• UFC 128

Jones vows to exploit 'fluky' Shogun Rua

ESPN staff
March 18, 2011
Jon Jones plans to break Mauricio Shogun Rua mentally © Getty Images
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Jon Jones claims he will cut through the myth surrounding Mauricio Shogun Rua and prove that the Brazilian's past struggles with Forrest Griffin and Mark Coleman were not "flukes".

Rua has a world class reputation in MMA, and rightly so after a career filled with devastating knockouts against the likes of Rampage Jackson, Chuck Liddell and Lyoto Machida.

However, his UFC career got off to a hugely underwhelming start when Griffin choked out Rua at UFC 76. The Brazilian then almost lost his next fight to veteran Coleman, with both performances blamed on a knee injury and poor cardio.

Jones has a different theory, claiming Shogun struggled in those fights because he faced men who put him on his back and tired him out.

"Everyone blames Shogun's early UFC [struggles] on his knee," Jones said in ESPN's Five Rounds. "They said his cardio wasn't there because he had knee surgery and he wasn't ready.

"People who get in his face, take him down and make him earn his way back to his feet, the people who ground-and-pound him hard, who strike him back and stand toe-to-toe with him, those are the people who get him tired.

"Mark Coleman didn't really know any better when he fought Shogun; he kept getting punched in the face and kept coming forward. That tired Shogun out.

"He can be broken mentally and physically, mainly mentally. That's part of what I am going to do to him. I'm going to show that the Mark Coleman fight wasn't a fluke, that the Forrest Griffin fight wasn't a fluke, that he didn't come unprepared."

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