Current UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones took many lessons from his first fight against Alexander Gustafsson.
Then the light heavyweight champion, Jones entered the fight at UFC 165 with five title defenses under his belt. “Bones” was in his prime, taking out former champions left and right with relative ease. After finishing Chael Sonnen in the first round, he was tasked with taking on Gustafsson, who at the time was a one-loss fighter on a six-fight winning streak.
Jones knew there was a lot of noise surrounding Gustafsson’s potential, but he admits he didn’t take him as seriously as he should have.
“I fought against Alexander Gustafsson the first time and, at the time, he was getting so much hype around him,” Jones said on a “Deepcut with VicBlends” episode. “I looked at Alexander as being, quite frankly, a white version of me. He was tall, he had a swagger, he had great footwork, he had great boxing. I just felt like he’s a lot like me, he has the same reach as me and everyhting, but I was like, ‘He’s not me.’
“That fight, I partied a lot leading into that fight. I studied a lot, I trained a lot, but I had this (feeling of) knowing that I was gonna win, and it was at an all-time high.”
Not only did the UFC 165 main event win the Fight of the Night award, but it would also be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. It was truly one of the best fights in MMA history. Not only for the back-and-forth war that unfolded over 25 minutes, but it was also the first time anyone made Jones look human inside the octagon. Gustafsson lived up to the pre-fight hype as someone who could dethrone Jones, even though he ultimately came up short on the scorecards.
“In that fight, things did not go the way I expected,” Jones said. “I couldn’t stop his jab. I hadn’t prepared for a low jab; he was jabbing me to the stomach, and I had never prepared for that. He was a lot more confident than I expected him to be. He was in my face, and he was a person who was expecting to win. I had to pull from something that I didn’t realize I had. I had a tenacity, and resilience, and a grit that I didn’t realize I had.”
The battle left Jones in a condition he had never experienced before, and hasn’t since. He recalls seeing his mother truly concerned for his health as he struggled to recover from what transpired in the octagon.
“It’s the first time I’d seen my mother crying over my bed backstage,” Jones said. “They put me on morphine, and the morphine was making me shake profusely, and my lips were swollen. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t use the bathroom on my own. That was one of the fights where I had really realized how seriously I had to take each and every opponent, that I could never get too big for my britches because there’s always somebody that’s nipping at our toes. That fight taught me a lot about the seriousness of preparation.”
Since that moment, Jones has won nine more fights – all of them championship fights, either in the light heavyweight or heavyweight division. It’s a stretch that includes a rematch against Gustafsson at UFC 232, which was a far less competitive bout as Jones finished the fight by ground and pound in Round 3.
Jones currently holds the heavyweight crown and has recorded one title defense. He may be heading toward retirement if he decides to pass on a title unification bout against interim champion Tom Aspinall.
