Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) interim light heavyweight champion Jon Jones does not like veteran mixed martial arts (MMA) referee "Big" John McCarthy.
Something about "bad energy."
So you can imagine how incensed "Bones" must have been to learn that McCarthy was attached to the UFC 200 pay-per-view (PPV) main event, which takes place on July 9, 2016 inside T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, even though Jones and Co. tried (and failed) to stop him.
Jones explains his gripe during a recent media scrum (via MMA Fighting):
"I would prefer any other referee but him. It's been a mixture of many things throughout the years. Just the energy. I don't feel like we have the best energy. It's an accumulation of some of the things that happened during some fights and just personal interactions. I just don't feel as, you don't need anything stacking up against you when you're fighting a great fighter like DC. He [officiates] probably once a week somewhere. For me, this is my life, this is my story, this is my legacy. This is everything to me, and if I don't agree with his energy that he brings to the fight, if I was him, I wouldn't want to be a part of it. You know what I mean? If you're not welcome, why would you even want to be part of someone's big night who doesn't want you there. I would say, ‘you know, I'll back out of this one, I don't need to be a part of this one.'"
Selfish McCarthy never willing to take one for the team!
Not surprisingly, Daniel Cormier -- who will try to unify the light heavyweight titles in the UFC 200 five-round main event -- was unsympathetic to the cause, especially having already endured his share of officiating headaches. The solution? Stick your hand down your pants and yank, or whatever "nut up" means.
"DC" talks to UFC Unfiltered with Matt Serra and Jim Norton (via MMA Fighting):
"I'm fine with John McCarthy. I would have been fine with Herb Dean again because as a man when I said that about Herb Dean on a conference call, I will tell you I didn't know that was going out audio to everybody. I thought it was just me talking to the commission. But afterwards...I felt the need to reach out and say, ‘If I have a gripe I should be able to tell it to you.' So I ended up talking to Herb Dean and he was gonna get one of the commissioners on the phone so that we could discuss everything, so that he could hear my complaint. Every referee has something that they do that someone will not agree with...Look April 23rd, if Herb Dean would have been the official I would've had to just nut up and deal with it. And that is exactly what Jones is gonna have to do on July 9."
Nuts.
The judges assigned for "Cormier vs. Jones 2" -- which may be a factor considering their first go-round went the full 25 minutes -- are Derek Cleary, Sal D'Amato, and Glenn Trowbridge.
For much more on UFC 200 click here.
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