No More Defending! Jones Demands ‘Fun Fights’

Jones has some interesting matchmaking ideas for his future, should he decide to stick around and keep fighting after UFC 309.

Jon Jones has spent the last two years preparing fans for his retirement from the sport following a legacy-cementing win over Stipe Miocic. Now all of a sudden he’s changed directions: he’s interested in continuing to fight, but only under his terms. And those terms are pretty unusual.

During UFC 309 fight week, Jones suggested a superfight with light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira, and even declared he’d relinquish the heavyweight title to get it. Now he’s sharing the kind of Aspinall-free matchmaking that excites him in this potential beltless “Bones” era.

“I could see myself, after this, entertaining superfights only,” Jones said during a media scrum. “After this fight, if we get a dominant performance, I’m prepared to vacate the heavyweight championship and then fight for fun. I wanna fight for fun.”

This isn’t coming out of nowhere. Jones walked away from the sport in 2020 after defending the 205 pound belt against the three ‘next’ guys: Anthony Smith, Thiago Santos, and Dominick Reyes. No one was particularly thrilled to watch any of those fights, and Jones looked flat and uninspired fighting through them.

“I’ve had a big chip on my shoulder my whole career of having to defend, defend, defend,” he added. “And I don’t necessarily want it to be over, but I just wanna fight for fun. I think about one of my teammates, Donald ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone. He just fights. Win, lose, or draw, he just fights. And I would love to kind of experience that for the first time in my career of just not having this belt to to try to protect, but just fighting guys that I stylistically wanna fight against.”

Jones’ suggestions outside of Pereira aren’t exactly inspiring, though.

“Just random fights like Jamahal Hill,” he said. “Me and him meet up at 220 and see what happens. That’d be interesting to see what happens. I’m at an interesting weight where I could fight light heavyweights or heavyweights. Derrick Lewis, the biggest knockout power in history.”

“I’m just throwing out random names, but I’m at a body weight right now where I could do just fun fights. And that’s what I wanna do. I wanna do fun fights for me — not necessarily for the fans, but for me. Let’s see if Dana allows me to do that or not.”

Typically we’d say no, Dana White won’t allow him to do that. But Jones has already suggested he’ll happily walk away from the sport and retire if the UFC tries to push him in directions he’s not interested in going. Then again, White let Jones walk in 2020, the last time negotiations came to push and shove.

There’ll be no pushing and shoving (outside the cage) until Jones does what he came to New York to do, which is defeat Stipe Miocic in the main event of UFC 309. After that? All bets are off.

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