Anthony Smith Believes No One Will Beat Jon Jones On Their First Attempt

Jon Jones is one of the greatest fighters of all-time. The light heavyweight champion was the youngest UFC champion in history and has never actually been legitimately defeated inside the Octagon. He has only lost one fight, which was a DQ loss, and normally breaks down his opponents in the Octagon.

Anthony Smith, who fought Jones at UFC 235 knows that to be true. He admitted after his fight with Jones that he didn’t fight his game plan and it cost him the fight. Now, looking back at the bout, Smith believes it is too hard to train for Jones without fighting him. Meaning, no one will beat “Bones” on their first attempt:

“I said the same sh*t going into it. It is not that simple. Now that I have 25 minutes of data on Jon Jones it totally looks different the second time around. But, you are right it is different, he is very different.

“There is no way of knowing that or training for that until you are in there with him. That’s the thing,” Smith said to The Mac Life (as transcribed by BJPENN.com). “I don’t want to just outright say it, but it is going to be hard to beat Jon Jones the first time for anybody, it really is. Unless you catch him, he’s going to be hard to beat on the first time.

“Thiago could catch anybody though, that dude is dangerous, he’s explosive, he could hurt anybody. I just don’t see him getting close enough to Jon to do it.”

Anthony Smith is confident he would do much better the second time around fighting Jon Jones. And, he has put himself in a good position to do just that after submitting Alexander Gustafsson this past June in Stockholm.

Do you agree the first man to beat Jon Jones will have to have fought him before?