Jon Jones wasn’t left off the UFC White House card. By his own account, he left himself off.
Jones said on the Prince St. Pizza YouTube show that sitting out the event was his call, and that a deal was there to be made until it wasn’t. “It was my decision. I could’ve fought, we just couldn’t come up to an agreement,” he said, before adding that it’s “one of my small regrets that I have to live with forever.”
That’s about as straight an answer as you’ll get from Jones on business. He didn’t blame the matchmakers or a phantom injury. He also didn’t say, at least in the clip circulated by Championship Rounds, what the sticking point was. Terms is a big word. It can mean money, opponent, date, or all three, and he left it there.
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The interview wandered into legacy talk too, which is where it got more interesting. Jones said Ilia Topuria was the first fighter he saw as a real threat to his spot at the top of the all-time list. “Honestly I thought that Ilia would be the first threat to being considered the greatest of all time. And then we saw what happened to him,” Jones said.
What happened, per MMA Fighting’s Morning Report, is that Topuria lost on the White House card. So the guy Jones figured might eventually pass him took his shot on the biggest stage the UFC has built, and came up short, on a night Jones chose to watch from somewhere else. You don’t need a novelist to see why that one stings a little for him.
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Jones still has admirers in high places. Jose Aldo, talking to MMA Fighting this week mostly to roast Movsar Evloev, held Jones up as the model of a fighter who sells. Aldo said Jones “has every skill in the game” and compared him to Maradona, a star who makes a mess away from the sport and then destroys people once he’s inside it. “Everybody likes him. Everybody wants to watch him fight,” Aldo said.
That’s the whole problem with Jones saying no to the White House. The UFC built an event designed to be bigger than anything it had done, and the most bankable name of his generation, by Aldo’s reckoning, decided the numbers didn’t work. Fans wanted him on it. The promotion presumably wanted him on it. Jones wanted it enough to call it a lifelong regret a few months later. Somewhere in between, nobody blinked.
The UFC rolls on regardless. UFC 333 goes Saturday, Oct. 24, in Abu Dhabi, with Alexander Volkanovski defending the featherweight title against the undefeated Evloev, who is 10-0 in the Octagon with all 10 wins on the cards.
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My take: I respect a fighter who answers the question plainly, and Jones did. But “small regret” is underselling it. You get one chance to fight on the White House lawn, and the guy who calls himself the greatest ever turned it down over a contract. That’s the detail people will remember long after they’ve forgotten whatever the terms were.
