By Roy Billington

Few families on this planet can compare athletically to the Joneses.  Rochester, New York was the birthplace to three brothers that would captivate the collective conscious of sports fans around the globe.  

The eldest of the Jones’ boys, Arthur, was a gifted wrestler in high school, but he followed the path to football greatness. After a successful collegiate career at Syracuse, Arthur was drafted to the Baltimore Ravens, where he excelled as a defensive tackle, featuring heavily in the Ravens team which took home Super Bowl XLVII. Following his stint in Baltimore, Arthur moved to the Indianapolis Colts where he remains a bona fide NFL star.

Chandler Jones may be the youngest of the Jones’ boys, but you would never tell based on appearances alone. At 6’5” and 280lbs, Chandler dwarves his older brothers and is arguably the most naturally gifted of the trio. Like Arthur, Chandler forgoed his wrestling career to focus on football and has shown a natural aptitude for the game that most can only imagine, but Chandler too has shown some signs of mental insecurity. In January, Chandler was hospitalized after a serious reaction to synthetic marijuana, in a move that bares striking similarities to the struggles of his older brother Jon.

The Joneses have always been a very tight-knit family. Arthur Sr. and Camille Jones raised their kids with strong moral and ethical values. As teenagers the Jones’ kids were sent to bed at 9 PM every night and not allowed out on Saturday nights so they would be fresh for church on Sunday mornings. From the outside the Joneses seemed like an every-day hard working American family and by all accounts this was true, but behind the scenes the family faced great hardship that would forever stick with the boys.


The first born child of Arthur Sr and Camille was named Carmen. Carmen was the second woman of the house and as the eldest child, she bore the responsibility of helping to raise her younger, energetic and sometimes troublesome siblings. Carmen dealt out the discipline to Arthur and Jon, who would fight over everything and she would spoil her baby brother Chandler, but as her younger brothers began to enter manhood, Carmen’s life was cruelly taken away. Carmen Jones was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and passed away within days of her 18th birthday.

To this very day, the Jones’ boys avoid speaking about their sister out of anguish, Arthur and Chandler are heartbroken by the death of their sister and Jon, the toughest man on the planet is teary eyed at the mere mention of his beloved sister. The pain and darkness that enveloped the Joneses at the time of Carmen’s death lead to a great resilience amongst the siblings and a tireless work ethic, which brought Arthur and Chandler to NFL stardom and Jon, the middle brother, to becoming the best fighter in the world.

Mixed martial arts is multi-faceted, it is rare to find a fighter who is master of all arts. It seems we are usually either given a fighter with solid foundation in all martial arts, who is the master of none, or a fighter with a specific skillset who is inherently inept at other styles, and then there is Jon Jones.

Jon Jones dropped out of college after his now-fiancee, Jessie became pregnant. Jon wanted to provide his family with a good life, so decided to segue his greatest skill, wrestling  into a potential career and his best option was MMA.  Jon began his career training out of the Bombsquad in New York and showed an immediate talent for fighting. Jones debuted in April of 2008 and within 4 months he had won 7 fights and earned a spot in the UFC, becoming the youngest fighter on their roster.


From the second Jon Jones stepped into the famed UFC Octagon his talent was apparent. For 15 minutes straight, Jon Jones engrossed the crowd with an unrelenting onslaught of Greco-Roman throws and spinning attacks that left Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt Andre Gusmao dumbfounded. On that night in Minneapolis, a star was born, over the next few years Jon Jones would go on to be the most controversial fighter in the world and the most talented fighter on the planet.

The following 4 years would bring a sport-defining rise to the top. As each foe fell, Jones’ game became even more complete. After 2 years of largely out-grappling and ground and pounding his opponents, Jones began to diversify his game, slowly the wrestler would begin to out strike the strikers, out grappling the BJJ blackbelts and making veterans of the sport look like amateurs. At the age of 23, Jones was awarded a title shot against PRIDE FC legend Mauricio “Shogun” Rua.

Over the course of 3 rounds, Jon Jones outclassed the much more experienced Rua, before scoring a TKO victory. With his defeat of Rua, Jon Jones became the youngest ever UFC champion and his rise from anonymity to stardom was complete, but unbeknownst to Jon Jones, stardom would present a new set of problems.

The Bentley Continental GT is a beautiful car, this work of art costs $400K, so when it was found wrapped around a pole in Binghampton, NY, some eyebrows were raised, more so when the man behind the wheel was none other than UFC champion Jon Jones. Just weeks removed from his 3rd title defense, Jones was found intoxicated behind the wheel of a sports car in what would be just a taste of what was to come for the troubled star.

Jones foes continued to fall like dominoes, the New Yorker made some of the most deadly men of the planet look foolish in the ring and things seemed to be going well for Jones on the surface.

Slowly things began to derail for Jon Jones, he was truly tested for the first time against Alexander Gustafsson and while he won, the fight really could have went either way, in the years following this war Jones would state that he barely trained and partied during camp for this fight. In Jones’ next outing he put in a textbook performance, beating Glover Teixeira with ease to set up a fight with Olympic star Daniel Cormier.


From the announcement of their fight, Daniel Cormier labelled Jones a fake and was quick to criticize the champion, but not many fans were interested in seeing a fight that was seen as many to be a formality for Jones. On August 4th, 2014, during a press conference for their fight, things turned nasty between Jones and Cormier, with their staredown escalating to an all out brawl, with Jones throwing a number of strikes against a downed Cormier.

The brawl in Las Vegas ignited the fan intrigue in the fight between Jones and Cormier, but it also highlighted the impulsivity issues of Jon Jones, no prize fighter in their right mind would brawl at a press conference, it is simply foolish. It is unclear how Jones’ state of mind was at this time, but it is fair to assume that the fighter was engrossed in his drug addiction at this point.

Jones and Cormier finally faced off at UFC 182 was a typical Jon Jones performance. Jones outwrestled the Olympic wrestler and beat him handedly with jabs while standing, but the truly intriguing factor of UFC 182 wouldn’t become apparent until after the fight. After the fight, it was released that Jon Jones had failed an out of competition test for cocaine metabolites. Jones played down his test failure, stating that he had made a huge mistake and had only used the drug on a handful of occasions, but his web of lies would soon unravel.

In April of 2015, Jon Jones crashed a rental car into a car containing a pregnant woman, breaking her arm in the process. To make matters worse for Jones, he fled the scene of the crash and the responding officer found drug paraphernalia in the car. Jones was stripped of his UFC title and sentenced to community service in wake of the incident.

Following his title stripping, Jones took an extended period off to sober himself up, revealing that he had been partying for the majority of his UFC career.

In Jones’ absence, Daniel Cormier won the vacant title against Anthony Johnson and defended his title against Alexander Gustafsson. When Cormier defeated the latter, he took to the mic to call Jones out for a rematch, Jones duly accepted and at UFC 197, on April 23rd we will see if Jones has defeated his internal demons and if he can win back his UFC title.