Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Jones leaves defeats on practice mat
Losses in sparring remind UFC star he’s not invincible
UFC interim light heavyweight champion Jon Jones watched as Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor suffered humbling losses while he was out of action dealing with legal issues.
While Jones knows all fighters are one punch from losing their invincibility, he said his intense workouts at the Jackson-Wink MMA gym in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he routinely gets pushed around, have helped him avoid the same fate as Rousey and McGregor.
“I owe not losing to losing,” Jones said during a media lunch Tuesday in Los Angeles. “I lose a lot in practice. There’s a lot of guys on my team currently, even guys not currently in the UFC, who are able to beat me on any given day.
”I get taken down all the time at practice, I get hit pretty hard, I get tapped out all the time at practice. To the fans and to other fighters, they probably look at me as close to unbeatable, where if you spend time with me, you see that I’m definitely not a guy who wins every day.”
Jones, who will turn 29 on July 19, will try to regain the belt that was stripped from him last year for incidents outside the cage when he fights champion Daniel Cormier in the main event of UFC 200 on Saturday at T-Mobile Arena. Jones defeated Cormier by unanimous decision in January 2015, his last fight before he was suspended by the UFC in April 2015.
While Jones was out of action, Rousey lost her women’s title by knockout against Holly Holm and McGregor was submitted by Nate Diaz after moving up in weight.
Jones said he thinks a few beatings during training could have prevented both losses. He also wonders whether egos needed to be checked at the door.
“I know I’m not unbeatable, so I try to exude confidence, and even when I’m not confident, I pretend to be. It’s important,” Jones said. “But I know I can be beat, and that’s why I haven’t been beat. Some of these guys really start to believe their hype.
“Ronda Rousey, they were saying she’s the greatest fighter of all time and best athlete in the world, and I was happy for her to hear those types of accolades. But once I realized maybe she was starting to believe it herself, I knew she was in a dangerous spot. Conor McGregor was saying these things about being the baddest dude and ‘I’ll beat anyone in any weight class.’ That’s foolish stuff. When you believe the hype to that level, that’s when you’re in danger.”
Jones suffered his only career defeat in 2009 when he was disqualified for throwing illegal elbows against Matt Hamill. He since has won 13 straight fights and is 22-1 as a pro.
Most of those fights haven’t been close. But Jones, who defeated Ovince Saint Preux by unanimous decision on April 23 in his return to the cage, says those beatings during workouts keep him focused.
“I talk about being confident and winning all the time, but the reason I tend to always win is at the end of the day, I’m more nervous than any other fighter,” Jones said. “It causes me to spend every night until 3 a.m. on my laptop watching the same damn fight over and over again with a notebook, thinking about the ways I could lose, thinking about what I need to do.
“That’s really what I attribute being undefeated all these years to, just how seriously I take it and how I know how much I don’t know. It gives me power.”