Jon Jones giving up the heavyweight title and hanging up his gloves has led to a lot of mixed reactions. While some fans were happy to hear the news, grateful that he wouldn’t be holding up the heavyweight division anymore, others were unhappy because they didn’t get to see Tom Aspinall match up against him.
The Brit was supposed to be the ‘new-age’ heavyweight, who had all the skills to give ‘Bones’ his first official loss in the octagon. However, the last time a ‘new age’ heavyweight fought Jones, he got finished in less than a minute.
So the argument that Aspinall would be the one to do something that no one has been able to do in 15 years is a stretch. Regardless, fans still believe that the former champion ducked Aspinall.
But his former teammate and UFC champion Rashad Evans, from Albuquerque’s Jackson-Wink MMA gym, believes retirement was a smart move.
“The fight with Tom Aspinall was a very interesting fight, but he’s at the point of the game where he’s done it all. He’s achieved the unachievable.” He continued, “No slight against Tom, it’s just another opponent. His (Jones) legacy is, it outweighs that,” he said.
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Jones has long been dubbed the greatest of all time – a title that has been contested over and over again, courtesy of his suspensions, arrests, and testing positive for banned substances.
Notably, the current undisputed heavyweight champion, Aspinall, the newly crowned UFC heavyweight champion, had predicted Jones would make people question his own legacy by retiring before fighting him.
Aspinall retires Jones without fighting
The Brit had been looking to secure a fight against Jones for a while now. Ever since ‘Bones’ beat Ciryl Gane in 2023, Aspinall has been calling for a title shot.
In fact in Jones absence, he went ahead and won the interim heavyweight title — something that was essentially a guarantee title unification fight with Jones.
But the Albuquerque native came up with one reason after another not to fight him. At first, he stated that he wanted to fight Stipe Miocic since he is the GOAT of the heavyweight division.
After he beat Stipe at UFC 309, he claimed that the Aspinall fight was not a big enough fight for him. So Jones started looking at possibly fighting Alex Pereira.
When that idea went out the window, he rekindled the fire with Francis Ngannou before finally calling it quits. A few months ago, Aspinall sat down for an interview with Michael Bisping and Anthony Smith. In the interview, he predicted exactly what would happen.
Prophetic….
“I will retire Jon Jones without even fighting him”
~ Tom Aspinall pic.twitter.com/2YgyFRKYCQ— Trevor Clarkson – 008 Martial Arts Network (@MartialArts_X) June 22, 2025
“And since I won that fight, he’s gone completely quiet, and he’ll continue to go completely quiet about me until he retires because there’s no way on earth that he’s going to fight me. I will retire Jon Jones without even fighting him.” This was his prediction, and that’s exactly what ended up happening.
In fact, when Jones announced his retirement, MMA Twitter was full of fans posting this exact quote from Tom Aspinall, almost as if the prophecy came true.
