Cormier: Jones like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde
“My thing is this: when you look at the times that he tweets, it’s almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the day, Jon is one person. Then at night, he’s a different person.”
Much trash talk in MMA is manufactured, a gleeful effort to get asses in seats. Some of it is real. For example, UFC heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier and former champion Jon Jones don’t get along.
Cormier recently appeared on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and discussed the latest in a seemingly endless chain of messages by Jones on his social nework, that he quickly thinks the better of and deletes.
When Cormier pulled out of their fight early this month, Jones responded respectfully.
“I don’t wish injuries on anyone,” he tweeted. “I hope you have a healthy recovery Daniel. Enjoy that belt.”
That night, Jones couldn’t resist a dig.
“So much for being willing to die,” Jones tweeted.
Jones thought the better of it, and quickly deleted it, but as is evidently not sufficiently clear to him yet, once you post something on a social network, deleting it doesn’t make it disappear.
“My thing is this: when you look at the times that he tweets, it’s almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” said Cormier, as transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMAFighting. “In the day, Jon is one person. Then at night, he’s a different person. I think when he’s alone in the middle of the night is when he’s actually just himself, and then he writes stuff like that.”
“I have seen [the deleted tweet] 100 times from fans writing that to me when I had to pull out of the fight. So it tells me that [Jones] is being himself, but it also tells me that he’s up reading tweets and he’s taking these people’s stuff and kind of using it.
“I think at times we give Jon a little more credit for being more clever than he really is. I think he stumbled across this whole posting tweets thing. He was deleting them because he thought he’d get in trouble, but now it’s become kind of a thing so it seems clever. Some of the things he says seem clever, but I think he kind of stumbles across it. He’s obviously not the smartest guy.”
Jones also appeared on The MMA Hour, and commented on the deleted tweet.
“I thought it was funny,” said Jones. “I actually stole that from a fan. One of my Instagram followers wrote that on my wall, ‘hey, what about Daniel being willing to die to beat you, and now he’s sitting out because of a knee?’ And like I said, I don’t wish injuries upon anybody. It’s unfortunate that he’s hurt. But then again, I hear that he’ll be recovered in four weeks, so how bad is it? If you’re willing to die and beat me, it’s like, I don’t know.
“Obviously, Daniel knows that fighting me not a 100-percent is not a good idea, and I don’t want him to have any excuses for when he loses a second time. So let him take his time off, like I said. Let him get his family together, go down and get some more photos done to hang over their chimney or whatever, because he knows this belt is going to be back around my waist really soon. Might as well go do some autograph signings, bring the belt with him. Do some seminars at his camp. Because all this sh*t is going to be over for him real soon.”