As prognosticated, the end of Jones vs Cormier came with a whimper and ebb of arterial blood as Jon Jones slit the throat of Daniel Cormier’s dreams in round four. As Daniel’s chances oozed onto the floor, one could see it on the Olympian’s eyes. Javier Mendez of A.K.A. fighting urged and cajoled but Daniel Cormier was beyond scrapping the bottom of his empty barrel. Cormier’s only chance was a Jon Jones disqualification or an outright knockout which looked improbable with each passing minute. None came to be, and probably never will – which could be all she wrote for Cormier versus Jones or Cormier’s aspirations for being the greatest who beat the greatest.
Jones vs Cormier – The (tipping) point at which Jones threatens to kill Cormier in the infamous SportsCenter interview. If you missed it, y’all shouldn’t blink so much.
And the reasoning behind this has to do with the leadup to UFC 182 – namely that if Daniel couldn’t pull it off at this juncture with 3 extra months of elite training camp, then chances are he probably never will. And with the melodrama out of the way, the time may have come for serious reflection, unencumbered by fear or loathing, or fight and flight which powered most of the hoopla leading up to this fight.
It is neither easy nor simple because there is something in Jones and Cormier’s back stories that draws upon those primal emotions the way hurricanes power off the warm currents of the ocean. But Daniel is cerebral enough and adult enough to pull it off.
We are gonna state it cogently and succinctly: The diss that started all of this, perhaps should have never have effloresced into anything bigger than a raised eyebrow and a shrug of world-weary shoulders. If Jon Jones’ insinuation that he could take Daniel Cormier down came off wrong to Cormier, then perhaps that was Jones’ problem Jones – to wit, one he was paying for day in and day out in other areas of his life. If the situation was as abrasive as Cormier puts it (and there are some tells from other situations that say it was), then welcome to real life and the whole wide world. Folks bump into folks like that all the time, and the reason why s#it don’t effloresce into anything more is because cooler heads prevail 90% of the time and the putative disses roll off folks backs like drops off a hobo’s raincoat. Word? No?
Aah, The Drama, The Drama: Yes, there is a deeper, deeper drama at play here – at least in the mind of one Daniel Ryan Cormier. Hear me out, hear me out: The kid who grew up on the mean streets of Orleans and vowed never to be bullied again. That kinda s#it runs deep and wide. But the mentality that bullies, whether imagined or real, ALWAYS need to be confronted is as limiting as it is lacking in supple creativity or economy, if ya will. Moreover it locks “the (formerly bullied) kid” in a basement he so desperately needs to get out of so he can graduate to more advanced and nuanced ways of resolving problems and escape the basement of fight and flight, and fear and loathing or self-worth that is tied to the ability to fight off numbskulls. Did someone say word?
The limitations of the foregoing view begin to pile up at rates that cannot be accounted for in a single sitting. Daniel is smart enough to figure out what he needs to figure out from the preceding fiasco. Suffice it to say that at alternate junctures, run-ins like the ones twixt Jones and Cormier often devolve into shootouts that have decimated millions of young black men in American inner cities. See where I’m going wit’ this? If Monsieur Daniel cannot see parallels twixt what went down between him and Jon Jones and part of our inner city problem, then there is nothing more to talk about. But if on the other hand he sees something, then there is something to learn here and parlay into a motivational thing or two. Daniel has the potential of being the adult in the room here. Jones seems to be a lost cause ….. that is if his most recent faux pas are anything to go by.
Imperatives of the Biz: Sure there is a place for drama that sells tickets and keeps UFC and Dana White happy. But there is also a place for deciding how far sh*t goes and to what extent it impinges one’s inner values in the sanctum sanctorum far removed from “the madding crowds”. And yes, there is a place for Alpha Male posturing laced with fire-hydrant lovin’, but just as before there is a place and time for that – but grown ups should never mix that up with the higher levels of cognition where s#it is subjected to cost benefit analysis of the spiritual kind. No?
Significant Tell-tale (My Take): Jones and Cormier should have known that they were slippin’ ‘n’ slidin’ into murky waters when Jones’ expression blanked out and he intoned “You know I’d absolutely kill you if you ever did something like that …… ” during their infamous SportsCenter interview. (In the preceding moment Daniel, who was sitting in a room far removed from Jones because of a knock-down-and-drag-out brawl that had just ensued between the two, had said “I wish they would let me in that door so I can spit in your fu#cin’ face.”) If Jones’ blanked-out expression had escaped Cormier, then I wouldn’t expect Cormier to last long on Cell Block C.
My name is BNSG and you’ve been treated to a gratis MMA meditation.
Filed under: MMA, Uncategorized, BNSG, Daniel Cormier, extreme fighting, Inner City Violence, Jon Jones, Jones threatens to kill Cormier, MMA, MMA Meditation, UFC, UFC 178, UFC 182
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