It is all over.
Within the context of our current existential moment – one characterized by general impatience and a fiendish addiction to instant gratification – Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier showed us all that real value is in the long play. There’s no fast track to history and both Jones and Cormier punched their ticket there last night with the culminating act of their epic story.
We all knew it would end this way. Jones’s 30 month hiatus made foretelling the fight’s results interesting, but it never pushed him out of favour. He’s the most dangerous man who ever fought in the Octagon, and, when the book closes on his career, he’ll be the greatest champion who ever held down a division. We knew he was going to take the belt back, because in the fight game – and it’s been this way at every stage of our evolution – the deadlier creature gets to eat. Jones is the deadlier creature in this story. He’s the alpha and the omega of the light heavyweight division. A demigod of combat and unrelenting viciousness. And he’s eaten whenever there was food to fight for. The only time he was beat to the table was when he beat himself.
And yet, even in the absence of a more uncertain matchup, last night’s fight puts a full stop on the end of a truly era-defining rivalry – the truest such thing there’s ever been in the UFC. And it’s because, owing to circumstances both within and outside of the fighters’ control, it had longevity, and it ended properly, with a showing of a full range of human emotion and animal instinct.
There’s a lot to be said about the act of class displayed by Jones during his post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, including that it wouldn’t have existed under the contrary set of circumstances. But in considering the outcome we’re left to ponder here, the only thing that should be said about anything pertaining to this rivalry is that it has the chops to go down as one of the great ones. It had it all, baby, and we ought to be filled with a sense of loathing and despair at its end, because this kind of story is generational, and I don’t know that Dana White has the initiative or the luck to mine the roster for another one of these things.
In the meantime, while we wait for miracles and hope to the living Christ that the UFC isn’t going the way of Tyron Woodley or the pseudo-political, daytime television trash he’s peddling out on a now regular basis, let us appreciate the Jones-Cormier saga, and watch it with fear and apprehension as it becomes smaller in the distance behind us.
