It wasn’t all negativity from Daniel Cormier when reacting to Jon Jones’ retirement.
Jones (28-1 MMA, 22-1 UFC) has called it a career, and relinquished his UFC heavyweight title in the process. Tom Aspinall (15-3 MMA, 8-1 UFC) has now been promoted to UFC heavyweight champion.
Cormier thinks Jones refusing to face Aspinall in a title-unification bout negatively affects his legacy. However, that didn’t stop Cormier from praising his former rival, who beat him twice in light heavyweight title fights – with the second being overturned due to a failed drug test.
“It’s big,” Cormier told ESPN MMA on Jones retiring. “We’re talking about a kid that started this thing at like 19, 20 years old. He has spanned three different eras of heavyweights and light heavyweights. He did the Vitor Belforts and the ‘Shogun’ Ruas, the ‘Rampage’ Jacksons, and then he moved on to the Rashad Evans and myself, and Alexander Gustafsson, into (Thiago) Santos, (Dominick) Reyes, Anthony Smith, all the way back to Stipe (Miocic). Nobody gets that amount of time at the top without the crowd catching you because when you’re the best, everyone’s training to beat you.
“Jon Jones somehow managed to not only stay relevant, but also win every time he stepped foot in that octagon. Everything else aside, all the stuff outside of the octagon, he won every time he was put in a fight with a man, one-on-one, and he beat me in Anaheim. I can tell you this without question: I beat Stipe Miocic, I became the Strikeforce heavyweight champion, UFC light heavyweight champion. I was never better than that time in Anaheim. That was the best I’ve ever been, and he beat me, and because of that, I will always respect him for his skills and what he did inside the octagon. In that eight-sided fence, there was no one like him.”
Jones responded to Cormier’s praise on his Instagram story.
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