Jones, it might prove to be a lot harder than simply beating the best in the world in a televised cage fight.

For complete coverage of UFC 214, check out the UFC Events section of the site.