One of the undeniable greatest talents in the history of mixed martial arts, Jon Jones, retired over the weekend, and the sport is all the better because of it.
The longtime UFC champion has certain accomplishments that may never be matched and is widely considered the sport’s GOAT (greatest of all-time), however, Jones now exits the spotlight with a tarnished and tainted legacy.
Jones’s rise to UFC stardom was full of hype and celebration, and his reign atop the sport lasted the better part of a decade, yet in a stark contrast, his retirement was announced with a passive comment made by Dana White at a post-fight press conference for a UFC Fight Night in Azerbaijan.
Eight words. A few seconds.
“Jon Jones called us last night and retired.”
Although none of his opponents ever officially got the better of him in the cage, Jones did not retire with an unblemished professional record, which is all too fitting considering how his UFC career unfolded.
The Rochester, N.Y., native began his MMA career in 2008 at age 20, and within just four months, the blue-chip prospect had caught the attention of UFC brass and signed with the organization.
Jones debuted with a decision win over Andre Gusmao at UFC 87, his next bout was featured on the main card of UFC 94 opposite established star Stephan Bonnar, and his third was a featured prelim spot on the historic UFC 100 card.
The only official loss of his UFC career was in his fourth Octagon appearance, but it was due to disqualification. Jones was disqualified for using illegal “12-to-6 elbows” on Matt Hamill late in 2009 in a fight he was completely dominating. It was the first setback of his young career, yet it didn’t derail his momentum whatsoever.
In fact, Jones’s run from 2010 to 2015 is perhaps the most impressive six-year stretch fight fans have witnessed in the UFC — though Anderson Silva supporters may protest that.
After fracturing Brandon Vera’s face with ground-and-pound in three minutes, then embarrassing past UFC title challenger Vladimir Matyushenko within two minutes, he handed Ryan Bader his first loss by making the future two-weight Bellator MMA champ quit. It earned Jones a title shot just six weeks later.
The day he won the light-heavyweight title from former Pride FC legend Mauricio “Shogun” Rua at UFC 128 has gone down in MMA infamy. Not only did Jones accept the fight with Rua on relatively short notice after Rua’s original opponent, Rashad Evans, was injured — Evans and Jones were teammates at the time under trainer Greg Jackson in Albuquerque, N.M, where Jones spent the majority of his career — earlier in the day Jones had played the role of real-life superhero.
While meditating in a park in New Jersey hours before heading to the Prudential Center, Jones helped thwart a robbery and subdue a larcenist who had smashed a car window and robbed an elderly couple near where Jones and his coaches were located.
Apart from a minor traffic incident in 2009, this was a time in history before Jones’s legal troubles and failed drug tests began damaging his image outside of the cage. That night was a changing of the guard in the UFC’s marquee division, and Jones became the youngest champion in UFC history.
His first string of title defences were consecutive wins over past champions Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Lyoto Machida, Rashad Evans (who was no longer his teammate) and Vitor Belfort.
Jones fought through a broken toe in his stoppage win over Chael Sonnen; his five-round classic against Alexander Gustafsson has already been inducted into the Fight Wing of the UFC Hall of Fame, and it’s a fight for which Jones famously did not take his training seriously.
After another title defence over future champion Glover Teixeira, Jones’s epic rivalry with Daniel Cormier began.
There were signs early in his tenure as champion that Jones’s partying and substance use were becoming an issue, including a 2012 incident when he crashed his Bentley into a utility pole with his two female passengers suffering minor injuries. Jones was uninjured but taken into custody after refusing to take a sobriety test. He escaped with a $1,000 fine, and his driver’s license was suspended for six months.
His feud with Cormier seemed to bring both the best and worst out of Jones. The pair brawled at a press event in a hotel lobby in 2014. Jones was fined $50,000 by the Nevada State Athletic Commission and received 40 hours of community service in Las Vegas.
Jones won a unanimous decision over Cormier at UFC 182 in January of 2015 in arguably his toughest in-cage challenge to that point in his career. Three days after the win, it was revealed Jones had tested positive for cocaine metabolites during an out-of-competition drug screening prior to the fight, and he checked into a rehab facility.
Jones was fined $25,000 by the UFC for violating the promotion’s Athlete Code of Conduct policy for the failed drug test, and things got much worse for Jones four months later.
In late April of 2015, he turned himself in to Albuquerque police after a hit-and-run incident that left a pregnant woman injured. Jones fled from the scene, and marijuana was found in his vehicle. He later pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident involving injury, avoiding jail time but receiving up to 18 months of supervised probation.
This incident resulted in Jones getting stripped of his UFC title and suspended indefinitely.
The UFC reinstated Jones in October of that year, though the following March, he was booked into county jail in Albuquerque for violating his probation after yet another driving incident for which he was given five citations.
Cormier had become champion after winning and defending the vacant title during Jones’s absence. The pair were scheduled for a rematch at UFC 197, but Cormier withdrew with an injury, and Jones instead won an interim title for a somewhat lacklustre decision victory over Ovince Saint Preux.
Jones vs. Cormier 2 was rescheduled to headline UFC 200, however, mere days before the anticipated rematch, Jones was flagged by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA was the UFC’s drug testing partner at the time) for a doping violation and was pulled from the event. Jones appealed the decision and, through tears at a press conference, insisted he didn’t cheat, but later that year, he received a retroactive one-year suspension and was stripped of his interim belt.
After serving his suspension, Jones returned at UFC 214 in July 2017 to face Cormier for the undisputed title. Jones won the fight with a highlight-reel third-round technical knockout of Cormier in the most impressive outing of his career.
That second win over Cormier remains tainted, though, just like Jones’s drug samples that confirmed he had steroids in his system when he knocked out Cormier. The win was overturned and changed to a no-contest, and Jones was stripped of a title for the third time.
After a year-and-a-half away from the sport, Jones returned to win a vacant title thanks to a second victory over Gustafsson at UFC 232, as Cormier had in the meantime moved up a division, where he became UFC heavyweight champ.
That UFC 232 event had to be moved from Las Vegas to California because the Nevada commission would not license Jones to fight after a random drug screening showed the same anabolic steroid found in Jones’s drug tests ahead of UFC 214 was still in his system.
This was around the time when the MMA fan base learned the term “picogram” because of this controversy. The California commission licensed Jones, allowed the fight to happen under a Double Jeopardy-esque ruling (you can’t be charged twice for the same crime), and Jones did pass all his post-fight drug screenings.
Gustafsson was not the same fighter in their rematch, which Jones won by TKO, and Jones’s next three title defences in his second reign as undisputed champ also left much to be desired.
Jones fought back-to-back middleweights who had moved up a division, beating Anthony Smith in a bout during which Jones was deducted two points for an illegal knee, and narrowly won a split decision over Thiago Santos, who fought most of that match compromised after tearing knee ligaments early in the fight.
A few months before his fight with Santos, Jones was charged with battery for an incident involving a woman at a strip club. Jones later pleaded no contest.
Jones’s final appearance at 205 pounds, though we didn’t know it would be at the time, was perhaps the most controversial decision of his career. Jones won a unanimous decision over Dominick Reyes at UFC 247 in February of 2020, which remains disputed to this day. Jones retained his title, but most onlookers and media scoring the fight thought Reyes had won.
Roughly six weeks after that Reyes bout, Jones was arrested on multiple charges, including aggravated DWI and negligent use of a firearm after he was drunk and fired a gun into the air in Albuquerque. A couple of months after that, Jones vacated his title partly because of a financial dispute with the UFC and hinted that his future would be at heavyweight.
The following year, in 2021, just a day after his first fight with Gustafsson was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame, he was arrested and charged with domestic battery for an incident at a hotel involving his then-fiancée that occurred in front of his children. That charge was later dropped and Jones, at the time, vowed to cut alcohol out of his life.
His heavyweight title tenure was a farce
Jones ended up taking a three-year hiatus after his Reyes win and focused on bulking up to become a heavyweight. During this time, MMA fans witnessed the rise of Francis Ngannou.
Jones conveniently, or strategically, waited until Ngannou was no longer in the UFC before finally announcing his return to competition. Jones was paired with Ciryl Gane, who had only begun MMA in 2018 and had lost a title fight to Ngannou in 2022.
Gane laid an egg at UFC 285 in March of 2023 as Jones earned a submission win in two minutes to win the title Ngannou was stripped of due to a contract dispute.
Jones became the UFC’s new undisputed heavyweight champion even though in reality it was disputed since Ngannou was (and still technically is) the lineal champ.
Although Jones will go down as one of the only two-weight champions in UFC history, Jones was never the best heavyweight in MMA, and his heavyweight title reign will be remembered mostly for him ducking Tom Aspinall, who won an interim title late in 2023 while Jones was recovering from a labrum injury.
Instead of the two heavyweight titleholders facing each other, Jones, along with Dana White and UFC brass, steadfastly insisted on him facing 42-year-old former champion Stipe Miocic for his first heavyweight title defence. This was despite the fact that Miocic was coming off a devastating knockout loss to Ngannou in 2021 and had one foot in retirement for several years. Not to mention the fact that Aspinall was active, healthy and had even defended the interim belt.
Jones beat a well-past-his-prime Miocic at UFC 309 this past November at Madison Square Garden. He could’ve retired after that win, but instead, he strung the UFC and Aspinall along for months.
“I obviously feel bad for Tom, that he lost all that time and obviously money,” White said of the situation while adding Jones at one point agreed to fight Aspinall but “changed his mind,” and that’s why the fight never came to fruition.
Others suspect Jones never had the intention of facing Aspinall.
Jones even stated he’d be interested in “fun” matchups with the likes of Derrick Lewis, Jamahal Hill, and seemed open to the idea of facing Alex Pereira before “Poatan” lost the 205-pound belt to Magomed Ankalaev, but he outright said he didn’t want to face Aspinall.
The former interim and now-undisputed heavyweight champion correctly predicted he’d retire Jones without ever fighting him.
Jones’s 205-pound career was in like a lion and out like a lamb, and it’s somewhat ironic that Jones returning to the sport and becoming heavyweight champion has ended up doing more damage to his reputation opposed to strengthening his standing in the sport, but that’s the reality.
In fairness to Jones, there’s no denying he truly did boast immense skill, elite fight IQ and finishing instincts, plus impressive durability that complemented his unique genetic gifts like his lengthy limbs. His kicks and ring generalship kept his opponents at bay, and his 84.5-inch arm reach was consistently utilized effectively throughout his career, and he eventually developed one of the best jabs in the sport.
Jones was also a frequent eye-poker, and his oblique kicks were effective and technically within the rules, but considered by many to be cheap and unsportsmanlike.
Jones will likely always have a staunch fan base in some form or another in retirement because of what he was able to accomplish in the cage, but his position as “The GOAT” of MMA will always be in question because, moral judgements aside, his career is littered with asterisks and he was a proven drug cheat.
For the sake of Jones’s family and those who care about him, hopefully he can find some personal solace in retirement and take time to heal, not only from roughly 17 years of fighting professionally but also from whatever internal demons he is battling.
