Jones: People who hate me have right to

MMAjunkie’s Mike Bohn recently did a major piece for Rolling Stone on former UFC light heavyweight Jon Jones vs. himself. Bohn notes Jones says he is a changed man, and asks why then can’t he stay out trouble? It is the best thing ever written about Jon Jones. Do yourself a favor and read the entire article here.

It begin with Jones, voice quivering, as he recounted the lowest point of his life. He had been living in a haze of alcohol and drugs. Then he ran a red light, hitting another car, breaking a pregnant woman’s arm. He fled, returned to stuff some cash in his pockets, and ran again. 24 hours later he turned himself in. The UFC stripped him of his title and suspended him indefinitely. 

“It was a reality check,” he says. “That’s really what it all boils down to for me. It was the day that I realized that life wasn’t all fun and games, there are consequences for your actions.” 

Jones for the first time details the extent of his problems with drugs and alcohol.

“Pretty much my whole career I wasn’t living like a champ. Fighters that look up to me would go out with me on weekends and see me get blackout wasted, weeks before a fight,” he confesses. “Then they think, ‘Jon Jones can do it. Maybe I can.’

“It would be like Kobe Bryant taking a rookie out and getting blackout drunk the night before a game, then going out there and dropping 30 points the next day,” he continues. “That would lead somebody down the wrong path of thinking. That was the same thing I was doing.”

Jones grew up poor in upstate New York, in the shadow of two brothers destined for the NFL, and struggled in school. He dropped out of college and was applying for jobs as a janitor when he found MMA. After just four months of fighting, he was signed by the UFC. Two and a half years later, he was the youngest champion in UFC history.

“I really started to get money, started to be able to afford to go out, to have a good time and buy people drinks,” he says. “Growing up, I was poor. In college I was poor. I never had anything. Then I go from living in a basement to renting out a house. My life just started to change so fast.”

“I was never popular. I always kind of wanted to be accepted with the rich kids, with the cool kids, and I never had that,” he says. “I became popular for the first time in my life, and I became obsessed with it. I loved being able to go to the bar and buy everyone a shot, make people happy, make people like me, and I became obsessed with that way of living.

“I thought I had friends. I thought I was cool for the first time in my life.”

“Some camps I had a harder time quitting smoking and quitting drinking than others,” he says. “I would occasionally get pretty fucked up in the middle of a training camp, because sometimes it’s hard to quit cold turkey. There are a lot of camps where I didn’t get caught with dirty marijuana tests. There was never really a concern of like, ‘What if I get caught?’ You were just able to get away with it, so it became a huge part of me.”

“I was able to justify it all in my head. I was a father going to church, a family man, but I was a total party boy, the guy who walked up to the bar and ordered 20 shots of Patrón for total strangers standing around me,” he explains. “Then there’s this third guy who was an elite-level athlete that took sports extremely serious. These three sides of me became who I was, and the world really didn’t know. I wasn’t really fake, I was just me, but there were things that conflicted with each other. I had different sides.”

“I’ve been slowly self-destructing,” he says. “Self-medicating myself, smoking pot all day. Most people don’t look at pot as a problem. ‘Oh, it’s just pot. It’s going to be legal soon. How can you be a pot addict?’ The truth is, you can be a pot addict. If that’s what you do when you wake up, before you play video games, before you train, before you study footage, before you go to sleep, you’re smoking weed all day long.

“I had a problem self-medicating myself and not dealing with real emotions. I got in the limelight at a young age. At age 19, people were already comparing me to Anderson Silva. I had two brothers that were destined to be in the NFL. I knew I never wanted to be the brother that wasn’t a pro athlete,” he continues. “There’s pressure to be one of the successful brothers [and] not the one that didn’t make it. I always put pressure on myself. I think somewhere along the line my relationship with marijuana just got stronger and stronger, and it was something I depended on and leaned on.” 

“One of the moments that really messed me up was when my daughter came home from school and said, ‘Mommy, such-and-such said daddy killed a baby,'” he says, sitting up from the couch and firming his posture for the first time since our conversation began. “That was one of those moments where I felt so bad. Like, ‘Man, I’m fucking up, and now I’m dragging my family into this.’ My fiancée didn’t sign up for me getting in trouble and having to explain to our kids that their dad got into a car accident. My family didn’t sign up for this s***.”

Jones says the turn around came when Daniel Cormier beat Anthony Johnson for the title, grabbed the mic, and said “Jon Jones, get your shit together. I’m waiting for you.”

“It lit a fire under my ass and really made me think about the fact that I was pissing away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says. “I’m sitting here living this life, being in the argument of being the greatest of all-time in the sport, and I’m pissing it away making poor decisions, partying, taking my life for granted.”

“Being on probation, I can’t go to the club, so a lot of my ‘friends,’ they were dudes looking to get free drinks every weekend, free joints, free bong hits,” he says. “My phone used to go crazy on Friday nights when I was able to go to the club and able to smoke weed. Now that I’m sober, people realize, ‘Oh you can’t come out?’ My phone calls went down by about half.

“It didn’t make me sad; it made me glad,” he adds, after a pause. “I realized, ‘Shit, I don’t have many friends.'”

Jones fell in love with powerlifting, which helped ease him out of dependence on drugs. He has a conditioning coach now. He has a nutritionist. He says he is trying to lead by example at Jackson-Wink MMA. Jones may in fact be – finally – finding his true potential.

“I’m not officially team captain, but to a lot of guys in here, I’m their captain. They see me doing the right things and working my ass off,” he says. “A lot of the guys used to see me and envy the fact I could party and still win. I knew the guys who had a little hate in their blood, like, ‘This motherf***er got everything I want as a fighter, and he’s coming to practice high and s***.’ Those guys now, they got nothing to say. It’s not that they hated me; they hated what I got away with.”

“This may sound weird, but I believe that God meant for what happened to happen,” he says. “I know a lot of people may twist this or look at it like, ‘Why would God put this girl in a car accident with you? That’s a selfish way of thinking.’ But since that happened, so much good has happened in a lot of people’s lives. I’ve been able to reach thousands of kids.

“I’ve told my story 72 times to completely different groups, to complete strangers. There’s something really freeing about being so real, open and candid with complete strangers and letting them judge you,” he continues. “It’s helped me know who I am. It’s helped me acknowledge the piece-of-s*** qualities I had. Truth of the matter, I had some piece-of-s*** ways. Still do have some. But at the same time, I have some really great qualities as well.”

This would be a seamless redemption story. But Jones was arrested after being ticketed heavily for revving his engine. During the traffic stop he called the officer a “pig” and a “f***ing liar.” The tickets construed a probation violation and he was arrested and held in jail for two nights.

“It was really tough being in jail,” he says after the incident. “It doesn’t get much lower. You’re in a filthy room. The food is terrible and you’re surrounded by people who have done all types of crazy crimes. You have nothing that belongs to you, not even your own underwear. It’s just terrible. It made me really realize how blessed I am. If you have any ounce of you that’s not living life correct, going to jail really puts it in perspective and helps you understand how much you really do have.”

Jones says it has only served to spur him to further positive actions.

“This situation was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says. “For a police officer to pull me over and to say I was swerving lanes and drag racing and all this stuff, it showed me, ‘Wow, if someone were to have it out for me they could simply pull me over, say whatever they want, and I will be the one paying the ultimate price.’

“When someone has that type of power over me, it’s scary,” he continues. “So my goal is to drive the absolute minimum until I’m off of probation. That will probably be another year, but I’m fine with it. I would rather take taxis and Ubers and rely on friends than even risk my freedom.” 

Jon Jones will fight Ovince Saint Preux at UFC 197 on April 23 for the interim light heavyweight title.

“I’m still on a journey to get back the belt I never lost. After I fight Ovince, me and Daniel’s story picks right back up where it left off,” he says. “I know what it feels like to be a champ already. To be sober doesn’t compare. This is the happiest I’ve ever been, without the belt. Now, to be sober with the belt – that’s going to feel like heaven.”

“I’m only at the doorstep of earning my second chance,” he says. “Doing community service was court-ordered. That’s not earning a second chance. Being sober when you’re on probation isn’t earning your second chance. I got a lot of proving to do. It’s a matter of actions. It’s about my effort. I feel like I have a lot more work to do. The people who still hate me, they have every right to.

“My vision for myself when I’m 30 is for people to see me and be like, ‘Man, look at him now. This guy is sober, he’s on the cover of every magazine, he’s on the cover of Wheaties boxes, he’s looked up to, he has charities. What a freaking turnaround story that guy is. If Jon can do it, a guy who was a total fuck up, then dammit, my life isn’t over either.'”

You want to believe him.

Read entire article…