Tim Kennedy believes that Jon Jones’ performance in the cage have been hindered by his troubles outside it.
Kennedy, who is now retired but previously trained with Jones, weighed in on the light heavyweight champion’s career on a recent episode of Submission Radio.
“When he was like the hungry young lion and his personal life wasn’t bleeding over into his professional life, you saw a ferocious Mike Tyson-like thing, right?” Kennedy said of Jones (via Middle Easy). “Then success came along, and so did money, and fame, and bad decisions, and DUI’s, and bribes, and coke, and strippers, and with that, I’m not saying that correlation is causation, but you have definitely seen a decline in performance, or the really large exclamation mark on how a fight is viewed while those kind of life decisions are happening. So, the technique, the talent, the skill is still in that fighter of Jon Jones. For all contenders, I hope you all pray that his life is still a disaster, because if he gets his life in order, like, that dude’s gonna be unstoppable.”
Kennedy also looked back on some of his previous training sessions with Jon Jones, admitting the champion occasionally smelled like alcohol and marijuana.
“When he’s right, I hated training with him because he was so dominant,” Kennedy said of Jones. “And then when he was off, if he had a night when he went out, I could smell it. You know, you can smell booze, you can smell the weed. As an athlete, when you start sweating, all those things come out. And when I would smell that, I would be like, ‘Alright, today’s my day, let me get his back, or I’m gonna push the pace, or in the 4th, 5th minute of these rounds, he’s gonna deal with a more aggressive version.’ So, it was almost night and day in the gym.”
What do you think of these comments from Tim Kennedy? What are your thoughts on Jon Jones? Let us know in the comments section.
This article first appeared on BJPENN.com on 3/13/2020.