Jon Jones recently spoke about fellow UFC superstars in Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey suffering losses on their last bouts. Apart from a disqualification in a bout he was dominating back in 2009, Jones has managed to basically have his record unblemished through the years. He credits this to always ‘losing’ in the gym, and not believing on his own hype like he thinks McGregor and Rousey did.
“There’s a lot of guys who are on my team currently, a lot of guys on my team who aren’t in the UFC who can beat me on any given day. I get taken down all the time in practice. I get hit pretty hard. I get tapped out all the time in practice,” Jones said. “To the fans and other fighters, they probably look at me as close to unbeatable, whereas if you spend time with me, you see that I’m definitely not a guy that wins every day.”
“I know that I can be beat and I think that’s why I haven’t been beat, where some of these guys really start to believe their hype,” he said. “Ronda Rousey, they were saying she’s the best fighter of all time and best athlete in the world, stuff like that and I was happy for her to hear those types of accolades, but once I realized that maybe she was starting to believe it herself, I knew she was in a dangerous spot. Conor McGregor saying these things about just being the baddest dude and ‘I’ll beat anybody at any weight class,’ that’s foolish stuff. When you believe the hype to that level, that’s when you’re in danger.”
“I talk about being confident in winning all the time, but the reason why I tend to always win is because at the end of the day I’m more nervous than any other fighter. It causes me to spend every night until 3 o’clock in the morning just on my laptop watching the same damn fight over and over again with a notebook, thinking about the ways I can lose, thinking about what I need to do. That’s really what I attribute to being undefeated for all these years, just how seriously I take it and how I know how much I don’t know.”
Jones also recently joked about McGregor and Rousey when asked about his UFC 200 bout as a way to comeback to re-join the two stars in the limelight.
“Well, I’ve never lost a fight,” Jones said with a laugh on a recent ESPN appearance. “I’m the leader of the winner’s circle.”
“But yeah, you know I was out of the game for over a year and it and in my absence these guys’ star definitely climbed a lot,” he said. “People always ask if I’m competing with with Conor or Ronda. I’m not at all. I think there’s enough room in the sky for many stars. We all bring so much different things to the table, different demographics and viewership so I’m just grateful to be a part of of the conversation again of being top dog.”
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