AMADI: Fairly or Unfairly, History Not Likely to Side With Jon Jones on UFC 151 Cancellation

By: Jason Amadi, MMATorch Columnist

With social media being what it is today, and quite frankly, with MMA being what it is today, it seems that whenever news breaks, many of us rush to oversimplify things in order to be the voice of reason. However, if you took that approach yesterday when the announcement was first made that UFC 151 was being canceled, the avalanche of news that followed probably made you look like a fool.

For those of you that missed it, Dan Henderson was forced to pull out of UFC 151 with a knee injury sometime within the last 72 hours, leaving Jon Jones without an opponent. In order to save the card, the UFC offered Jon Jones a fight with Chael Sonnen that Jones would ultimately decline, and with time constraints being what they were, the UFC was forced to cancel the event.

Now, it needs to be said that Jon Jones was completely within his rights to decline the fight. The UFC Light Heavyweight Champion is under no obligation whatsoever to step up and save the day, especially when it could potentially wind up being at his own expense.

That being said, Jones' decision negatively impacted a lot of people. Sure, you could make the argument that the UFC could have added enough name value to the card to where it could have survived without the originally scheduled main event, but that wasn't the case.

Fairly or unfairly, Jones had to make a decision in the eleventh hour that would ultimately decide whether UFC 151 would take place or not, and he chose not to compete. Say whatever you want about how the card should have been structured, but UFC 151 was canceled as a direct result of Jones' decision.

People often speak cavalierly about Zuffa just cancelling UFC events, but the reason they've never done it before is because doing so would cost them millions and millions of dollars, and that's what we saw here. The city of Las Vegas will also take a hit, fans that booked flights and hotels for Labor Day weekend to see this fight will take a hit, fighters that paid for full training camps to compete at UFC 151 will take a hit, and FX has two hours of programming to fill as a result of there no longer being UFC 151 prelims to air.

The price the UFC will pay for the cancellation of UFC 151 has been discussed ad nauseum over the last 24 hours, but the fact is that Jon Jones could easily wind up paying a price for it as well.

If the UFC Light Heavyweight Champion had his druthers, he would be positioned in America a lot like Georges St-Pierre is in Canada; he'd be the squeaky clean champion, adored by millions and plush with mainstream sponsorships and endorsements. Unfortunately for Jones, that might never work out for him the way he had hoped.

Jones may have already signed a landmark global sponsorship deal with Nike, but the success of that deal and the potential to acquire more blue chip sponsorships like that in the future depends heavily on the way he is perceived by the public. No professional athlete gets mainstream sponsorships based on merit and accomplishments alone; they get them based on the fact that companies think their name will help sell merchandise.

Had the drunk driving incident and the UFC 151 cancellation happened a year ago, Jones could have just run with all the bad publicity and for lack of a better term, "turned heel." After all, it's been well documented that in the fight game it pays the same to be hated as it does to be loved. We know that people will pay to see a fighter lose on television, but they won't buy sports apparel branded with the face and name of an athlete they despise.

Fairly or unfairly (this time I lean a bit towards unfairly), the UFC has made sure that 100 percent of the blame for UFC 151's cancellation falls right on Jon Jones. On the conference call to announce the cancellation, UFC President Dana White made it clear that he was disgusted by the actions of Jones and went on to say that "UFC 151 will be remembered as the event Jon Jones and Greg Jackson murdered."

Again, while Jones was completely within his rights to refuse the fight the UFC offered, history will show that the UFC tried to set him up with a middleweight with no training camp in order to save the event and Jones still declined. History will also show that Chris Weidman, UFC Middleweight Champion Anderson Silva, and obviously Chael Sonnen were all willing to step up and save the event on eight days notice while Jon Jones was not.

Personally, I'm of two minds of here. I think Jones should have taken the fight because A) it would have saved the show, B) he would have potentially been fighting a guy with no training who was undersized to begin with, and C) doing it would have earned him some sorely needed points with the fans. However, I completely understand the risk involved in taking a fight on eight days notice and don't fault him for his decision in the slightest.

As I said before, if this were six months ago, Jon Jones could have leveraged this incident into a money making opportunity and just went heel. But that's not the career path Jones has chosen. Instead, he's opted to try to become the global face of the sport and collect mainstream endorsements in the process. The question now is whether or not the UFC Light Heavyweight Champion can overcome a year's worth of horrible publicity to still make that happen.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter @JasonAmadi and direct your "Ask the Torch" questions to mmatorch@gmail.com

Source: http://www.mmatorch.com/artman2/publish/amadis_take/article_14221.shtml

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