Set the punchline aside for a second. Yes, Josh Hokit said Gable Steveson “has stretch marks around his mouth with Jon Jones and sh*t,” and yes, that’s the line Sportskeeda and Yahoo Sports put in their headlines. It’s crude and it’ll get clicks. But a few sentences before that, in comments reported by MMA Weekly, Hokit made the most useful observation anyone has offered about Steveson’s MMA career so far. He talked about where Steveson trains.
The backdrop: rumors surfaced that Steveson and Hokit had been working together at Jackson-Wink in Albuquerque. Hokit shut that down fast. He said Steveson claims to train at his gym but isn’t there, and that he’d given Steveson a chance to train with him and Steveson never showed. Sherdog summed it up on X with “The gym is part of the rivalry now,” which is accurate, and also the most interesting part of this whole mess.
The room matters more than the mentor
Here’s what the sources lay out. Jon Jones was permanently barred from the main Jackson-Wink gym in 2021. Since then, according to MMA Weekly, Jones has been training Steveson privately, mostly away from elite-level coaches. And Steveson, the Olympic gold medalist who climbed into the spotlight under Jones’ guidance after debuting in the UFC, was on the wrong end of a first-round knockout in his last fight. MMA Weekly described his future as uncertain.
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Put those facts next to each other and Hokit’s jab lands harder than the joke does. Jones is one of the most decorated fighters who ever lived, and plenty of people consider him the greatest of all time. That makes him a great resource. It doesn’t make him a training room. A wrestler crossing over to MMA needs bodies: heavyweights who’ll punch him in sparring, coaches who’ve seen 500 versions of the same entry mistake, someone on the mat who’ll catch the habit Jones never had to fix because Jones never had it. Private sessions with a legend can’t replicate a full room of 250-pound killers, and the first-round knockout is the receipt.
The irony is almost too neat. Jackson-Wink is the gym famous for building Jones. Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn are now building Hokit, and the results are hard to argue with. Hokit went from Contender Series prospect to headlining Madison Square Garden in roughly 15 months with the UFC, and he’s now on the verge of heavyweight gold. Jones’ pupil, meanwhile, is somewhere else entirely, and the guy who actually lives in that room is telling everyone the door was open.
Steveson threw the first shot
It’s easy to cast Hokit as the instigator here because he’s the one with the NSFW quote. The record says otherwise. By Hokit’s account, Steveson was the one running his mouth first, telling Hokit he should drop to 205 or he’d get beat. Hokit said he’d been trying to stay away from all of that.
That tracks with how this rivalry has been built. Both men are standout collegiate wrestlers (Hokit wrestled NCAA Division I), so their names were always going to get stapled together. Steveson chose to push it. Telling a heavyweight contender to cut to light heavyweight is a fine bit of trash talk when you’re winning. It reads differently after a first-round knockout loss.
Hokit also went for the tic-tac-toe bit, explaining that he avoids the game because he doesn’t want squares around his circle. I’ve watched a lot of fighter media and I’m still not sure that one parses, but the message is clear enough. Steveson is outside the circle, and Hokit wants that on the record.
The fight can wait
To his credit, Hokit didn’t close the door on actually fighting Steveson. He said that once he’s champion, he’ll give a fight to whatever name makes sense, and added that they’ll see whether Steveson can make his way back.
That’s the right order of operations, and it’s a polite way of saying Steveson has work to do before this matchup means anything. Hokit has a title shot to worry about. Steveson has a knockout loss to recover from and, I’d argue, a training setup to rethink. The Olympic credentials are real. The wrestling base is elite. None of it protects your chin if the people around you every day can’t drill the defense that keeps you upright when the takedown isn’t there.
Jones can teach Steveson a lot about distance, about patience and about winning rounds a dozen different ways. What he can’t do, by himself, is supply the daily sparring and full coaching staff that turned him into Jon Jones in the first place. Hokit has those things. He’ll walk into his title fight with Jackson and Winkeljohn in his corner, and if Steveson ever wants to meet him in a cage, he should probably find a room that looks a lot more like the one Hokit is training in.
