Anderson Silva To Jon Jones: Change Everything In Your Life

Former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva and ex-light heavyweight title holder Jon Jones find themselves eternally linked in MMA history. Firstly they were two of the most dominant champions the promotion ever harboured, but they’ve also both come unstuck in recent months.

For ‘The Spider’, it started with a failed drugs test in the wake of his UFC 183 win over Nick Diaz. Silva got popped for steroids and anti-anxiety pills in a whirlwind of controversy, marring what should have been a triumphant return from his year-long injury lay off. For ‘Bones’, things got a lot more serious.

Jones was involved in a New Mexico hot-and-run, got stripped of his title and has pretty much fell off the radar in the time since. TMZ caught up with Anderson Silva last night, and he had some words of advice for the troubled ex-champ:

“I don’t think (the UFC should bring him back), Jones is a good boy — he’s a good man. He needs to focus.”

“I love Jones,” Silva said. “He needs to change everything in life. It’s very important.”

In what has turned out to be quite the tragic scenario, we’ve seen Jones go from a hopeful, raw talent, to a dominant champion, to a disgraced alleged criminal in the space of a few years. What are his choices now?

Obviously the biggest battle on his horizon is the upcoming legal situation. The pregnant woman that ‘Bones’ left injured on that fateful night will want her day in court, and it’s possible that the ex-champ could get time for the felony charges he is currently facing.

A civil suit is much more likely to take primacy in today’s smash and grab society, but would that mean that we’d see Jones return to fighting any sooner? The sad truth is, we’ve probably seen the last of JJ in the octagon, and perhaps way too long before it was due.