White: ‘All this madness’ with Jon Jones cost him over $15,000,000

UFC president Dana White appeared recently on The Dan Le Batard Show and discussed the sad and brilliant career of Jon Jones. He is currently serving a one-year suspension for failing an anti-doping test and will be eligible to fight early in July of 2017, but that is only the latest in a long-line of personal failings that interfered with a level of ability that is second to none.

“He’s definitely one of the guy’s who could have gone down as one of the greatest ever,” said White to LeBatard. “If you look at all the time he’s been out, he probably would have defended the title a few times. He might be fighting at heavyweight right now, who knows, but, hey man…when you do what this guy has done, you’ve got to pay the price.

“We’ve lost a lot of money, left a lot of money on the table and obviously his legacy is…I’ll tell you this, too…in the history of combat sports, nobody’s ever taken this much time off and come back and looked like they did when they were younger. Even Ali. So it’s going to be interesting.”

“[The cost to Jones] has got to be…who knows. I mean, if he moved up to heavyweight and fought for the heavyweight championship, it could have been massive. It could be anywhere from $15-20 million.”

Jones has long been on track to being the Greatest of All Time, but he’s no G.O.A.T. today.

“It’s tough to not give that to Anderson Silva,” said White. “Anderson Silva was doing things at the time that other people couldn’t do. He was so dominant and made it look so easy. There was a point in time when he made that 185-pound division look weak.”

Dana White created a four billion dollar business out of less than nothing, but he didn’t make every big fight he wanted. It was widely believed that Fedor Emelianenko was the one that got away. However, he told LeBatard that not seeing Jones fight for the heavyweight belt is the greatest disappointment.

“I think so, yeah,” said White. “I think because everybody looks at Jon Jones as the guy who was probably the best ever to do it. And the potential that he had. Who knows what fights we missed or what could have been because of all this madness.”