If you thought the UFC light heavyweight title fight was happening in a playground instead of at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, you couldn’t really be blamed with the childish attacks that have taken place between Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier.
While UFC fans are used to seeing fighters ‘sell’ their matches, Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones have taken things to a while new level (as we have previously reported).
At UFC Fight Night 12 on Saturday, things escalated even further. Cormier, who served as a guest commentator during the broadcast, told the viewing audience about all the things that he was going to do to Jones at UFC 178. Uncharacteristically, Jones told Cormier to shut up to which Cormier told him to ‘make him.’ Jones even went as far as deleting one of his tweets. Like we said earlier, it almost felt like we were watching a couple of couple of middleschoolers instead of the two best pound-for-pound fighters in the world.
Cormier said that he didn’t buy Jones’ good guy personna.
“I said time and time again that I didn’t believe [Jones] should try and protect this image that doesn’t even exist anymore,” Cormier told The MMA Hour. “That image that he put out when he started fighting before, that’s gone. People saw through that. People know that he’s not this person that he put off he was in the beginning of his career because of all the things he’s had to deal with just in the media. He’s had to grow up a lot faster than most people did in this sport because he’s so good. I like his heel persona. But for me, it just tells me that he’s a bit uncomfortable because this is out of character for Jon Jones. He doesn’t directly go at his opponents like he has with me. This is out of character a little bit.”
Cormier seemed to be taking it as a positive that he was rattling the champion in advance of their match-up although he is the first to admit that will not translate into an easy fight by any stretch of the imagination.
“I’m not in his mind or under his skin,” Cormier added. “But I know that he knows that he has a real fight ahead of him September 27th, so maybe he’s trying to use mind tricks on me to affect me. But, I mean, oh my goodness that is just so petty and childish. He can’t use mind games on me. I’ve deal with all this stuff for so long in my life that mind tricks don’t work. They won’t. They won’t ever work.”
