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Losing By Winning: An MMA Meditation on the Strangely Sad Story of Jon Dwight Jones

 

 

This is neither a jaundiced obloquy nor augury of things to come, but a meditation born of sensing; a sensing of  incipient light that has left a man’s face and the serene joy that used to illuminate it like a beatific filament. It’s  a meditation on scars made visible by sight and insight, and “(gazes) blank and pitiless as the sun“. (Wordsworth)

Jon Jones, Pic by Kyu Shim 800x600 PIX

Jon Jones: A Midlife Tale of Losing by Winning – A tale etched in not-so-fine lines of  face and faith that really never was … Phillipians 04:13. The problem, more than Jones’ mid-career stasis, is his intestinal inability to step outside his constipated sense of self for a single self-redemptive moment. And with each passing moment it’s getting late for the man MMA once hailed as a bright light and most promising heir to Anderson Silva after the thorough drubbing of Shogun Rua in 2011. Incrucible.Net. Graphic Image by Kyu Shim – Dribble.Com

Sadly,  after battles lost by winning, it has come to this for one  Jon Dwight Jones: the gift (precocious in extremis) is still here, but the joy is long gone; gone with the promise of things that could have been …. beneath  windows that opened and closed before the angels could sing.

Parenthesis: Even when Jones swears that he has done well  for himself (materially that is), he is palpably unconvincing.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? (Gospel According to Mark 8:36-37)

Crux: But to get to the crux of tidings impending; it matters not whether Jon Jones wins his upcoming fight against Thiago Santos on Saturday of July 6, 2019 or  not. What matters most (for a Bible thumpin’ thumper) is whether he wins “the smithy of (his) soul” before the deepening shadows of eventide. But then come to think of it, losing (at the hands of Santos) might actually give Jones a sliver of a chance of winning back the promise of what he  once had in the beginning …. when his god was in a position “to murder and create”(T.S. Eliot) ….  just like when earth “was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Yes, a man can indeed win by losing …… in the same way he can lose by winning.

BNSG Gnostradamus ……. Modus Meditatus.

 

 

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What Now, Daniel Ryan Cormier: A Belated UFC 182 Post Mortem

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 threatens to kill Cormier

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.

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