Jon Jones would welcome a superfight with his fellow former UFC champion, Brock Lesnar.
Bones is scheduled to fight Ciryl Gane tonight — March 4 — for the vacant heavyweight championship as the UFC 285 headlining act at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Lesnar, who owned the strap for nearly two years from 2008 to 2010, hasn’t competed since UFC 200 in 2016. And at 45 years old, the WWE superstar will likely never compete inside the Octagon again.
But, that hasn’t stopped Jones from dreaming about the matchup. And if Lesnar is down to scrap, so is Bones.
“I think fighting Brock Lesnar would have been really cool,” Jones said in a recent interview with The Sporting News. Brock isn’t the most technical guy, but he has a massive fan base. He’s a lot bigger than me, and it would have been one of those really cool kind of David and Goliath kind of situation.
“It would have been really cool for cross-sport promoting, and I think we both would have done great things for our family and for our team. Financially, that would have been massive. Never say never — Brock, if you’re out there.”
Lesnar Beat 2 Former UFC Heavyweight Champions in the Cage
Lesnar has a professional mixed martial arts record of 5-3 with one no-contest. He holds notable wins over former UFC heavyweight champions Randy Couture and Frank Mir, as well as ex-interim champion Shane Carwin.
In his last outing, Lesnar fought Mark Hunt at UFC 200 and originally won the affair by unanimous decision. But, the result was overturned to a no contest after Lesnar failed a drug test for the banned substance clomiphene.
Anthony Smith Outlines Several Interesting Fights for Jones at Heavyweight
Saturday night will mark Jones’ first fight as a heavyweight, as well as his first contest in over three years. Should he get past Gane, there will be no shortage of follow-up fights for him as the champion. And Jones’ former light heavyweight opponent Anthony Smith shared a few potentially interesting matches for Bones.
“There’s a couple of really interesting fights,” Smith said on MMA Fighting’s “The Fighter vs. The Writer.” “The Ciryl Gane fight is really, really interesting. The Stipe fight, very, very interesting. To be honest with you, Curtis Blaydes — very, very interesting. Another high-level, super-explosive, dangerous striker against a guy who isn’t known as a knockout guy.
“That’s Curtis Blaydes’ problem, that’s always been his problem. He has everything right, but he’s just had a run of bad luck of getting caught by really powerful guys. Will Jon Jones’ power be much heavier at heavyweight? For sure. He’s just carrying more, that’s how it is, but he’s not known as a power guy.
“I think a fight with Curtis Blaydes is very interesting to me. Just seeing Jon against not only a super high-level wrestler, but a very, very aggressive, power, heavy, heavy big god**** guy. Like, Curtis Blaydes is huge. He’s huge, he’s athletic, he’s got the cardio to go five [rounds], and he’s super explosive. That’s interesting to me. We can go down to Tom Aspinall, that’s really interesting to me. There’s a handful of guys like that.”
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Jon Jones Sounds Off on Fighting Former UFC Champion Brock Lesnar