Joe Rogan Experience<\/a>. \u201cHe sent me a DM, he sent me his number, and if you know Jon, he don\u2019t answer the phone worth anything \u2014 and it\u2019s crazy. He sent me his number and said \u2018call me,\u2019 so I called him and this is before he got hurt for the first Stipe [Miocic] fight. He was like, \u2018I want you to come practice with us, I want a wrestling partner.<\/p>\n\u201cI left him and played football. Next year comes\u2026 he\u2019s like, \u2018I want you to come back for the second camp.\u2019 He\u2019s going through it, me and Jon hit it off like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The MMA community saw Steveson as a potential heavyweight contender even before he signed a contract with WWE to an NIL deal. Steveson was eventually released from his WWE contract in 2024.<\/p>\n
Steveson then transitioned to the world of pro football, signing a contract with the Buffalo Bills despite never playing the game. A few months later, Steveson was released by the Bills, which left the door wide open to pursue MMA.<\/p>\n
Working with Jones in preparation of his first heavyweight title defense against Miocic was not only an honor for Steveson, but it was an eye-opening experience that gave the five-time All-American wrestler all of the motivation to become a world champion in mixed martial arts.<\/p>\n
\u201cI needed somebody to kind of engrave it in me,\u201d Steveson explained. \u201cWith the wrestling, I had my father, I had the University if Minnesota, I had good people around me kind of say, \u2018Hey, this is how we\u2019re going to do it, this is where you need to go, and this is how it\u2019s going to happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd when I saw Jon, I saw that drive, like, \u2018Damn, this guy\u2019s winning and people get close but they can\u2019t get past him. Why is that?\u2019 So I really sat back and watched his mental, how he went about a lot of things, how he talked to people, how he walked, how he punched, how he looked when he was in the pocket, when he needed to get out, when he rested his hands. And I saw everything. I was like, \u2018Man, this guy\u2019s a superstar \u2014 a super, super star,\u2019 and we all knew that, and people knew that for a long time.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I really saw him and I was like, \u2018Damn, I want to be that,\u2019 and that\u2019s what really flipped my switch right there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gable Steveson credits Jon Jones for putting him in the mindset he\u2019s on right now. The heavyweight super…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":386512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-386511","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}