Wall Street Journal: Is Jon Jones the UFC’s Transcendent Star?
The Athletically Gifted and Charismatic Jon Jones Has Given Mixed Martial Arts Fans a Glimpse of What It Can Become….
The Athletically Gifted and Charismatic Jon Jones Has Given Mixed Martial Arts Fans a Glimpse of What It Can Become.
You can watch it a dozen times and not believe it. The first man cinches his arms around his opponent’s waist from behind, bucks forward and then simply dead-lifts him up and drops backward with him, tracing an arc of perhaps 140 degrees so that they land together, their weight on the neck of the man being thrown.
As they grapple for leverage on the mat, the first man catches onto the second man’s left leg, working down toward the ankle as they rise, and then drops it, spinning to his right and catching his opponent flush with an elbow to the head that knocks him down to the mat, helpless again. From impact to impact, the whole fluid sequence lasts 10 seconds
“I’ve never seen anyone throw anything like that,” said the second man, a tough veteran fighter named Stephan Bonnar. “I didn’t even know it hit me. I was laying there thinking someone from the audience threw a bottle or something.”
The fight was a test, Jon Jones’s eighth in less than a year and his second in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the leading mixed martial arts promotion. Five fights, four wins and just more than two years later, Jones, 23, is preparing for his first chance at a UFC title.
Saturday at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., he is scheduled to fight Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, champion of the 205-pound division, a feared Muay Thai artist and Brazilian jiu-jitsu player who has finished two-thirds of his 24 professional fights by knockout or technical knockout.