Newark, NJ — It seems that UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones’ talk of retirement and vacating his title is news to UFC CEO and President Dana White, for one.
“He said he’s ready to vacate the belt?” questioned White following UFC 316 on Saturday, confronted with some of Jones’ recent public statements. “F*cking crazy. I’ve been busy, I haven’t been keeping up with the gossip.”
White has been busy, looking to launch TKO Boxing (it won’t end up being called that, though the name is fitting as the UFC falls under the TKO Group branch of Endeavor these days). He missed out on UFC 315’s post-fight press conference and has seemingly avoided most media up until Saturday in Newark.
“He comes back, he’s either back today or came back yesterday, whatever, he was in Thailand. We’ll be home tonight, and Tuesday, we’ll figure this out.”
Jones recently called for a fight with Francis Ngannou, now signed with the PFL. He’s downplayed the idea of fighting Tom Aspinall, the UFC’s interim heavyweight champ, questioning what it would do for his legacy. Of course, the UFC and Dana White in particular have never been fans of co-promotion, though Ngannou could likely get PFL founder Donn Davis on board.
“Tom Aspinall’s the guy. He’s the guy. I don’t know, we’ll have to see how this plays [out],” White stated, failing to even address the Ngannou question otherwise. “Listen if the guy wants to retire, and doesn’t want to fight, nothing you can do. I didn’t want Khabib [Nurmagomedov] to retire, I thought DC [Daniel Cormier] should have stayed in it longer. It’s none of my business. I’ll do what I can to make the fight if we can.”
“If he’s talking that crazy sh*t, I didn’t realize that.”
When Georges St-Pierre retired after defending his welterweight title against Johnny Hendricks, White espoused the opinion that GSP owed it to the company to fight the next deserving contender first. He agreed that Jones is in a similar spot. “Yeah. Yeah but Jon’s been Jon since he walked in the door here. I was younger then. Really sh*t doesn’t go the way you would like it all the time.”
White also responded to a recent petition calling for Jon Jones to be stripped of his heavyweight title.
“Every human on Earth was DM’ing it to me. Yeah, I saw it,” White said regarding the petition, hosted by change.org with over 188,000 signatures to date (less, apparently, when Dana White saw it).
“How many fans are there worldwide, what’s the number? 400 million or something like that? 130,000 want to see him stripped,” noted White. “It’s kind of f*cking silly.”
Jones has, of course, been stripped of titles on multiple occasions. He’s the only fighter in company history to have been stripped of belts on three occasions, for a mixture of violating the promotion’s code of conduct, and failing multiple drug tests. After being stripped of light heavyweight titles (including an interim belt) in 2015, 2016, and 2017, Jones would win the UFC’s 205lb title back in 2018, defending it a few times more before voluntarily vacating, then returning at heavyweight in 2023.
Later, White would reiterate that when it comes to Jones, if he does fight, “it’s Aspinall’s fight.”
“We’ve been talking to this kid forever about it. It’s his fight. Listen, you can’t make people fight. If Jon doesn’t want to fight, you can’t make him fight. We can try to make him fight, we can throw things at him to inspire him to want to fight, but we’ll figure it out.”
