Culture
‘Jon Jones is a scary dude’: After years of setbacks, the UFC champ is still at the top
Jon Jones has accumulated a wealth of labels throughout a 16-year UFC career that is almost exhausting in its complexity.
First, he was the wunderkind, when he ran through esteemed contenders like Maurício Rua, Quinton Jackson, Lyoto Machida and Rashad Evans, as he built his case as the new face of the sport. In 2011 at age 23, he became the UFC’s youngest champion.
Quickly, he was criticized for his maneuvering in the cutthroat and often caustic world of combat sports, when UFC president Dana White called him “selfish” for not accepting a last-minute opponent in 2012. Similar takes persist today on social media, from fighters and fans and observers in the sport who want to steer Jones toward their entertainment of choice. “On the internet everyone’s like, ‘You’re a duck,’” Jones said in an interview, referring to him choosing certain fights and, in some minds, ducking others. “Is being called a duck supposed to sway my decisions? What is this, high school?”
A string of deeper, more troubling setbacks throughout his career has often prompted even sharper assessments. He failed three drug tests, and explained the first to USA Today in 2016 by saying: “I was a drug addict.” Jones has regularly faced legal troubles, including accusations of hitting women, including his fiancée, and was stripped of a championship belt when he was accused of fleeing the scene of a hit-and-run wreck on foot.
His greatest rivalry, with Daniel Cormier, was sidelined heavily as a result, and when Jones tested positive for anabolic steroids, he was stripped of his belt for a third time and his knockout of Cormier was changed to a no-contest.
White said then that it could be the end of Jones’ career. On Thursday, he said that despite tension in their working relationship, it made “common sense” to keep booking him fights.
“You cannot deny what this guy has accomplished. And most of the things he’s accomplished, he’s done with not being very good to himself,” White told The Athletic. “He’s the greatest of all time and one of the baddest human beings to ever walk the face of the earth. And when I talk about him, I talk about his dark side, too. I mean, Jon Jones is a scary dude.”
He added: “I told (former UFC chief executive) Lorenzo Fertitta: ‘This is a guy you can’t build a business with.’”
Jones cries during a news conference in 2016 after his fight with Daniel Cormier is scrapped days before UFC 200. (Photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Yet Jones has exactly that stature, with top billing in what could reasonably be considered UFC’s biggest event of the year. Jones is scheduled to fight Stipe Miocic, another great in the sport, for the heavyweight title on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York.
“I think Jon Jones battles with these inner demons sometimes on who he is and I think he wants to be that good guy. I think he has a lot of internal battles with who he really is. But at the end of the day what Jon Jones has to come to grips with and what he has to realize is Jon Jones is a killer and he was put on this earth to do exactly what he’s doing right now,” White said.
Jones declined to talk about specifics around his arrests and other problems, but broadly acknowledged his stumbles. “I haven’t always lived a perfect Christian life,” he said, a reference to the religious themes that he says have been a big part of his family and private life. (A Bible verse will be etched onto his trunks on Saturday to mirror one of his tattoos.)
“I’d like people to remember me as just a person that overcame, a person that was very much human, a guy who had a lot of flaws and a guy who really loved God from start to finish,” he added.
His parents, Camille and Arthur Jones Jr., raised three sons who reached the top echelon of their sports. Both of Jon’s brothers were Super Bowl-winning defensive linemen; his older brother, Arthur, in the 2012 season with the Baltimore Ravens; his younger brother, Chandler, in the 2014 season with the New England Patriots.
Each morning, Jon Jones said, his father is up at 4 a.m. fasting and praying for his sons, then blowing up their phones with sermons and Bible verses. Camille, who died in 2017 from complications of diabetes, was praised by women in their church at her memorial for her effect on their lives, Jones said.
“She showed me that you can be a rock star without being a professional athlete, without being famous,” he said.
Jones said his parents showed him how he could be admired. His public mistakes, conversely, are for him to own.
“The best sides of me definitely came from them, as far as the humanitarian side of me, the compassionate side of me, the side that really genuinely cares about my neighbor. Now, as human beings, we have many sides to us…” Jones said before trailing off.
In the octagon, Jones is clear that he’s fighting for his own ends rather than to feed into fights that may be in public demand.
Jones and Miocic pose ahead of their UFC 309 title fight. (Photo: Josh Hedges / Zuffa LLC)
This week, he has circled around the interim heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall, a British fighter who won the interim belt a year ago when Jones had to postpone a bout with Miocic with a shoulder injury. Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich instead, and even defended the interim belt earlier this year while Jones waited to fight Miocic. Miocic has greater name recognition, but at 42 is four years removed from his last victory.
Still, Jones seems uninterested in fighting Aspinall, and indicated that he would rather fight Alex Pereira, the light heavyweight champion who has quickly risen to be a star. He could also retire, a common move used by fighters for a variety of reasons – often sincerely and also often to drive up their bankability in a sport with a fight-by-fight payday.
“If the UFC is interested in having me come back to maybe fight against Pereira, I think that’d be a fight worth my while.” Jones said. “And outside of that, man, I’d love to test my hand in Hollywood, and use some of this influence that I’ve gained to put me in some really cool roles and in movie roles and action films and things like that.”
Jon Jones is prepared to hang up the gloves.
The heavyweight champ told @TheAthletic his main goal for #UFC309 is to become the first man to submit Stipe Miocic, “and I’m prepared to retire after that, very happily.” pic.twitter.com/6jeOiJh32q
— Mark Puleo (@ByMarkPuleo) November 8, 2024
White said he would only entertain Jones fighting Pereira, who has become the new UFC darling for his thrilling style and frequent, action-filled title defenses, if Jones fights Aspinall first.
“If Jon wants to fight Aspinall, we’ll do it. And if he beats Aspinall and then said he wanted to fight Pereira, I would consider it,” White said.
The uncertainty all sets up for plenty of drama no matter the Jones-Miocic result.
“You can call me chicken, duck, goat, whatever,” Jones said, adding: “It’s not my responsibility to help someone else build a brand or give someone an opportunity. My job is to take care of my legacy and do what’s best for my legacy.”
Jones – at 27-1 with the no contest and his only loss a disqualification — appreciates that being considered among the greatest fighters is part of how fans discuss his mark on the sport.
“I feel like it’s always going to be an opinion. Some people would like fighters because of the way they carry themselves. Some people like fighters because of the way they compete. Some people like fighters because of the way they changed the sport. There are so many different opinions on that,” Jones said. “I’m just grateful to be in the conversation.”
And White, despite saying finding it difficult to work with Jones at times, said the results have been clear. “Win, lose, draw on Saturday night, his legacy is set. He’s the greatest of all time,” White said. “Nobody’s accomplished what he’s accomplished.”
Required reading
(Photo: Chris Graythen / Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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