When Dana White bluntly dismissed Jon Jones as a sell-out and accused him of tarnishing his legacy
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Jon Jones and Dana White
Back in 2020 Jon Jones held the UFC light heavyweight championship and wanted to move up the weights after completely dominating the light heavyweight division. Jones was targeting a fight with heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou and asked for a ridiculous paycheck for his fight.
In an interview with ESPN UFC, President White claimed that for his fight against Francis Ngannou, Jones demanded “Deontay Wilder money,” alluding to the $25–30 million that Wilder reportedly earned after his rematch with Tyson Fury in February 2020. Dana also added that Jones‘ actions had damaged his own reputation.
Speaking to ESPN Dana said, “Being ‘The Greatest of All-Time’ doesn’t mean you get $30 million … Jon Jones has done a lot of things to himself…In one of his tweets he was saying that I tarnished him. I tarnished you? You’ve done a very good job of tarnishing you. I haven’t done that.”
In the end, there was no fight between Francis Ngannou and Jon Jones. After his relationship with the UFC started to deteriorate, Jones announced on social media on August 15, 2020, that he would be giving up the light heavyweight title. “Jonny Bones” has had a challenging journey since making his UFC debut, one that has been marked by both fantastic victories and difficulties outside the Octagon.
The troubled relationship between Jon Jones and Dana White
Jon Jones has always found himself tangled in incidents outside the Octagon that questioned his integrity and sportsmanship. Being it getting involved in a hit-and-run incident or abruptly changing his mind and backing out of the fight with Chael Sonnen, causing Dana White to cancel UFC 151, the first event the promotion had to postponed in nearly eleven years.
Dana White thought it was all planned, even though it caused a lot of trouble to have to refund people’s money and damaged the company’s reputation by failing to deliver the much-promised action. According to him, Jones had the opportunity to fix the situation but decided against doing so in order to preserve his ego.
Following these and other incidents, White even attacked Jones’s trainer, Greg Jackson with negative comments about Greg. White declared that he would never again put Jones in the main event and risk the possibility of him wrecking another show after the UFC 200 main event had to be replaced due to Jones getting busted for possession of illegal drugs.
Jones was arrested in Las Vegas in 2021, hours after being inducted into the Hall of Fame, and was charged with misdemeanor battery and domestic abuse. Upon begin asked about the arrest, UFC president Dana White says, “This guy’s got a lot of demons, man, a lot of demons.”
Regardless of how great a legacy Jon Jones has in the UFC.He’ll always have a tense relationship with the UFC president.
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Soumya Ranjan
(2167 Articles Published)