UFC icon GSP said it’s good if both Jones and Ngannou are scared of each other.
MMA GOAT candidate and current Marvel villain Georges St-Pierre is on record stating how much he hated fighting. And that, despite the fear and anxiety that came with stepping foot inside the Octagon, he was driven to compete out of a desire to win and become a champion. The Quebecois of course achieved this in clinching the UFC’s welterweight and middleweight titles.
With St-Pierre appearing in the popular Disney+ series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier a blonde-haired GSP has upped his media rounds. Recently he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to chat about a number of topics.
When the chat circled around to current MMA stories, ‘Rush’ was asked about a fight that has the potential (if it gets booked) to be one of the biggest heavyweight bouts in recent memory: Francis Ngannou vs. Jon Jones.
Jones and Ngannou have been jawing at each other since at least last summer, way before Ngannou won the UFC’s heavyweight crown with a KO win over Stipe Miocic. Back then both men expressed interest in a fight that would welcome Jones, the former UFC light heavyweight champion, to the UFC’s biggest division.
But that fight fell apart because both fighters wanted a pay increase to put on that show. The UFC seemingly wasn’t interested and booked Ngannou a title fight instead. Since then Jones and Ngannou have been at it again.
With the heavyweight title now up for grabs, both Ngannou and Jones are rightly sticking to their guns in wanting a bumper offer from the UFC for them to fight.
When St-Pierre was asked to weigh-in on this fight, the question of whether Jones feared Ngannou came up.
“Yes, Jon Jones is afraid of Francis,” said St-Pierre (ht bjpenn.com). “And Francis is afraid of Jon Jones because if they would not be afraid, that’s mean they don’t care.”
“Fighting, I’m sure, is important for them,” he continued. “Success is important for them, and when you put it all on the line, it’s normal to be afraid. If the price is good, even though he’s afraid, regardless of how he feels, he will do the job. He will bite in his mouthpiece and do the job.”
Whether either man will ‘do the job’ seems to be in the hands of the UFC. If the promotion offers the kind of money both Jones and Ngannou want for the fight, then we’ll likely get to see one of the most intriguing heavyweight clashes of this generation.
However, if the UFC doesn’t want to loosen their purse strings (which seems very likely), we may never see this match-up realized inside the cage.
Jones recently went on record saying he was confident a deal could be done. However, it has also been reported that the UFC were starting to look beyond the match-up and were instead favouring the less expensive option of Derrick Lewis vs. Ngannou sometime later this year.