Filed under: UFC
As pre-fight verbal battles go, the one between UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones and challenger Quinton “Rampage” Jackson is starting to get a little bit meta. During Monday’s UFC 135 media call, it was less about what’s being said than what was said, and who said it first.
Not surprisingly, the two could not reach a consensus on the topic.
According to Jackson, it was Jones who kicked things off by acting “real cocky” at the first press conference to hype their main event title fight. Jones, who claimed he was “waiting for an example or a quote” to illustrate Jackson’s point, said he’s doing his best not to get caught up in the pre-fight talk — though, by the way, it’s all Jackson’s doing.
“My job is not to out-talk him,” Jones said on Monday. “You’re talking about an opponent who threatens and harasses literally every opponent in his career’s history, and I’m very aware of this. So I’ll let him talk and have fun and make me look like the scared one, but when I’m in the Octagon on the 24th, that’s when I’ll demand more respect.”
Jackson, of course, bristled at the suggestion that he’s a habitual trash-talker.
“If you go back and look at my interviews [before fights with] Marvin Eastman and Chuck Liddell and Dan Henderson and other guys, I react the way the guys act towards me,” he countered, adding that Jones had set him off with his disrespectful, “cocky” attitude at the initial Denver presser.
“The guy has never walked the way I’ve walked in this sport, and basically the guy just said the wrong [expletive] and I treat him the way I treat him because I got no respect for him,” Jackson said.
Still, the most heated public exchange between the two came during Saturday night’s UFC Fight Night 25 broadcast on Spike, when the UFC’s Joe Rogan asked about Jackson’s allegations that Jones had a spy in his camp.
Jones seemed flustered by the topic, and said on Monday that what he’s really confused about is how fans could believe he’d actually go to the lengths that Jackson had alleged, all just to get inside information from his opponent’s training camp.
“The only thing that bothered me initially was the spygate situation,” Jones said. “And it wasn’t the situation necessarily, it was the fact that fans actually considered the fact that I would pay someone to…first of all, find someone to go to his camp and then pay someone and try to get Rampage to trust them, and all this ludicrousness, I thought that was pretty interesting that the fans would think I would do something like that.”
While Jones drew contrasts between his bout with former Pride champ “Shogun” Rua and this fight with another Pride veteran in Jackson, he added that it was still “a huge honor” to fight an experienced mainstay of the sport like “Rampage.”
Jackson, too, acknowledged that Jones “has skills,” and said he plans to do his part to help him advance those skills after Saturday night.
“After I relieve him of his first loss, I think Jon will go on to be a better fighter because he won’t have all that pressure of being undefeated,” Jackson said. “…I’m just the person to give him that first [expletive]-whooping so he can go on and be a great fighter that I know he can be.”
If you’re looking for these two to find something nice to say about one another, that might be as close as you’re going to get.