With the Mayweather vs. McGregor World Tour sucking the oxygen out of the MMA world, you might have forgotten the fact that UFC 214 is coming up on July 29th and it’s by far the best UFC show of the year with three great title fights at the top of the card. Headlining is a rematch between longtime rivals Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones, a fight that almost happened at UFC 200 until Jones tested positive for drugs he linked to ‘dick pills.’
It was just the latest in a long string of WTF moments that had effectively derailed Jones’ career over the past couple of years. From testing positive for cocaine to driving into a pregnant woman’s car and then fleeing into the hills of Albuquerque, there was no headline too strange when it came to Jon and his outside the cage behavior. UFC president Dana White even swore after UFC 200 that Jones wouldn’t headline a UFC again, but here he is at the top of UFC 214. Hopefully he doesn’t test positive for cocaine again, because this statement in a new feature with Bleacher Report doesn’t sound like someone who’s sworn the stuff off.
“As far as me doing coke before a fight, that’s not me trying to be a bad guy. That’s me frickin’ doing a bump—you know, at a party. The truth of the matter is, you’d be surprised how many people have done coke. I’ve been around some of the greatest athletes in the country. Athletes with a lot bigger names than me do coke. But people don’t talk about it.
“I just like to have a good time, man,” Jones says. “If you can afford to smoke a little weed, and do a little coke, and still win world titles, who’s to tell you you can’t? I understand these things are illegal. And once you get caught doing it, it’s humiliating. But at the same time, I’m not an addict or anything like that. You don’t see me walking around weighing fucking 100 pounds with my teeth rotting out and scabs all over my face.”
Keep in mind you don’t have to look like a meth head to be an addict, and you don’t even have to be an addict to have a problem with drugs. At this point, with Jon being the only UFC champion in the history of the sport to be stripped of his title twice, we think it’s safe to say he might at the very least have a problem. That’s not even taking into account the long swirling rumors of heavy cocaine use where no one close to Jones or the circles he ran in were surprised when he finally flunked a drug test.
On a personal level, I generally agree with most of what Jon Jones says in the above statement. But he’s one of the best mixed martial artists in the world, getting paid millions of dollars to headline massive events that are policed by USADA under one of the most stringent drug testing programs in sports today. If I was Dana White, my blood pressure would be through the roof. July 29th can’t come soon enough.
