The only loss on Jon Jones’ record was a disqualification where the referee asked the fouled fighter how he was; the fighter is deaf. The fighter Jones fell to was himself.
Then Ronda Rousey fell to Holly Holm. And then Conor McGregor fell to Nate Diaz.
Rousey had been so confident she mused that she had a chance at defeating Cain Velasquez. McGregor took to calling the round he would win in, and hinted the information was coming from a mystical source.
Jones looks back on Rousey and McGregor, and sees a cautionary tale of fighters who think they cannot be beat.
“I know that I can be beat and I think that’s why I haven’t been beat,” said Jones, as transcribed by Dave Doyle for Yahoo Sports, “where some of these guys really start to believe their hype.”
“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 all these years, just how seriously I take it and how much I don’t know.”
“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.
“To the fans and other fighters, they probably look at me as close to unbeatable. Whereas if you spend time [at his gym], you see that I’m definitely not a guy that wins every day. I just got beat in a five-mile run by a kid that’s like 15, 16 years old. So, I know that I’m not unbeatable.”
UFC interim light heavyweight champion Jon Jones fights light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier in the main event of UFC 200 on July 9.
