Aside from indulging my sweet tooth and enjoying the (many) inappropriate Halloween costumes uploaded to Instagram this past weekend, I didn’t do much.
That’s not to say others didn’t have a good old time on Saturday. Albuquerque based mega-gym Jackson-Wink held a grand opening for their sprawling new training center over the weekend.
Jon Jones Returns to Same Old Tricks
Open to the public, the gym had a food truck in tow, autograph signings, and held open workouts for fans to get a closer look at where some of the sport’s best call home.
Most of this was overshadowed, though, by Jackson and Winklejohn’s most erudite pupil, Jonathan Dwight Jones. Spurned by previous opponent, and now champion, Daniel Cormier, Jones was quick to extend an invitation to DC for the grand opening.
That is, if you consider calling someone a p*ssy and goading them into a fight at your home gym an invitation. The outburst was classic Jones, but it represented a troubling return to the “Bones” of old.
Sidelined for most of this year due to a hit and run accident, Jones took a brief hiatus from social media and public appearances to allow the dust to settle around his personal life.
Now, recently reinstated for competition by the UFC, Jones has wasted little time in reaching out to his fans via Twitter and Instagram.
It started innocuously enough: a self-made recording of a shirtless, glassy-eyed Jones contemplating whether he “misses it” or not the night of UFC 192. Things quickly took a very “Jones” turn, however, when the video was soon deleted.
For those who don’t know, this is a habit for “Bones”. For the better part of the last few years, Jones routinely posts comments, pictures, tweets, videos, and any number of other online musings that he later deletes.
They go up, they come down.
Some deletions are more onerous than others. There were the homophobic slurs left on his detractor’s pages; that one was blamed on a stolen phone. Then there were the derisive shots lobbed at his peers’ performances on fight night.
Though most are deleted mere minutes after he posts them, Jones can’t escape his massive online following. Between Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, Jones’ various revelations are routinely seen by at least four million sets of eyes.
In turn, those same eyes then share to the world the moments that Jones tries to remove from his social timeline. It’s become so routine that some have speculated as to whether or not Jones does it on purpose.
Surely he most know that, at this point, he can’t escape anything generated by his fingertips; he’s just too popular. It’s become habit for fans to immediately screen-cap any post of his, just in case it might be brought down by the end of the hour.
After this most recent second chance (or third, depending on your metric), people were anxious to see if the lessons Jones had learned in the courtroom would carry over into social media.
Clearly, they haven’t. Be it a Tweet or an Instagram video, Jones is clearly just as inept at policing his own social media platforms as he was before he collided with a pregnant woman, breaking her arm, and fleeing from the scene of the crime.
While it does create fodder for media outlets, it’s doing nothing to convince the court of public opinion that Jones has learned anything from this past summer. It took being stripped of his title and being placed on court ordered probation for Jones to admit any wrongdoing and take a step back from the public eye.
Now, safely back in the UFC’s good graces, Jones is back to his old tricks, calling grown men p*ssies and making fun of his contemporaries prowess in the cage. It’s a bummer, because although it’s just social media, it represents an element of Jones personality that is clearly unchanged throughout all the rigmarole he’s undergone this past year.
It’s clear he thinks he can get away with stuff like this, and that’s a disturbing thought. For a man so unchallenged in his professional pursuits, it’s scary to think the biggest threat to his livelihood could be his iPhone.
