Jon Jones tested positive for cocaine earlier this week! You know what that means, right? If you guessed an overhaul of drug testing procedures and increased transparency from the Nevada Athletic Commission and the UFC, you’d be wrong. No, what this significant development in MMA means is another Wanderlei Silva pro wrestling-style shoot promo.
He set his sights on the NAC, bashing them for ruining Jones’ reputation and for being the bumbling, corrupt idiots we all sort of know they are (transcript via MMA Fighting):
Let’s analyze what happened to Jon Jones. [The NAC is] saying that test shouldn’t have been done out of competition and that it was an accident. So they went to test him and accidentally tested for cocaine. But now Jon Jones’ champion image is damaged. So what’s the commission going to do about this? They go, ‘ah, we don’t know, we’ll see what’s going to happen.’ Are there laws or are there no laws? Sometimes there are laws and sometimes there are none? There are no protocols to be followed? Where are the laws? Who voted for them? Who implements them? You are lost, you don’t know what you are doing.
Good points. He’d go on to make a few more…
This sport has to be regulated. The way that it’s going can’t continue. This commission is a mess. They don’t know what they are [doing]. You can punish or not? There’s no set punishment, there’s no set testing system. You guys have to be professionals, you ask for fighters to be professionals when you are not. How can you want to put people on trial without laws? Without laws that apply equally to all? Everybody knows the UFC is a business. They put on fights to make money, and in those regards they’re not wrong. But the entity that implements the laws for the athletes, the entity that punishes athletes and controls their lives yet doesn’t know what they’re doing, just can’t be. It’s a commission that doesn’t follow protocols or laws. So you better clean up this mess. Instead of regulating it, you are damaging the sport.
While Silva’s words have truth to them (hell, we agree with pretty much all of them) they sound awfully strange coming from the guy who literally ran away from a piss-cup-carrying commission member.
And Silva has released scathing videos like this before, one on fighter sponsorships and the other on fighter pay. Being a disgraced fighter and habitually releasing scathing videos is putting Silva dangerously close to fringe MMA weirdo territory — think Luke Cummo and Dan Quinn. And once you become one of those guys, there’s no coming back. You’re condemned to signing autographs in third-rate pizza places for all eternity.
We still want to love you, Wandy, you’re just making it harder and harder. So instead of latching onto the popular cause of the minute every few weeks, please figure out how to escape your UFC contract so we can watch you murder professional wrestlers in Bellator.