Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier clearly still hate each other. I hope it stays that way forever

A while back I wrote a story on the ferocious and nearly fatal rivalry between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. One of the highlights was getting to interview legendary sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who covered both men and got to know them well over the years.

At some point well after both fighters had retired, Izenberg was working on a retrospective about their trilogy and so he reached out to Ali for an interview. They talked for a while, Izenberg told me, and then Ali asked if he was going to talk to Frazier next.

"I told him, 'Yeah, I'm going to call him as soon as I hang up with you,'" Izenberg said. "So Ali told me, 'Listen, when you talk to Joe, tell him I didn't mean any of that stuff back then. Tell him it was all just to sell tickets.'"

By "that stuff," of course, Ali meant years worth of relentless verbal abuse. It was way beyond the typical pro fighter trash talk. Ali had portrayed Frazier as an ignorant mule. He'd called him an "Uncle Tom." Frazier's kids got in fights at school because they heard classmates repeating things they'd heard Ali say about their father.

Ali's taunts reshaped public perception about Frazier in ways that hounded him for the rest of his life. The semi-fictionalized version of Frazier that Ali had aggressively marketed to the public and the press supplanted the real Frazier in many people's minds — and for a long, long time. Now here he was, years later, asking Izenberg to apologize on his behalf and let Frazier know it was all just business.

So OK, Izenberg gave it a shot. He called Frazier and got his interview, then toward the end of the conversation he slipped it in there.

"[Frazier] asked me, 'What did he say?' He would never use his name, always just referred to Ali as 'him,'" Izenberg said. "I told him he'd said he was sorry. He said, 'No, tell me exactly what he said.' So I told him everything that Ali had said and he said, 'OK, here's what I want you to do. When you're done talking to me, call him back. Tell him you told me exactly what he said. And tell him I said he can take sorry and shove it all the way up his ass.'"

See, now that? That's what a real rivalry looks like. Years later and it's still burning, still giving off heat. When a man is willing to carry around a grudge that big for that long, at a certain point all you can do is respect that choice and let him have it.

I found myself thinking about this today while reading about the latest back-and-forth between former UFC champions Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier. Both of them are comfortably retired too (for now). But there are times when it seems like that just leaves them more time for hating each other.

Like recently, when Cormier brought up Jones' lone professional loss (that DQ against Matt Hamill for an illegal elbow strike that would have been legal by today's rules) during a conversation about MMA greats.

Jones responded by getting on X and claiming that he was so young in his career back then that he didn't even know the rules. Then he switched his focus.

"My brother, Daniel Cormier, your jealousy runs so deep through your blood. I honestly pray that the good Lord heals you from your envy and that, one day, you won't feel the need to do interviews like this. Until then, it's flattering to see the passion you have when it comes to me."

Personally, I'm not sure I believe that Cormier really factors all that heavily into Jones' nightly prayer routine. I can't quite picture him bowing his head and clasping his hands and asking the almighty to work a miracle upon the hardened heart of “DC” so that they might finally make peace. At the risk of sounding like a cynic, a part of me suspects that this is just his way of turning the faux-humble routine into another surreptitious needle that he can poke Cormier with from afar.

One thing I feel like I know for sure is that Cormier isn't buying it. He doesn't even like it when he hears that Jones is going around telling people that the two of them might have buried the hatchet.

"Jon Jones, I do still hate you and I always will," is the way Cormier put it recently. That doesn't really sound like a man ready to let those bygones be.

To which I say: good. I'm weirdly glad to hear it. I hope this dynamic never changes and I don't care what that says about me.

It feels like we're always being sold these bad blood narratives in fight sports. Everyone hates everyone else's guts — until two minutes after the fight is over, when it's time to make nice and say it was all just to sell the fight. To see a guy still holding onto his hatred nearly a decade later, it feels reassuringly authentic. At least in this case, it was all real. Cormier really does hate Jones, and he doesn't particularly want or need to stop.

One of the things that I love about Cormier's hate specifically is how honest he can be with himself and others about it. In one interview, Cormier explained exactly what it was that really bothered him about losing to Jones in their UFC title fights. All the guys who'd beaten him in wrestling, Cormier said, were guys who worked every bit as hard as he did in training.

"I saw Jon, and it was the first time that I saw a bit of an outlier," said Cormier. "A guy who had talent, who has a lot of physical ability, he's very tall, he's got a great mind for fighting and he's unbelievably tough, but he didn't work as hard. And it was the first time that I had come across someone that was able to beat me while not working like I worked. That was hard for me. That was one of the reasons why I've struggled so much in the relationship with him. Because I don't understand how I can do everything, hard work and everything else, and he was still able to beat me."

It requires a certain level of self-awareness to even realize these things about yourself. To understand that what really bothers you is how a guy can use his natural gifts to beat your hard work and discipline, thus upending your entire world view and personal philosophy, that's not so easy for most pro fighters.

To then take the extra step of explaining all that to the public, when you could just as easily say, 'I hate this guy because he's a phony and a jerk'? That requires something else.

If you were to ask me if I believe in holding grudges, just as a general principle I'd say no. My experience is they ultimately harm the person on the holding end the most. Hate is heavy, and carrying it around for years and years will weigh a person down. And for what?

But something about a rivalry like this one, especially when you hear Cormier lay it all out like that, it feels different. It's like he's earned it. If he's willing to carry that load, it seems like we should all respect it and let him. Also seems like, a rivalry like theirs, maybe this is exactly how it should be. Even all these years later.