Jon Jones sat and waited from afar for the past two and a half years while UFC’s big-money era started without him. That’s why, mere minutes after his perfect finish of Daniel Cormier on Saturday, Jones moved on from the best performance of his career to the prospect of something — and someone — larger.
“Brock Lesnar, if you want to know what it feels like to get your ass kicked by a guy who weighs 40lbs less than you, meet me in the Octagon,” Jones howled, in a statement directed at the pro wrestling star and former UFC heavyweight champion.
But why Lesnar who, at the age of 40, is well past his prime?
With his old rival Cormier in the rear view mirror, Jones is setting out to capture the money that Conor McGregor has managed to engineer from his UFC career. The Irishman’s coup of luring Floyd Mayweather and the UFC into a massive boxing spectacle in August is impressive, and more than ever his peers, albeit a select few, want to conjure their own hefty paydays.
“Conor McGregor has been a tremendous inspiration to me,” Jones said. “He has shown me and the upper echelon of the sport that these huge paydays are possible. I never thought during my time as champion as a fighter that I would see fighters making $7m or $8m [in UFC], or the $100m that he’s making on this Mayweather fight. It’s been an inspiration that he can do it. It’s like the first guy to go to the moon, right? Now everyone wants to go to the moon. That’s what McGregor has done for me. So, yeah, facing a guy like Lesnar, getting the world excited about an MMA fight is what we’re here for.”
Jones, Lesnar and the UFC are sure to benefit from the arrangement. But does a bout pitting perhaps mixed martial arts’ greatest fighter against a retired heavyweight who remains subject to suspension from competition for six months upon his return live up to the mission that sport has long laid out for us?
If Jones is ready to make the move up from light heavyweight, why not take on the champion above him? Stipe Miocic is poised to establish the UFC record for heavyweight title defenses, and a contest between the two champions would surely do solid business while preserving the notion that fights in the Octagon mean something more than money.
Perhaps that’s because while McGregor has been a grand risk-taker during his rise to superstardom, Jones, for all his reckless decisions away from the cage, comes off as risk-averse. That may seem an odd assessment of a person willing to stand in a locked cage with Lesnar, but it still stands.
“Most people don’t really know who [Miocic] is, all respect to him. So if I’m going to sacrifice being the smaller guy, I think stylistically Brock would be a fight that makes way more sense, and the payday would be tremendous,” said Jones this weekend. “What it would do for our sport would be tremendous. Much greater impact. So for many reasons a Brock Lesnar fight just makes more sense to me.”
There’s the rub. Do money fights between all-time greats and all-time showmen expand combat sports, or sentence them to an irredeemable downward trajectory? How long fans accept one-off affairs like Mayweather-McGregor or Lesnar-Jones (which would, at least, be under MMA rules rather than those of boxing) without taking it out on the wider world of combat sports remains to be seen.
UFC president Dana White said that Saturday’s rematch between Cormier and Jones, which capped a stellar UFC 214 that featured welterweight champion Tyron Woodley’s latest defense as well as the crowning of longtime women’s star Cris “Cyborg” Justino at 145 pounds, was trending past the 1m buy mark on pay-per-view. But figures like that aren’t common, and it can force the hands of promoters and fighters to manufacture big events out of thin air rather than invest the time to build contests with legitimate intrigue.
In the meantime, if moving to heavyweight to challenge Miocic is too high a hill to climb for the man who wants to be known as the best ever, Jones may be left to mop up a weight class he has already put his stamp on. Waiting in the light heavyweight wings is Sweden’s Alexander Gustafsson, who gave Jones the most difficult test of his career back in 2013, or Switzerland’s Volkan Oezdemir, who starched British light heavyweight Jimi Manuwa to open the pay-per-view portion of Saturday’s UFC 214 card.
“I feel the best is yet to come,” Jones said. “At age 30 I feel I’m in my physical and mental prime. And just believing that will allow me to train at a higher level and expect more out of myself. I have my best years ahead of me and that should be very scary to these light heavyweights.”
For better or worse, Jones’s first competitive decision after recapturing the UFC title appears to place money above sport.
