Call it either pre-fight gaming by Quinton Jackson or something out of a movie from Jon Jones; the former UFC Light Heavyweight champion has accused the current holder of that belt of planting a spy in his camp per Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports.
It sounds remarkably strange, especially considering Jackson is rumored to have spent nearly a million dollars on his training camp to prepare for Jones, but this isn’t a case of Jackson saying something to hype a fight.
“One of my friends was talking to Jon Jones’ manager recently, and Jon Jones’ manager was saying that he knows everything that is going on in our camp,” Jackson said to Iole. “He said he had spies in our camp and he knew everything that was going on. That got me thinking.
“How did he know about my hand injury that fast? It wasn’t on the Internet, and yet he knew about my hand injury right away. The UFC people were in Brazil, which is why it probably took them four hours to call me. That shows me two things: They have spies in my camp, one, and two, they’re dumb as hell, because they didn’t know how to use the information correctly and to wait. He called right away, running to Joe Silva. Joe Silva called my manager right away.”
For his part, Malki Kawa has denied to Iole anything of the sort.
“I promise to God, I have no spy in that camp,” Kawa said. “It’s completely and totally untrue. There is nothing to it at all. It’s funny he said that, though, because we’ve heard he has had old training partners of Jon coming in to work with him. We don’t care and it’s kind of hilarious he’s doing this. But I can guarantee you there is nothing at all that is true about this other than that I called Joe Silva after someone put out a thing on Twitter that Rampage was injured and pulling out. I wanted to know what was up, but it was no more than that. That is it.”
If it sounds like the premise of a film that’s because it’s a premise of plenty of crime films, where a police officer goes undercover to infiltrate the mob ala Donnie Brasco. Martin Scorsese won an Oscar after many tries with The Departed, where both a cop and a criminal go undercover in each other’s organizations, and it’s not new to the fight game either.
Marvelous Marvin Hagler was preparing to fight Sugar Ray Leonard when Leonard sent J.D. Brown to Hagler’s camp in Palm Springs, CA, to spy on him.
