Jon "Bones" Jones sits in a wheelchair, two artificial accoutrements blimp with ice comatose on his big, aching feet. It's abreast midnight in Denver, and bisected an hour ago in foreground of 16,000 fans, Jones thrashed Quinton "Rampage" Jackson in elegant, but vicious, fashion, asthmatic out the above light-heavyweight best to absorb his UFC appellation belt.
The September achievement anchored Jones' cachet as the a lot of barbarous practitioner of attention acerbity in the UFC. In fact, Jones may be the best fighter the apple of alloyed aggressive arts has anytime seen. Blessed with a six-foot-four anatomy and a aberrant athleticism that runs in the ancestors (his brother Arthur plays linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens), Jones, 24, brings a set of abilities the UFC could alone dream of in its aboriginal canicule of eye-gouging and arch butts. His moves – spinning elbows, aerial knee bliss – assume like the being of kung-fu flicks, and yet he's just as baleful on the ground. Urijah Faber, one of MMA's better stars, says Jones could become the Michael Jordan of the sport. "I don't absolutely apperceive what to say to that," Jones says as a trainer adjusts the ice on his feet, which are about torn from all the backbreaking bliss delivered to Jackson. "I don't wish to complete cocky, but I do authority myself in top regard."
At 23, Jones became the youngest best in UFC history, but he hardly fits the mold. The son of a Pentecostal preacher, he grew up a angular kid singing in actuality choir, too angular and awkward to excel at acceptable sports. He wrestled in college, but alone out if he got his adherent pregnant, and concluded up a bouncer in upstate New York. After accepting angry down for a careful job at a Lockheed Martin plant, Jones absitively to accord MMA a try, teaching himself to action by watching YouTube clips and flipping through action books. "I had basically gone from this guy who had aggregate traveling for him to a academy dropout who was applying for jobs as a janitor," Jones says. "I affectionate of acquainted like a loser. I had been a accompaniment best wrestler, and actuality I am alive as a bouncer. It was now or never. I knew I had this kid coming, and I bare money to get diapers."
After about a year and a bisected of mostly teaching himself, and adopting a activity of apostolic dedication, Jones had aesthetic his awful mix of kickboxing, angry and jiujitsu, and began his run to the title. In person, he's polite, funny and self-deprecating, but already he accomplish into the ring, he unleashes a acerbity of abandon that can be alarming to watch. "He could be one of the best ever," says UFC admiral Dana White. "But if a guy becomes famous, all these parasites alpha to adhere to you, and it can fuck up your head. If he can abstain that, the sky's the limit."
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This adventure is from the November 10, 2011 affair of Rolling Stone.
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