Jon Jones: I'm the most nervous fighter in the world, and that's why I win
Jon Jones is proud of the fact that he's yet to ever suffer a true defeat in MMA; his lone career blemish is a controversial disqualification loss to Matt Hamill in 2009. According to the light heavyweight, the key to his dominance has been a healthy dose of fear of losing.
"I know that I can be beat and I think that's why I haven't been beat," he told media members at a lunch scrum, this week.
Jones says he knows that no one is unbeatable. Knowing that makes him better, in his mind, than the likes of Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey.
"Some of these guys really start to believe their hype," he claimed.
"Ronda Rousey, they were saying she's the best fighter of all time and best athlete in the world. I was happy for her to hear those types of accolades, but once I realized that maybe she was starting to believe it herself, I knew she was in a dangerous spot."
Jones surmises that McGregor also began to believe all of his own haughty trash talk. "Conor McGregor saying these things about just being the baddest dude and 'I'll beat anybody at any weight class,' that's foolish stuff," Jones reasoned.
"When you believe the hype to that level, that's when you're in danger."
Jones certainly enters fights confident that he'll win but he reveals that he may very well be the most nervous person in the world throughout training camps. He obsesses over the ways opponents like light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier could beat him, when they rematch next week at UFC 200.
"I talk about being confident in winning all the time but the reason why I always win is because at the end of the day I'm more nervous than any other fighter," he admitted.
"It causes me to spend every night until 3 o'clock in the morning just on my laptop watching the same damn fight over and over again with a notebook, thinking about the ways I can lose, thinking about what I need to do. That's really what I attribute to being undefeated all these years -- how seriously I take it and how much I don't know."
"Bones" went on to say that a trip on any given day to his Jackson/Winkeljohn gym would reveal just how human he is. Having teammates who can push and beat him in practice helps Jones get sharp for fight night.
"There are a lot of guys on my team who aren't in the UFC who can beat me on any given day. I get taken down all the time in practice. I get hit pretty hard. I get tapped out all the time in practice," he concluded.
"To the fans and other fighters, they probably look at me as close to unbeatable. Whereas if you spend time [with me at the gym], you see that I'm definitely not a guy that wins every day."
