ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — After spending four weeks in New Mexico helping Jon Jones prepare for his latest title defense, Izzy Martinez finds himself in charge of one last team training session at the Jackson Wink MMA Academy ahead of UFC 239.
It’s Friday morning, eight days away from the pay-per-view card, and the UFC champion isn’t in attendance. However, the way Martinez, a wrestling coach with a cement mixer for a voice box, repeatedly mentions Jones, it certainly feels as if he is. Which is sort of the point.
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Making Jones’ greatness relatable to a roomful of pros whose experience ranges from newcomer to mid-tier vet is key to Martinez’s lesson plan, and the way to accomplish this is by getting sensational about something specific.
“Jon is a vicious animal in the cage,” Martinez said. “He wants to hurt you.”
The hope is this will prompt many of the three dozen fighters currently encircling Martinez to think about the little details that separate the best competitors like Jones from everyone else.
None of these fighters possesses the kind of talent that the man they’re being asked to think about does, and that’s no slight. There aren’t many mixed martial artists who have ever operated with Jones’ combination of physical, mental and technical ability.
“Jon doesn’t explain a lot of what he does; he kind of does it,” Martinez said after the session, which ended prior to the trainer departing on an early afternoon trip home to Chicago, which days later will boomerang him to Las Vegas. “It’s hard to acknowledge a lot of the things he does if you’re not being pushed to watch him and identify what Jon’s doing in the cage. I’m always trying to reference Jon so they can look and see how the best fighter in the world is doing it.”
When Jones’ overall game is broken down into digestible pieces, there should always be something to learn that illuminates what makes him so dangerous. That generally means honing in on things that are based on sound fundamentals, such as securing the two-on-one grip, rather than his seemingly unteachable preternatural abilities.
Fighters either plateau or grow, and it’s not a linear process. Both tracks can serve them well so long as the aggregate trends toward an upward trajectory, and that’s exactly where Jones has headed as he prepared for his third bout in the past seven months.
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“When you fight so often, you just get this comfort and get in this zone,” Jones said. “I feel the way I did when I was like super young and fighting back to back to back. The only difference is I’m a little more mature, a little more sure with my team and myself. I’m in a good place. I’m really excited to be here.”
The best fighter on the planet is active and improving, which should make anyone trying to compete against him legitimately concerned that what they’re doing won’t ever be enough to defeat one of the most innovative competitors in MMA history.
“My mentality is to win, none of that ‘or be killed’ stuff,” Jones said. “My mentality is to win. My mentality is to go out there to try to fight flawlessly, to have fun with the gifts that I’m blessed with. And that’s what I plan on doing – going out there and being who I’ve always been. That’s a guy who looks at himself as extremely skilled and mainly a guy who truly believes in himself. I think those are my greatest strengths: my belief.”
Early in his career, people who sought to criticize Jones absurdly took to ridiculing his skinny legs. If they’re skinny at all these days, it’s in the way a knife tapers to a sharp point. Now in the prime of his career, Jones isn’t quite a killing machine from the future like Robert Patrick’s T-1000, just the best current iteration of an unarmed human combatant (notwithstanding the foibles and disappointments that have influenced how he is publicly perceived).
Inside the Jackson Wink Academy, Jones is seen as nothing less than the best fighter on the planet, which makes him a great frame of reference for Martinez.
Christian Edwards, a 20-year-old prospect and purported Jones’ protege who will make his pro debut for Bellator on July 12, was one of the champion’s main sparring partners ahead of tonight’s UFC 239 headliner in Las Vegas, where Jones (24-1) meets Thiago Santos (21-6). Edwards took part in Friday’s morning session.
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Edwards, an athletic light heavyweight, has had moments against Jones in the gym, including catching the champ in a triangle choke. It’s happened once, and “sure enough he got me with the exact same triangle two weeks ago,” Edwards said. “He reminded me of the last time I got him.”
Jones is always interested in improving so if he gets caught, or tagged, or misreads something, no matter how small a correction is needed, it’s enough to get the champ’s attention. And this has been a great lesson to learn for a young fighter.
“It’s a different kind of feeling when you’re in there with him. I’ve never felt with anyone else the way I feel with him when we’re sparring,” said Edwards, who put in several rounds with Jones and walks away better for it. “He’s got a crazy work ethic. He’s ridiculously strong. He breaks you down in ways you’ve never been broken down before. If your strength is striking, then he’ll strike with you and still kind of make you feel less good than you thought you were.”
Jones’ fallen opponents can attest to this experience. The champion’s physically unique stature gives him advantages over most of the fighters he encounters, and it’s true that he sometimes does what others can’t, such as landing that spinning elbow against Stephan Bonnar before joining the gym in Albuquerque 10 years ago. So, reminding talented fighters to look to Jones for inspiration seems like a sensible enough idea, and locking in on certain techniques reveals plenty about Jones. For one, it’s his mastery of the basics that positioned Jones as a brutal test for challengers.
Jon Jones and his team celebrate a March victory over Anthony Smith. (Jeff Bottari / Zuffa)
Jackson Wink co-founder Mike Winkeljohn has called Jones the “king of hand-fighting,” smartly highlighting perhaps the least appreciated but most important area of the UFC light heavyweight champion’s arsenal. Through a variety of entries, Jones has created opportunities to escalate attacks and seek finishes after securing a two-on-one grip against his opponents, which is what Martinez was seeking to impress upon as the class regarding how and why Jones does the things he does.
“Izzy Martinez has him working on head position and hand-fighting, and that has taken Jon to a whole new level,” Winkeljohn said. “When Jon starts pushing someone’s head up off the cage, the double-leg is easy because they don’t like the pressure. They hate it. They hate the position. They’re not sure if the elbows are coming or not, and they almost want to get taken down because they’re scared of elbows. The blend we have is working really well. And his striking, same thing. Kicking range, no one can beat him. They close their eyes trying to reach and they’re running into stuff.”
Jones has a knack for knowing when to move in for the kill, but that’s really the last stage of what makes him one of the most impressive fighters ever to wear four-ounce gloves. Viciousness like Martinez described can come quickly or by following a patient and technical route. Either way, the end result against Jones is often the same: Elite fighters leave the cage broken, their strengths exposed as inadequate compared to his.
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“Jon is one of those guys that has a vision of the sport and can see it different,” Martinez said. “He’s a fighter. I think Jon is not only gifted, but he’s a studier. He doesn’t just fight; he lives fighting. He’s watching film. We record all his sessions, and I literally record his sessions and put them on his phone so when he’s bored, when he wants to take a sh*t, when he gets out of the shower, he always has it in the palm of his hands to study. Most fighters don’t have that availability, right? And not only don’t they have that availability, they don’t have the discipline to go back and watch. One of Jon’s biggest qualities is the discipline to engulf himself in this sport.”
Martinez’s lesson for the day hits on one of the crucial ways that Jones has stood up to every man he’s fought. Remaining undefeated continues to be the goal as he faces difficult tests, including Santos, that most people won’t credit him for following his overwhelming success in the octagon.
“If I am able to do that, it would just be extraordinary,” said Jones, whose lone blemish came via disqualification following a fight everyone treats as a win. “I believe I will. I’m working really hard. I believe more than ever that I am meant to be here and, there’s no coincidence I’m in this position. I’m just earning it, day in and day out.”
The impact of Jones’ work has been obvious during his recent stretch of fights. If all goes well against Santos, “Bones” will attempt to enter the octagon once more in 2019, making it four bouts in 12 months. If Jones were a rock band, his “Getting Back To Business” Tour would have begun with a third-round stoppage of Alexander Gustafsson in December.
The continuous pace has kept Jones in the gym, working on a repertoire that was already nuanced and dangerous enough to twist the brains of opposing trainers and freeze challengers in their biggest moments. Consistency has allowed Jones to step up his training, which has streamlined his feedback loops with trainers, establish a rhythm, and figure out smarter and better ways to go about his fighting.
Greg Jackson said forcing an evolution onto Jones has been “super important” mentally and technically as they incorporate subtle improvements to avoid stagnation and fighting the wars of yesterday.
“It might be in this fight. It might be his next fight. It might be the fight after that,” Jackson said. “But I’m seeing him beginning to turn the corner. He’s adding more moves to his arsenal. He’s getting his flow down a little bit better. I think he’s improving again. The best is yet to come. We’re getting set for another great run.”
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How great can Jones be if those things fall into place?
“He’s got a couple more game changers in him that people are going to see here soon,” said Winkeljohn, who noted that the most recent thing they have come up with is a way to negate boxing as a viable attack against Jones. “That’s kind of my goal with Jon right now because there’s always an opening due to elbows. I’m sort of showing my cards, but I’ll be so old by the time people can figure it out I’ll be retired anyways. Jon is capable of doing it. Jon is capable of stopping people in so many ways.”
