If you follow mixed martial arts, you know about the entire Jon Jones vs. Rashad Evans beef.
You know how they once said in interviews that they would never fight each other, but that started to change once Jones beat Ryan Bader at UFC 126 this past February, and now that they’ve both said they’re on board, now they hate each other’s guts.
It’s understandable that you’d want to fight the other guy and settle the beef once and for all, but answer me this:
When is it okay to postpone an injury just to get that fight to happen?
You see, Mr. Jones, there’s a bit of a problem here with you and Malki Kawa going to the doctor and choosing to postpone the injury when given the option rather than taking the surgery.
Where may I begin?
Well, there’s the issue that raises up now that you’ve postponed the surgery—Phil Davis is supposed to face Evans at UFC 133, a fight that was made after you bowed out due to that hand injury you’ve had since before Mauricio “Shogun” Rua.
It would have been fine with me if you had taken the surgery and, much like Shogun when he fought you, ended up losing the belt in your first fight back from healing—although that was really part of why Shogun was out for so long.
I would have been fine with the same tired arguments that “Jones had just come off of a layoff,” because layoffs can be a tricky subject in MMA.
Bowing out of UFC 133 due to an injury and then choosing to not go through with the surgery might open the doors for the match to finally happen, but it’s bad enough that people actually saw Tito Ortiz as a nicer guy than you in the weeks between UFC 126 and UFC 128.
Now, everyone but myself is convinced that there was never an injury—that you basically did duck out of the Evans fight intentionally, even though we’re all pretty convinced that there are no real alternatives for the time being.
Couple that ducking question with the one of your now-deemed-alleged injury, and that also brings up the question of if you lose the fight with the hand being as it is right now without surgery.
You’ve gone for this long without much trouble, but even if postponing the shot meant facing Evans and possibly facing Davis down the line, you denied yourself the chance to get rid of that nagging injury once and for all.
Even if it’s not that serious of an injury now, it will as you continue to train for your first defense, and if it gets bad by the time you have to actually defend the belt, a loss means that you lost due to taking the fight with an injury as well as the manner in which the world saw you lose the fight.
If you have to go through a layoff and you wind up not fighting until December or January at the earliest, at least a loss means that you were beaten by a better fighter and not because of some injury that you didn’t take care of.
At the end of the day, it’s like Alice In Chains said: It’s your decision.
All I’m saying is that you should at least consider getting the surgery done just to be safe.
Rashad Evans or no Rashad Evans, it’s better to keep us waiting until you’re ready to fight at 100 percent rather than give us a forum to make excuses for why you lost and ultimately help us forget that this all happened during the fight.
Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time Rashad’s had to wait his turn.
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