The longer UFC light heavyweight champion
Jon Jones goes without booking his next fight, the weirder the story gets.
Just look at how quickly UFC President Dana White changed his mind about what’s really happening with the champ. Last week White explained the delay in booking Jones’ next fight by
saying the UFC was “doing a new deal with him.”
This week, however, the
UFC prez just can’t understand where people got the idea that this all about doing a new deal.
“Just to clear up a couple things, people think we’re in contract negotiations with Jon Jones – we’re not,” White told
UFC.com. “Jon Jones still has five fights left on his contract.”
Oh, good. Glad that’s cleared up. Somebody should let the Dana White of last week know. They might also want to tell the Lorenzo Fertitta of
this video blog, since he very clearly says that he’ll be meeting with Jones’ manager to extend his contract and “walk him through” why it makes sense to rematch Alexander Gustafsson.
(“Are we going to get a deal done?” Fertitta asks Jones’ manager, Wayne Harriman, who replies, “I hope so.” If only someone had told them both that it was unnecessary.)
The Dana White of this week knows what’s up, though. As he told the company website, the real hold-up is Jones’ refusal to grant a rematch to Gustafsson, because apparently he’d rather fight fresh light heavyweight contender Daniel Cormier.
“So what we’re doing right now is trying to get him to sign the bout agreement for Gustafsson,” White said. “He doesn’t want to fight Gustafsson. … Lorenzo and I have a meeting with Jones on Thursday to get him to sign the bout agreement, and he’s asking to fight Cormier instead.”
Is that true? Hard to say. Jones has been
conspicuously tight-lipped lately, and for all we know White might change his story again next week. The UFC’s willingness to air this particular point of contention in public does tell us something about where it stands with one of its biggest stars, though. I’m just not sure it’s the message the UFC really wants to send.
Say we take the most recent explanation at face value, ignoring the substantial body of evidence that suggests this is more about the terms of a contract extension than pure opponent selection. The UFC seems to be not so subtly pushing the idea that Jones would like to avoid Gustafsson, and also that he’s committing the champion’s sin of trying to handpick his opponents.
That seems like a weird route to take because, for one, Cormier is arguably just as tough an opponent as Gustafsson, if not tougher. For another, how exactly does this strategy makes things easier or better for you, if you’re the UFC?
If you successfully convince fans that one of your own champions – not to mention one who seems like the most readily available heir apparent to departed (or at least gradually departing) superstars like Georges St-Pierre and Anderson Silva – is ducking certain fights, haven’t you just made your own job as a promoter (as in, the one responsible for convincing us to pay to see this man perform) more difficult?
And if it’s all part of a negotiating strategy to remind Jones that the UFC has a powerful website where it can undermine him with quips from the company president, isn’t that likely to make him more rather than less intractable when he finally sits down opposite White and Fertitta this week?
Another strange piece to the puzzle, however, is White’s own admission that he and Fertitta have yet to sit down and discuss this with Jones himself. If that meeting is happening privately on Thursday, then why broadcast your position publicly on Monday? Unless, of course, you’re trying to turn up the pressure on him via the court of public opinion.
Whether that’s working depends on who you ask. Certainly the comments section of the UFC’s “exclusive” with White is littered with comments from people who are pretty sure that the most dominant light heavyweight champ in recent history is an irredeemable coward. In other words, the Internet is still the Internet.
Still, if you were being offered a contract extension before your next title defense – and regardless of what the UFC says now, its executives are literally on video attempting to make such a deal – how much would you really care?
Because those people on UFC.com? They’ve probably already made up their minds about you anyway. And for Jones, fights with both Gustafsson and Cormier seem practically inevitable now. All that remains to be decided is the order and the compensation.
