The UFC’s marketing angle may not sit well with Jon Jones, but Ronda Rousey won’t be complaining anytime soon about stealing the spotlight from the light heavyweight champ.
Whenever Rousey isn’t in the cage throwing opponents around like rag dolls and slapping on armbars, she’s in Hollywood taking selfies with A-list celebrities, starring in movies and gracing the covers of magazines.
With Georges St-Pierre on an indefinite vacation and Anderson Silva sidelined with a broken leg, the argument can be made that the women’s bantamweight champ is now officially the UFC’s biggest star.
Unfortunately, this notion is frustrating to a fighter like Jones, who is a six-time defending champion and the greatest light heavyweight in UFC history.
Jones recently admitted to feeling slighted by UFC marketing during an interview with BloodyElbow.com. According to Jones, the UFC’s attention is fixated on a certain blonde-headed Olympic medalist with a knack for making opponents cry uncle:
We don’t always see eye to eye with the UFC, so I don’t know if they are always necessarily pushing me and whether that’s a smart idea on their end or not, who knows. I do know that they are pushing Ronda Rousey really hard, and she’s gotten a lot of great opportunities. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but I’m pushing myself all the time so, I’m not really worried.
Rousey took an opportunity to respond to Jones’ remarks during the UFC 170 media conference call on Wednesday.
While she wasn’t necessarily perturbed by the comments, she was determined to make it known that she has worked incredibly hard to earn every opportunity in her career. Rousey said:
I feel like, I’m owed a little bit of help, dammit. I had to do so much to get to this. I’m not going to complain. This is nice. They can help me all they want.
I don’t know exactly what [Jones] said, but I work really, really hard. I might be getting some help from the UFC now and I appreciate all their support, but to get to this point, there’s been a lot of spots where I didn’t have any help at all.
Rousey will be looking for her third straight UFC title defense on February 22 when she takes on Olympic silver medalist and wrestler Sara McMann. It’ll be interesting to see how she manages to juggle a full training camp with all of the other commitments in her professional career.
She recently landed starring movie roles in The Expendables 3 and the new Entourage movie.
As for Jones, he may think twice before snubbing Sensei Steven Seagal for a locker room visit again (h/t BloodyElbow.com). If the UFC truly is exhausting all of its marketing resources on Rousey, Jones may want to be on standby just in case Under Siege 3 gets made.
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