Opinion: On the Countenance of Money and Monsters

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.

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It’s so very much like Jon Jones -- quaintly destructive and unwittingly arrogant -- to have his second positive steroid test come to light in the middle of fight week buildup for the biggest combat sports spectacle in history: the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor circus this Saturday in Las Vegas. The news actually broke in the middle of Dana White’s Tuesday Night Contender Series, leading to the Ultimate Fighting Championship boss furiously screaming into his cell phone and then becoming visibly despondent throughout the rest of the fight card designed around auditioning for his promotional heart.

And to think of how upset Jones was when Rashad Evans “ruined his special night.”

Beyond the cosmic and coincidental circumstances that always seem to make Jones’ malfeasance worse -- there was his first blown U.S. Anti-Doping Agency test during UFC 200 fight week and his April 2015 hit-and-run incident in which he ran back to his car to grab cash but left behind weed, a pipe, condoms, his Nevada Athletic Commission paperwork and Funyuns in the vehicle -- there is a contemplative value in “Bones” getting laid bare once more during the run-up to “The Money Fight”. Mayweather is what Jones could have been: an unsettling but successful countenance of immorality, a legend and an icon whose greatest failings are glossed over and cynically forgiven.

There are arguments to be made that both Jones and Mayweather, relative to their respective sports, are the most skilled and/or accomplished fighters to ever compete in a ring or cage. Outside of Jones’ infamous disqualification debacle, both men have been perfect in competition and have routinely humiliated their opposition. Mayweather’s ascent to pound-for-pound king of boxing and pay-per-view was not a quick one; he was a nine-year pro and multi-division world champion before his first PPV headliner against Arturo Gatti in June 2005, which drew 340,000 buys. It took a while for Jones’ star to incubate, as well, though in the wake of his UFC 214 knockout of Daniel Cormier, he seemed poised to leap into a different strata of sports star. One of the cruelest impositions on prizefighters is the demand that athletes metamorphose into superstars when the best advice offered as to how to go about that is this: “Well, just keep winning.” Jones and Mayweather are two of the rare ones that could actualize that sort of thing.

The biggest impediment facing any combat athlete in becoming a mainstream sports star is the fact that fighters at the highest level typically only ply their trade once, maybe twice a year. They don’t play multiple games a week on national television or the same time every Sunday; their names don’t scroll across cable sports ticker crawls daily; and they have infinitely fewer chances to make “Sportscenter.” Modern prizefighters, in an effort to transcend their sport, must manufacture their own ubiquity, and Mayweather, for better and worse, was at the vanguard of this. What’s key here is that omnipresence doesn’t need to be based on virtue; any publicity can feasibly be good publicity here. One of Mayweather’s initial routes to wider sports media coverage was constantly posting five- and six-figure sports betting slips to social media, even when the wagers were on seemingly mundane college basketball games. His legal troubles -- both his ghoulish track record of domestic violence and myriad tax issues -- have only seemed to help his visibility over the years and made him even more famous, infamous, polarizing and ultimately successful.

Likewise, Jones’ sports and pop culture visibility exploded in his fighting absences, as his criminality and budding sociopathy fueled headlines on TMZ, charmingly in this case, the UFC’s preferred direct content partner. Jones was widely lauded for dropping his sanctimonious choir boy gimmick in the wake of his indiscretions and embracing his true, heelish self. “It is a freeing feeling to be looked at like a piece of s---” was a revolutionary and well-received bit of introspection for “Jonny Bones.” Jones’ extreme, deleterious and truly worrisome frailties are not disqualifiers for stardom, and given the difficulty of staying in the headlines as a prizefighter, they may prove unwittingly and perversely beneficial, just as they have for Mayweather. For crying out loud, Mayweather, an unrepentant woman batterer, is doing media out of his new strip club -- the horrifically and inhumanely named “Girl Collection,” because they’re like soulless dolls, you see -- a business venture he ideated while serving jail time for beating up the mother of his children in front of them. The build-up to “The Money Fight” has been, in part, a series of commercials for Girl Collection; star power can be created and bolstered by the worst human impulses and instincts.

The monstrous dimensions of their personal lives have some congruence, but what sets Jones and Mayweather apart -- why Jones is arguably the greatest disappointment in sports history and Mayweather is going to bank nearly a half billion dollars after this weekend is all told -- is professional rigor and discipline.

As I’ve mentioned, Mayweather’s Girl Collection has gotten tons of media coverage as a result of “Money” advertising his presence there all fight week long, masquerading as if he’s partying instead of training. It’s supposed to be some sort of red flag when pre-fight stories feature testimonials that Mayweather is at his gentlemen’s club at 3:30 a.m. every morning. This is promotional trickery of the most basic order: It’s a well-documented piece of Mayweather’s career and persona that he keeps unusual hours, such as his mythologized roadwork and training sessions at three and four o’clock in the morning, a long-running psychological edge he hones and sharpens, lionizing himself for putting in hard work when his opponents are at rest.

His cohorts appeared on Showtime’s “All Access” ahead of his Marcos Maidana rematch in 2014, smoking joints while Mayweather sat by, ordering underlings to go buy more rolling papers. Have you ever seen Mayweather smoke? When he’s surrounded by party animal homies turning up around magnums of champagne, there’s always a glass of water in his hand. As described in this week’s “Press Row” segment by Sherdog contributor, Las Vegas resident and longtime boxing scribe Andreas Hale, Mayweather is famous for leaving nightclubs in the wee hours of the morning, stone sober and then literally running home on foot.

Yet look at Jones. His two positive steroid tests led to two of the most embarrassing PR statements the sport has ever seen. He is such a complete train wreck outside of the cage that despite his freakish athleticism, physicality and ability to pull off the extraordinary inside of it, many if not most onlookers don’t necessarily think Jones is a cheater but rather shockingly stupid. It’s entirely feasible Jones is a career-long steroid cheat, as his rival Cormier previously posited. Incredibly, it seems just as likely that he is impossibly arrogant and imprudent. If another athlete who tested positive for clomiphene and letrozole as Jones did last year and then attempted to blame the test result on sexual-enhancement pills, it would be seen as an inherently preposterous, desperate cover story. For Jones, who basically all but said, “Hey, I love these blue pills, they really help counteract all the cocaine I’m doing,” the explanation was entirely plausible. Pathetic but entirely plausible.

The best-case scenario for Jones -- and I say “best” very loosely in this case -- is that given the test he failed was administered on weigh-in day before UFC 214, he can argue once more that he took a tainted supplement or penis pill, or maybe his coke was cut with turinabol. However, even if that turned out to be 100 percent true, Jones was admonished by the USADA a year ago specifically for his recklessness. He is perhaps the greatest talent ever in the cage, yet he once allegedly spent eight hours hiding under a cage inside Jackson-Wink MMA to dodge a surprise drug test. Meanwhile, it supposed to be a shock to the senses when Mayweather allegedly eats Burger King during training camp. Never mind that Mayweather’s supposed BK feast was filmed for promotional hype videos, or that the burger chain paid him a cool million to put its uncanny plastic freak of a mascot in his walkout for the Manny Pacquiao fight two years ago.

It’s often trite and overused to say that the public will pay to watch an event largely based on the potential for someone to lose, but for a certain sort of recalcitrant, indecent athlete, it can work; and it can work to the tune of tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. In prizefighting, being the bad guy can pay; being a worse guy can often pay even better, especially when your misdeeds become fuel for your own promotional engine, even if it’s depraved or downright criminal. However, as Jones is hopefully soon to realize, there is no quarter, figurative or literal, for an idiot.