Daniel Cormier has had about as impressive a career as you can have in mixed martial arts (MMA), but like it or not he is still defined by his two losses (one later overturned to a No Contest) to Jon Jones.
Because he’s so inextricably linked to Jones, the world often turns to Cormier whenever big news breaks about Jon. And there was pretty big news this weekend when the UFC announced that Jones was retiring from the sport and relinquishing the UFC heavyweight title.
That upgraded interim champ Tom Aspinall to undisputed status, and left the world with a lot of questions regarding why a Jones vs. Aspinall fight never came together. Only “Bones” knows the reasons for sure, but in a new video recorded late last night, “DC” shared some thoughts on the situation.
“By not stepping in that octagon, he quit,” Cormier said. “He didn’t want to fight Tom Aspinall. It’s so surprising. Is he scared? No. But by not fighting Aspinall, he opened up the conversation. He lets you, every one of you, question why he didn’t fight him.”
Cormier painted the picture of a man who just wasn’t hungry enough to take on a challenge like Aspinall.
“You got a young, hungry champion that goes, ‘I wanna kick this dude’s ass,’” he suggested. “Especially when you know you’ve got millions of dollars in the bank. You’re doing very well. You just bought a brand new beautiful home in Albuquerque. But you know what it takes. You know what you went through to beat me. You know what you went through to beat Stipe. You know what you went through to beat Gustafsson.”
“You know what it took to get there, but you don’t have that desire to do so. So he walked away.”
Cormier criticized Jones for how he publicly handled things over the past few months, saying these ‘hiccups’ and ‘stumbles’ were making him look worse in the eyes of fighters and fans.
“To walk away right now opens the door for people to start having a conversation: does this affect the legacy? Because I feel, like, many decisions he made over the course of this last month where he was hiccupping and he was stumbling all over the Internet … He felt assured that he was doing the right thing, but he wasn’t. He’s supposed to fight.”
“He talked about fighting Francis Ngannou, but he didn’t talk about fighting this guy because he never truly had any intention of fighting this guy,” the former champ-champ said. “Tom Aspinall was waiting. The UFC was waiting. Everybody’s waiting for a decision, when in reality? You’re the heavyweight champ! You’re supposed to fight. You go out there and you do the job. You go fight that dude, and you put him in his place.”
“Beating Tom Aspinall would have further legitimized his career,” Cormier concluded. “I don’t know that he needs it. He was unbeaten in twenty UFC fights, won sixteen UFC title fights. He’s done it all. But what happened today opens a conversation for us to question whether or not he ran away. I will go to my grave believing he quit instead of fighting that guy.”
Cormier made it clear that he put the blame on Jones for not making an Aspinall fight happen, and claimed the UFC had dome everything possible to move the bout forward.
“They gave him the money,” he said. “They agreed to everything, and he still just would not do it.”
As Cormier said, Jones goofing around on the internet while holding a belt he apparently never intended to defend is a bad look. Nobody’s happy about the heavyweight division being stalled out, and Jon is taking the brunt of the blame for this (even though the UFC shouldn’t have let things get to this point).
But will there still be this level of anger and outrage in three months? In three years? When people in 2035 are debating GOATs, will the past six months of Jones behavior and social media trolling hurt his standing? We doubt that.
But the clear refusal to fight interim champ Tom Aspinall certainly could.
