(Photo by Tommy Gilligan/USA TODAY SPORTS via MMAJunkie)
Jon Jones‘s performance against Glover Teixeira at UFC 172 — particularly during their clinch exchanges against the fence — redefined the limits of how one human being can hurt another human being without the use of a pair of pliers and a blowtorch. It wasn’t just the way Jones battered Teixeira in close with punches, kicks, and even flying chin-checks. “Bones” took away the Brazilian’s primary weapon in the very beginning of the fight with a brilliant standing arm-lock that wrecked Teixeira’s right shoulder. (Watch the GIF here, via Zombie Prophet.)
As Teixeira’s trainer John Hackleman explained after the fight:
“I’ve never seen Glover lose a fight like this. I’ve never seen Glover bleeding. I’ve never seen Glover hurt so bad. Glover hurt his right shoulder really bad the first round. The first round! That’s not an excuse, because Jon Jones hurt his shoulder. Jon Jones hurt Glover’s shoulder in the tie up on the clinch against the cage, tweaked his shoulder and he hurt it. So Glover couldn’t use his right hand very well. You see me in the corner trying to get him to throw that right hand harder. He told me, ‘Hey, can you get some ice on it?’
…[During the fight] he never said he had an actual torn ligament or torn tendon so we found that out after. It was obvious. It was actually disfigured and swollen. You could tell something was seriously wrong with it. He’s going to have an MRI Wednesday.”
On the bright side, Teixeira’s arm wasn’t actually snapped in half, Aoki vs. Wisniewski-style, so he’s got that going for him. As for Jones, he was well-aware of how nasty the move was as he was doing it:
“That’s a move that I’ve been doing since [I was] a little boy in wrestling. It was [something] you could never do on your wrestling partners and it’s dirty in wrestling, but it’s always there when someone has an underhook on you and you have an overhook, and you can just crank their arm…I always wanted to do it during those wrestling matches and finally got to hit it on somebody. I felt his elbow pop two times — a consecutive ‘pop pop’ — and I was just like, ‘Aw, nice.’”
Nice, indeed. Jones’s standing arm-lock definitely falls under the “dirty, but awesome” category, as opposed to the “dirty, and they should really start taking some points away” category.” What did you think?
