Jon Jones And The Oprah Effect

All sports are essentially simulated combat. Teams "battle" for supremecy, attempting to dominate each other using physical prowess and sheer will. Combat sports are thus the most pure of athletic endeavors, with mma being the purest of them all. With minimal rules in place, two men face each other without bats or balls or any weapons other than their bodies, and at the highest caliber, their minds.

The cream of the crop in MMA is now at a level so far beyond what we have ever seen that they simply don't resemble those that are supposed to be their counter parts. Jose Aldo, GSP, Anderson Silva and Cain Velasquez are such complete athletes, so far removed from the countless tatooed, loud mouthed, mohawked tough guys that fill ninety percent of the TUF house, that they seem to be operating on a different plane.

Even these transcendent athletes may pale in comparison to the sheer impact that a Jon Jones win could have on the sport. In Jones, MMA may have its pre-scandal Tiger Woods. Its Michael Jordan. An athlete that is so talented, so complete, so captivating on such a broad level that he will elevate his sport to levels it has never seen.

As Jon Jones spoke direclty to the camera during his very own Spike television special, he referenced the law of attraction. He spoke of the need to see where you want to be before you get there. It is fitting that another high profile advocate of this law is media mogul Oprah Winfrey. Jon Jones is right up Winfrey's alley. A clean cut role model worthy of the stamp of approval Oprah sticks on her book club selections. If Will Smith could fight, he'd be Jon Jones. A fighter so easily promotable, so well liked, so able to ingrain himself in not white, nor black, but AMERICAN culture, that he can go places where GSP's accent and Brock Lesnar's vulgarity simply can not reach.

At the pre-fight press conference, Jones appeared a tall drink of class, in his dark suit and confident air, while the legendary Shogun Rua wore his "Bad Boy" t-shirt and baseball cap. In MMA, surely clothes do not make the man, but the ground work for Jon Jones' media saturation, first orchestrated by Dana White and now by Jones himself, seems to be playing itself out to perfection.

Julio Rivera http://www.omnimartialartsny.com/