Jon Jones confident? You're preaching to the choir

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By Chuck Mindenhall

“Guys like Stephan Bonnar, the kinds who can stand up and fight me as well as submit me on the ground,” says Jon “Bones” Jones, “well, that’s probably the worst matchup for me.”

I mean, if that’s the worst matchup, you’d hate to see a great matchup for the upstate New York native. Gosh.

Jones thrashed the stalwart Bonnar with a barrage of spinning backfists, roundhouse kicks and textbook Greco-Roman throws at UFC 94 this past January, winning a very loud unanimous decision. Very loud, and very entertaining. It was only the 21-year-old’s second fight in the UFC, and in both—the other a bout against Andre Gusmao that he took on three weeks notice back at UFC 87 in Minneapolis—he came in as a declarable underdog. In each of those fights he proved oddsmakers wrong, wrong, wrong.

Jones (8-0) won’t be an underdog when he steps in to take on Jake O’Brien at UFC 100 on July 11 in Las Vegas. When people are comparing you to Roy Jones and you execute suplexes and carry an 84.5” wingspan and strike with accuracy and drop spinning elbows into the mix . . . well, you get the picture.

“I really don’t go into the fight with too much of a game plan,” he says. “I have a general idea of what I want to happen, but about 90% of the fight is improv.”

Jonny “Bones” Jones got his nickname because his brothers, both of whom are college football players at Syracuse University, were so big that Jon took on the dubious distinction of being runt of the litter. His younger brother is 260 pounds, and his older brother 295 pounds.

“I had good size in my upper body, but I always had these chicken legs,” he says. “So it would look really funny because I had these big shoulder pads and this huge helmet and I would even wear the cowboy’s collar to make the neck look bigger. And then I had these bony chicken legs, and people would joke ‘you should sue your legs for non-support’ and that type of thing. But as a skinny fighter, I just embraced it.”

That’s not a typical story you hear from a light heavyweight fighter, but then again nothing is very typical about Jon Jones. For one thing, a lot of people wouldn’t walk away from a full-ride to a Division 1 school to wrestle when his life-long dream was to go to a Division 1 school to wrestle.

But when Jones’ 11-month-old daughter Leah came into the picture, he had to do what he had to do.

“I love being a father, and it’s my main sense of motivation,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’m playing a sport or that I can afford to not win or afford to not succeed. When I decided to give up a full scholarship at Iowa State, at that moment I put all my eggs in one basket. I’m dependent on MMA to make it. If I don’t make it or I don’t take it seriously, I let my family down.”

He doesn’t speak about that sort of thing with any detectable sense of pressure, but more as a sense of duty. In fact, as one of the youngest fighters in the UFC you’d think he would be nervous before stepping in against guys who’ve been in wars since he was in junior high, guys like Bonnar.

Here again, Jones isn’t your typical subject. Fighting pales considerably when you’re familiar with the cold isolated term, acapella.

“Nervous, no not at all,” he says. “I’ve been wrestling for a lot of years and been in the finals a lot on big stages. I actually used to sing, growing up, in church and honestly—that’s probably the most nerve-wracking thing. To stand up and sing a solo. So fighting is kind of a piece of cake.”

And you wondered why he looked so calm against ‘The American Psycho’, eh? Jones’ dad is a pastor and he sang for many years gospel music. When asked if his voice is good he says, without the slightest hesitation, “definitely.”

Kid has multiple talents, and he says the damndest things. Things like:

“With the Stephan Bonnar fight I felt like I was Jonny Jones at 15 percent, and right now [heading into the O’Brien fight] I feel like I’ve kicked it up to maybe 17 percent.”

On a 100 percent scale? Granted, Bonnar was coming back from a 15-month lay-off and may not have been 100 percent himself, but Jones came out of the three-round battle in mint condition. Only 15 percent?

“I got a lot more to go,” he says. By his reckoning, about 85 percent more to go. Scary.

If there was one knock on his Bonnar fight it was that he gassed a little towards the end. Training for ‘Irish’ Jake O’Brien, a wrestler with good stand-up who is in his second light heavy fight after a run at heavyweight, he has been going to Cornell to touch up on his wrestling while prepping with Team BombSquad on his cardio. He’s been rolling with the likes of Tamdan “The Barn Cat” McCrory and Erik “Chainsaw” Charles.

For a man who devotes himself to faith and destiny as Jones does, perhaps it’s also an act of divinity that, come July 11 when he gets ready to fight on the biggest show in UFC history, there is something even more cosmologically specific at play.

“My daughter, Leah, will be exactly one year old on July 11, the night of the fight,” he says. “So Daddy’s going to try to give her a really nice birthday gift.”

And just how he does it is what crowds over the spectator’s sense of wonder.

“I’ve watched Jake O’Brien fight, and I know he has great boxing and pretty good wrestling,” he says. “Those are his two strengths, and I’m prepared for that. He’s a mixed martial artist so I’m sure he knows submissions, I’m sure he knows kicks. Right now I’m just preparing for him to be the best Jake O’Brien that he’s ever been. I’d expect nothing less. But, stylistically, I think it’s a great matchup for me.”

A great matchup? See the first paragraph to try and feel the entire gravity of what he’s saying.

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