Dana White has not changed his stance on including Jon Jones in the UFC’s planned White House event.
The UFC CEO revealed that Jones reached out to him to apologize for how the entire Tom Aspinall saga played out, in which he ended up vacating his heavyweight title and retiring over taking the fight. But just two weeks later, Jones decided to come out of retirement and re-enter the drug testing pool in hopes of landing on the White House card next summer in Washington, D.C.
“It wasn’t a conversation,” White told Sirius XM’s Zach Gelb. “He reached out, he wrote, like a text saying, ‘Listen, sorry how this all played out’ or whatever. ‘I want to fight at the White House – I’m serious about that.'”
However, White still doesn’t trust Jones.
“No, I appreciate it, I appreciate him reaching out and doing that, but I need people I can count on for this fight,” White said. “And I know who they are, I know who they are not.”
In an interview with Jim Rome, White said his concern over Jones has nothing to do with his past history involving performance-enhancing drugs.
“I’m never worried about Jones not being clean for performance-enhancing drugs,” White said. “People go crazy over that. Shut up. I’m not worried about that. My thing about Jon Jones is, in the crunch time, bad things always happen leading up to fights and all this stuff. Can I count on Jon Jones? That’s my thing. Every time. I also back that up with, I do believe he’s the greatest of all time.
“And I also say when you deal with the greats like him – whether it’s him, Anderson Silva, the list goes on and on – it’s almost like these guys are artists of a sort, and anytime you deal with artists, stuff happens. It’s part of the business. But I like consistency. Who do you want to be in a foxhole with? Those are my kind of guys. I know them all from top to bottom, men and women.”
