I desperately want to like Jon Jones. Jon Jones is an incredibly talented fighter, probably one of the best that we’ve ever seen, which only time will tell. The problem with Jon Jones is that anything he does to endear himself to the world inside of the ring is undone by his constant barrage of ridiculousness outside of the ring. It’s almost like Jon Jones the fighter and Jon Jones the person are so completely different that it might as well be two different people.
Fans loved the Jon Jones fight against Alexander Gustafsson and want to see a rematch between the two more than anything else. In a business-sense, a rematch between the two should be huge, but the only problem seems to be that Jones is finding any and every way to try to undercut Alexander Gustafsson and make the rematch less meaningful to the world. How? He claims now that he only went “80%” against him, which is just as ridiculous as Johny Hendricks talking like that after fighting GSP. [source]
“Going into the Gustafsson fight I had just beaten Chael Sonnen, somebody that almost beat Anderson Silva twice, and I dominated Chael Sonnen in a minute and thirty seconds,’ said Jones. “I think for the first time in my career I really started to feel myself. I really started to think, ‘Maybe I’ve got this extraordinary talent and maybe I just can’t be touched.’
“I went 80% [against Gustafsson]. I’m not making any excuses. Gustafsson did a great job in the fight but I know that I had a lot more in me. I did some of the cardio tests that I normally do and my numbers weren’t the same. Me knowing that, I still went into the fight thinking, ‘Well, since I’ve performed excellent, maybe I’ll still perform really really high, do really good and the fight may be a little closer if I just put half the effort in. I learned a lesson the hard way that you have to give full effort.”