Jon Jones Advisor Explains How He’ll Try To Make The Ngannou Fight
Richard Schaefer, the man tasked with guiding Jon Jones through perhaps the biggest moment of his fight career, has explained how he plans to secure a mega-money fight with Francis Ngannou for his client.
Jones hasn’t competed inside the Octagon since defeating Dominick Reyes in controversial circumstances at UFC 247 in February 2020.
The former light-heavyweight king has since relinquished his title and announced his intention to compete at heavyweight moving forward. Despite the fact Jones has impressively bulked up over the last year, he has been unable to come to financial terms with the UFC for his heavyweight debut.
In the midst of this failure, Jones left his long-time management team and has now linked up with Schaefer who is best known for his exploits in the sport of boxing.
During an interview with Sirus XM, Schaefer revealed his goal is to help organize a fight between Jones and the current UFC heavyweight champion, Francis Ngannou.
“There’s this big fight out there, the fight against Francis Ngannou,” Schaefer said. “That’s the fight everybody wants to see. That’s what fight fans want to see – not just UFC fans, fight fans period – and that’s really my task, is to see if there’s a way to get that fight done and represent Jon Jones the legend against UFC, to see if we can get it done.”
Schaefer pointed out that Jones and Dana White took a wrong turn when they began publicly talking about a deal.
“When you start negotiating fights in the media, and people are starting to dig in their heels and say, ‘Well, this is too much,’ and people who maybe even aren’t supposed to talk are throwing out crazy numbers, which didn’t even come from the athlete himself, and people are getting pissed off at each other, that’s not the way you get deals done,” Schaefer said. “These (big fights) don’t get done through the media and Twitter and Instagram and things like that. They get done by professionals sitting down at the table talking about the different revenue streams and negotiating a deal. … That’s really the problem, because otherwise things get out of hand.”
Schaefer is confident in making Jones vs. Ngannou due to his own track record of making big fights and his friendly relationship with Dana White.
“It’s a matter of sitting down and seeing if we can structure a deal, which everybody can live with. I don’t know the MMA managers. I don’t know who the other MMA managers are. And I frankly don’t care. I have one task, which is to deliver to Jon that fight, and I’m gonna do whatever I can to do that based on my experience, based on my great relationship with Dana, and see if we can turn out what I think can be the biggest UFC pay-per-view event of all time.”
Jon Jones’ advisor insists now is the time to make a fight with Ngannou.
“My philosophy going back into my boxing days: If you do have a mega-event (in front of you), I always try to get that mega-event done,” Schaefer said. “Because if you allow for interim fights or other fights, you never know. A guy might lose, a guy might get injured. There just are so many question marks out there. My philosophy was always to deliver the biggest fights when they can get made.” (Transcribed by MMA Junkie)
Do you think Richard Schaefer will help get Jon Jones vs. Francis Ngannou done?
