Daniel Cormier is holding his ground in his latest back-and-forth with his old rival, Jon Jones.
The current Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Heavyweight champion, Jones, has had a rather problematic history outside the Octagon, to say the least. So much so that it upset his boss, UFC CEO, Dana White, a time or two. One time specifically came in 2014 when revealed through some text messages between White and former UFC owner, Lorenzo Fertitta.
Reacting to the leaks shortly after, Cormier noted how all businesses deal with bad employees. This bothered Jones enough to elicit a response on Twitter, saying, “Never let a ‘bad employee’ beat you up and take everything from you twice. It’ll leave you bitter for a really long time evidently.”
“If I could say 100 things about him positively, he hangs onto the negative thing,” Cormier responded on his YouTube channel. “I wasn’t talking about him directly. I was talking about in business and you have employees in your business, sometimes things go sideways with the employees, and you say bad things. When someone’s being a bad employee, you say bad things. That was my argument.
“Even if he won both fights [against me], in that moment it doesn’t change what I was saying,” he continued. “I’m paid to do a job, guys. I’m paid to talk and try to make sense or give you guys the inside views as to what’s going on in mixed martial arts. Even if he won both fights, it doesn’t change what happened with the fight with Dan Henderson. It doesn’t change with UFC 200. It doesn’t change all those reasons why Dana went off.”
About Cormier’s last mentions, Jones’ declining of a fight against Chael Sonnen at UFC 151 after Henderson was injured out of their bout infamously resulted in the event’s cancelation in September 2011. In July 2016, UFC 200 was supposed to feature Cormier vs. Jones 2 atop the billing, but saw Jones removed from the card when he tested positive for a banned substance just a few days out.