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Thirty seconds elapsed between Dana White opening Wednesday’s UFC 200 news conference at Madison Square Garden for questions and the headliners verbally tearing into each other.
Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier bickered for three straight minutes on their first exchange, and probably could have gone three straight hours if White hadn’t interrupted them to resume the event.
“DC’s grandkids are going to ask him, ‘So what ever happened with that Jon Bones Jones guy? Did you ever beat him?’” Jones said looking at his rival. “’What are you going to say?”
Cormier responded, “I’m going to say, ‘You know what? When I won the belt, I didn’t have to. The idiot eliminated himself from competition.’”
Cormier and Jones lived up to expectations on the first day promoting their July 9 rematch at T-Mobile Arena. It’s going to take much more for their fight to ultimately register as a success in the main event of UFC 200.
They’re going to have to produce spectacularly for the pay-per-view card the UFC once promised would go down as the biggest in promotional history to be remembered for something more than its haphazard arrangement.
White wanted UFC 200 to surpass UFC 100, though the July 2009 milestone event at Mandalay Bay Events Center provided the template. The UFC’s two biggest stars at the time, Brock Lesnar and Georges St. Pierre, anchored the card.
The not-so-secret idea at the beginning of the year was to do the same at UFC 200 with Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor.
But Rousey remains missing in action after her defeat to Holly Holm last November. And the UFC presenting Jones and Cormier Wednesday was akin to reading McGregor the decision in his fight over promotional obligations: He lost unanimously.
The difference was, there was no winner in the bizarre battle. UFC created the McGregor monster by handling him differently than any other fighter who had come before, and combatted the predictable power-struggle bred out of his evolution clumsily.
It ended up proving McGregor’s argument on the futility of coming to Las Vegas for obligations including a commercial shoot and news conference last week. Neither Jones nor Cormier participated in those various UFC 200-related junkets, and that was no hurdle in thrusting them to the top of the card.
Stubbornness on the promotion’s part is the only thing keeping a now-mammoth rematch between McGregor and Nate Diaz off of UFC 200.
At the same time, advocating for McGregor based on his erratic social-media posts feels fallacious. Let’s not forget he used his influence to force through a second fight with Diaz that no one was particularly interested in until this latest saga.
To not fulfill duties he was well aware came with getting his way nearly three months before the fight is indefensible. After acquitting himself with grace and dignity in the short term when Diaz upset him in March, McGregor has managed to do the opposite in the long term.
Blaming the loss on too many distractions, as McGregor did in a facebook post explaining his position, is laughable. McGregor had months to prepare, while Diaz accepted the fight on 11 days notice.
And then, to top it all off, McGregor tried to illustrate his point by demeaning female reporters almost concurrently to the issue of misogyny in sports media gaining just prominence.
Of course, McGregor’s transgressions account for a minuscule fraction next to Jones’ lengthy record. But Jones appears to have defeated his demons, espousing sobriety and gratitude while beating Ovince St. Preux by unanimous decision last week at UFC 197.
The UFC must hope Jones has everything together, and that Cormier isn’t rushing back too quickly from a leg injury that kept him from fighting last week. It’s hitching everything to the backs of the two antagonistic light heavyweights.
Jones and Cormier are the only ones left that could deliver UFC 200 close to its originally intended vision.
Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.
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