As Jon Jones most bitter rival you could be forgiven for thinking that Daniel Cormier may have been emjoying seeing him get in trouble again with the police after being arrested on a DWI arrest, but the former two-division champion insists that’s far from the case.
“For a guy that has these issues, whether it be alcohol, whether it be drugs, that dead time is your worst enemy,” Cormier said on his “DC & Helwani” podcast for ESPN. “Because all those vices start to pull at you, especially when you’re sitting at home with nothing to do, especially if you’re not a person who does that a lot. Seeing him get into trouble again, a lot of people in my circle, they text me almost celebratory. That’s not me. I didn’t celebrate the kid getting in trouble again. I don’t think that you should celebrate or dance on someone’s grave in their darkest moments. You don’t do that to people.
“Ultimately are you a human being, or does this competition overtake everything? I didn’t take any joy in seeing that kid – or, at 32, he’s a man. He was a kid when he was 23. At 32, I did not enjoy seeing that man in that situation again, because it’s just bad.”
As for how Jones can stop this repeated cycle of bad, self-destructive behaviour over the years, Cormier believes that the most important thing would be to move on from those who may be a bad influence in his life.
“When it was happening, people started putting us these videos of Jones and I when we did a sit-down with Joe Rogan a while back, and I was talking about how it would be very difficult for him to change if nothing around him changed,” Cormier said. “It won’t change. It won’t change until something around him or the people around him change.
“I’ve got to be honest: For as much as I don’t enjoy that and bask in it, it’s not going to change, until someone takes a drastic action to show that the behavior is unacceptable. You’ve got to imagine how many times he’s done this. From the drug failures to the getting suspended, it’s all elevated. It’s gone from bad to worse.”
