Hey Jon Jones, are you still there?

HE CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS.

With UFC 309, fight fans will be expected to pay eighty dollars to witness the commission of a fraud. The main event is set to feature Jon Jones, technically the heavyweight champion and technically one of the greatest fighters of all time, against Stipe Miocic, the 42 year-old former heavyweight champ who has not set foot inside the Octagon in well over three and a half years, following a crushing defeat to Francis Ngannou in March of 2021. 

Speaking of Francis Ngannou, his considerable shadow looms large over these proceedings. After all, back when Jones’ light heavyweight reign was beginning to falter, the UFC begged and cajoled him to meet Ngannou in the cage. But despite frequent opining about his desire to challenge himself at heavyweight, Jones staunchly refused to come to a deal, rarely even deigning to mention Ngannou’s name in public.

The notes of that tune will be familiar to any fan now questioning why Jones is “defending the belt” against a middle-aged retiree, while the interim title currently resides with Tom Aspinall in England. If Jones is fighting, you might ask, then surely the interim is over, yes? 

A side-by-side comparison of Tom Aspinall and Ngannou’s silhouettes might provide some clue as to Jon’s motivations. A veritable giant at light heavyweight, we know Jones has no problem inflicting pain on people smaller than him, be they a champion of yesteryear or, say, the mother of his children. Regarding the proposition of fighting a bigger, stronger man, however, Jones has always seemed a tad insecure–a touch of little brother syndrome, perhaps. It’s hard not to imagine that this very insecurity had some hand in the careful course Jones has charted through—or, rather, around the heavyweight ranks.

The funny thing is, Jones might well be able to beat Aspinall and Ngannou both, even at this stage of his career; he is that great a fighter. It’s just that he doesn’t want to take the risk. And you know what? It might be easier to stomach that as a purely pragmatic, business-minded decision if Jones himself weren’t a criminal narcissist possessing all the charms of a high school bully. 

So. As the culmination of his great heist draws near (and with only the faintest bit of spite in our hearts) let’s look back at a time when Jon Jones probably should have lost the light heavyweight belt. Let’s revisit Jon Jones vs Dominick Reyes.

On the shoulders of giants

Now 37, Jones was just nearing his 33rd birthday when he took on Reyes in 2020. Not old in usual terms, but more or less over-the-hill for a fighter. Jones had already been competing professionally for 12 years at that point and, as a champion of nine years, had faced nothing but the best his division had to offer for most of that time. Plenty of mileage, in other words. 

Still, age was not the only thing that would affect Jones performance on that night. Throughout his rule, Jones’ least convincing performances had always come against other big men: Alexander Gustafsson, Jones’ toughest customer, was 6’5” to his 6’4”; Ovince Saint Preux was 6’3”; Anthony Smith was 6’4”; Thiago Santos was only 6’2”, but he employed a long-range, particularly kick-focused game. 

Only a few of these men really tested Jones, but every one of them managed to make the great champion look quite ordinary, simply by denying him the security blanket of a range where only he is effective. But despite being Jones’ equal in height, Reyes would nonetheless find himself on the wrong end of a seven inch reach disadvantage. 

This sequence, from early on in the first round, spells out a good deal of Reyes’ plan to circumvent that fundamental imbalance. In fact, the overall strategy more or less mirrored that used by Alexander Gustafsson six and a half years earlier: Reyes aimed to keep Jones from setting his feet and thus maximizing his reach advantage by employing lots of footwork. Since this would mean spending long periods at long range, however, he needed to be ready to deal with the kicking game which had ultimately sapped Gustafsson’s strength and broken his spirit. Kicks are the backbone of Jones’ striking game, often comprising 50 percent or more of his total output in a fight. Basically, the difference between a convincing Jones win and a confused mess usually comes down to whether or not he is allowed to operate freely at this range.  

Like Gustafsson, Reyes staked his claim to long range with a defiant kicking attack of his own. But here he found an improvement on the Gustafsson model, ironically drawing on an even earlier Jones challenger: Lyoto Machida. The first man to show us just how good Jones’ chin really was (by hitting him really hard in the face), Machida was a master of the art of the carefully coordinated car crash. He enjoyed considerable success meeting Jones’ kicks with counters fit to make an ambulance chasing lawyer blush.

That is exactly what Reyes does here. There’s even a bit of Machida in his footwork as he bounces around, dipping in and out at the very limit of Jones’ range. Boxers sometimes call this movement a “pendulum step,” but karateka like Lyoto Machida probably just call it “the way you move around when you’re fighting.” As Jones comes stalking in, he telegraphs his intention to time Reyes’ bouncy, rhythmic movement, blind to the fact that Reyes is in fact using that very same rhythm to time him. As soon as Jones steps in to fire a low kick, Reyes creates a head-on collision, landing a thudding left hand to the body and aborting Jones’ strike in the process.