After stroking Jon Jones’ ego for more than a year, UFC CEO Dana White has seemingly backed himself and the entire heavyweight division into a corner.
In November 2023, Tom Aspinall scored a 69-second KO over Sergei Pavlovich to capture the UFC interim heavyweight title, which was introduced while ‘Bones’ was sidelined while recovering from a torn pectoral. Since then, Jones has fully healed and even competed late last year. And still, we are no closer to seeing Jones and Aspinall unify their titles than we were 19 months ago.
Much of that blame has been placed on Jones, who has regularly flip-flopped regarding whether he would stick around long enough to fight Aspinall or retire from the sport altogether. ‘Bones’ has also kept busy by accepting coaching gigs on a Russian knockoff of The Ultimate Fighter and touring around Thailand with Nate Diaz.
UFC fans launch futile campaign to strip jon jones
After recent reports claimed that Jones had accepted a massive payday for the fight, only to ultimately back out, fans finally grew tired of the drama and launched a petition to have ‘Bones’ stripped of his heavyweight crown.
As it stands, that petition is sitting at over 193,000 signatures.
Unfortunately, the demand of the fans is unlikely to sway Dana White into taking Jones’ title away.
“Go ahead and let Jon do what he wants to do,” former UFC fighter Josh Thomson said on his Weighing In podcast with ‘Big’ John McCarthy. “Jon doesn’t need another title to fight. It doesn’t mean anything anymore…no one cares. He has the belt. He makes the calls. Dana has stroked his ego so much, ‘The greatest to ever do it! The greatest fighter of all time!’
“You’ve gotta wait for him then, if you’ve said all those things. You’ve gotta wait for the greatest of all time to decide what he wants to do. You can’t strip him.”
