Des Moines — Jeremy Stephens wasn’t the only fighter at UFC Des Moines making his return to the promotion. So to was Stephens’ opponent, Mason Jones, coming back to start his second stint with a thrilling three-round decision win.
Jones vs. Stephens easily could have snagged Fight of the Night in Des Moines, had the UFC awarded one (instead, they handed out four Performance of the Night bonuses). Jones’ absence from the Performance bonus-list wasn’t for lack of effort either. He had his moments where Stephens was either hurt, or fending off submission attempts.
“That guy’s built with power, so it was just like, let’s not be stupid, let’s go back and make it clean. His jiu-jitsu wasn’t great, but it was like everything he did was quite solid, he was slippery, he was bleeding a little bit, and I just couldn’t get in position to finish him,” Jones (16-2, 1NC) told media outlets including Cageside Press following the fight. A kimura attempt came close, but Stephens fended that off through “good, old fashioned, smart intelligent play.”
Later, Jones admitted that he could probably have taken Stephens down early in the fight, and maybe even found a finish that way. The desire to knock the returning UFC veteran out overrode that. “I wanted to knock him out so badly, but he is who he is. He’s Jeremy Lil Heathen Stephens. When that name came across my desk, I said ‘listen, I’m going to give him a firefight.'”
Mason Jones, a former double champ in Cage Warriors at lightweight and welterweight, returned to the UFC’s 155lb division on Saturday off the strength of a four-fight win streak back in his old promotion. So where does a win over Stephens, a definitive one, leave him in terms of bargaining power?
“With this game, a lot of people don’t understand, one, this is television. This is film. No one wants to see someone hold someone down. This is all about exciting fights, I give exciting fights,” he stated. “I go out there, I want to go out there and beat people like Justin Gaethje beats people. I don’t want to go out there and take people down, hold them down.”
Jones knows he may have to do it eventually — even Khabib Nurmagomedov had a fight where he mostly held his opponent down, Jones noted — “but I want to go out there and give exciting fights, I want to go out there and decimate people, I want to destroy people on TV. But as for bargaining people, we earn it. We earn it as we go.”
After a rocky first four fights in the UFC that included just a single win, “today I proved that I’m experienced enough that I can get a win no matter what,” Jones later added. “I can go out there, I can give exciting fights, then I can make the win happen. I went out there with the whole mentality of, ‘I’m going to set fire to his career, burn what’s left of it, and mine’s going to grow from the ashes.'”
Watch Mason Jones’ full UFC Des Moines post-fight press conference above.
