On Monday, Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier immersed themselves in one of the most talked about situations in recent MMA history. During their UFC 178 media tour in the MGM Grand lobby in Las Vegas the two squared off and it was instantly a debacle.
Joe Rogan thinks the Jones-Cormier debacle ‘is real bad for the sport’
Pundits complained that it was bad for the sport, while fans dug the two going back and forth with each other. One person who found the entire situation ‘ridiculous’ was UFC commentator Joe Rogan.
On the Joe Rogan Experience podcast he believes that Jones and Cormier put a black flag on the sport.
“It was ridiculous,” Rogan explained on his podcast. “This can’t happen. You can’t do that. This is real bad for the sport. It’s real bad. It’s real bad for public perception. It’s a weapon to be used against MMA. It’s unfortunate. “I think it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Some of it’s gamesmanship, but it’s just so bad for the image of the sport. It’s pretty rare, but that’s a high profile fight. I mean, Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate got head to head in each other’s faces and it was pretty hot, right? But they were professional about it. They didn’t do anything about it. These guys were not professional. You can’t do that. You can’t grab each other and f***ing slap.”
He continued to say that what the two did was nothing more than street fighting.
“Nobody wants to give ground. They don’t want anybody getting any psychological advantage so they have to show each other, ‘I’ll f***ing fight you right here, b***h.’ That’s when s**t like this happens. The importance of that not happening is huge. It’s huge. It’s just such a negative connotation attached to what that is. Just violence. The difference between that kind of violence and the violence of a sport is that the violence of a sport, everyone is agreeing with that scenario. You’re agreeing to train for X amount of weeks for X amount of rounds. You’re going to fight this guy, he weighs what you weigh. Everybody prepares, you meet at this day and you compete. It’s a very dangerous form of competition and, yes, it is fighting, as a competition, but it’s not violence the same way that that is. That’s a street fight. That’s a world champion mixed martial arts fighter and an Olympic wrestler and they’re street fighting. That’s bad for everybody. That’s bad for wrestling. That’s bad for MMA. That’s bad for sports.”
What are your thoughts on the whole Jones-Cormier situation?
