The Jon Jones saga continues to get more and more bizarre, as the UFC Light Heavyweight Champion went from testing positive for cocaine, to claiming he was going to enter a drug treatment program and “take it very seriously,” to checking himself out of said-rehabilitation center 24-hours later. Now, even more extreme rumors have surfaced, including a claim that Jones not only has a legitimate drug addiction issue, but that he actually once hid under a cage to avoid being drug tested.
In a recent Deadspin article, writer Greg Howard wrote the following:
“I think he has a problem,” someone close to Jones told me last week, adding that it was unlikely Jones would get real help. “He doesn’t have the right people around him.” (Jones’s manager, Malki Kawa, persistently comes up as the worst of his influences, which probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s ever had to deal with him.)
There are a lot of questions here, ranging from the absurd—did Jones really hide under the cage when a tester showed up at his gym unannounced, as the rumor has it?—to the merely telling. Why, for instance, did the Nevada State Athletic Commission and the UFC let Jones’s fight go forward after getting word of the positive test when a lesser star would almost certainly have been pulled from the card? (Asking that one is the same as answering it.) What really matters, though, is what we now know: One day Jones felt he needed to be in drug treatment, and the very next he didn’t. Whatever’s been going on here, nothing is going to change.
Ultimately, you can draw your own conclusions, but it certainly appears that we’ve yet to see the last of Jon Jones in the center of controversial situations.
Talk about this on our official FACEBOOK page, or on our official TWITTER page. You can also talk about it in our popular FORUMS.