Remember this guy? I don't have a Twitter account, but I remember this poor guy kept getting hammered when something controversial with the real Jon Jones would come up. Even though, if I recall, his profile pic shows he is a white dude.
Meet the Jon Jones Who Keeps Getting Nasty Tweets Meant for the Other Jon Jones
Fightland Blog
On August 23, 2012, the UFC canceled its first event since the promotion was bought by Zuffa in 2001. At a press conference that day UFC president Dana White announced that Dan Henderson had withdrawn from his main-event fight with light heavyweight champion Jon Jones due to a knee injury and that Jones had declined to fight Chael Sonnen, who had agreed to take the fight on eight days’ notice. Rather than go on without their main event, the UFC shut down UFC 151. Within minutes of White’s announcement, Jones went from being a respected champion to the biggest heel in MMA, hated by both fans and fellow fighters alike.
Immediately the negative messages started flooding into the @JonJones Twitter account:
@ShinErick16: Wow @jonjones you are seriously a fuckhead
@AJIsTheReal: Man, f*** @JonJones. Yeast infection-ish.
@Heavy_Chase: hahahaha @JonJones is a bitch!!!!! @OGDankSinatra
Hundreds, thousands of angry tweets. The problem was that Jon Jones the UFC fighter didn’t own the @JonJones Twitter handle. The Jon Jones who did was was just a mild-mannered video game developer in Austin, Texas, who had acquired his handle back in 2007, when Twitter was new and no one had heard of Jon “Bones” Jones, and who had no idea the whirlwind he and his computer were about to reap.
Over the next four days, Austin Jon Jones received more than 6000 tweets. Over one six-hour stretch he was receiving five tweets every 10 seconds. An avalanche of vitriol. But Jones kept his cool, replying to and retweeting the worst, or best, of the attacks. He even offered to accept Sonnen’s offer to fight. Someone, he figured, needed to stand up for the good “Jon Jones” name.
For his troubles, Jon Jones the video game developer suddenly found himself a minor Internet celebrity. His story spread around the MMA-blog community. He got a mention in Sports Illustrated. An MMA gym in Austin offered him a free lesson so he could be ready to fight Sonnen. People even started a meme—“Good Guy Jon Jones”—the surest sign that you’ve made it in the 21st century.
Following UFC champion Jon Jones’ controversial victory over Alexander Gustafsson last weekend, we decided to give Austin (now-Relocated-to-Brooklyn) Jon Jones a call and see if the trouble had started up again. Also to find out what it’s like being famous for having the same name as someone famous, what it means to be the recipient of all that hatred directed at somebody else, and what the definition of “identity” really is in a world where the line between fame and anonymity is becoming increasingly blurred.
What’s in a name?
Who is Jon Jones?
Jon Jones: I’m famous for not being someone. The whole experience has been kind of mind-bending.
Last Saturday, the night of the Jones/Gustafsson fight, I was out drinking pretty late. I woke up to a mannequin torso on my patio, and I go to check Twitter and I have 75 tweets, all variations on “You fucking loser! You stole it!” So I sat down and wrote a tweet saying, “Oh that’s great. I woke up to a bunch of people calling my wife and mother ugly whores and telling me to fuck my dead dad. Thanks guys!”
But this time hasn’t been nearly as bad as when UFC 151 got canceled. That was odious. The first day or two there were a lot of mouth breathers being really, really angry—nothing but unbridled hatred. I would type a tweet and literally by the time I was done typing it there would be another 30, 50 tweets waiting for me. I was refreshing every few seconds. It was page after page after page almost instantly. It just wouldn’t let up.
I took the entire day off work, actually. Because I’d never been through anything like that before, and for all I knew I might never again. So I decided, I’d been having fun one on one, I’m going to have fun with all of these people all at once. So I started responding and retweeting the really, really awful ones.
I spent 14 hours straight at my computer.
When he was first getting popular, maybe five to 10 times a week I’d get tweets from someone saying, “Jon Jones, you’re a piece of shit! So-and-so is going to kill you. You’re going to bleed out your face!” Really vile stuff. First I ignored it but then I started having fun with it. At first I’d reply like I didn’t know anything, like, “What?!! Who wants to hurt me?! Oh my god! Who are you?!” I always replied as me. I never deliberately try to pose as him in a way that anyone would ever take seriously.
I’m a minor MMA fan. I did fly out to Denver for UFC 135 when Jones fought “Rampage” Jackson. When it came time for the title fight and 20,000 were chanting my name, I realized, 1) This feels right; and 2) My life has peaked. It’s never going to get cooler than that.
