Daniel Cormier said he\u2019d like to face Jon Jones in a wrestling match for Real American Freestyle, and the promotional brass would love to make that happen.<\/p>\n
Ahead of RAF 5, which takes place Saturday at Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Fla., RAF co-founder Chad Bronstein reacted to Cormier\u2019s challenge, saying that because of Cormier and Jones\u2019 relationship with RAF promotional figureheads Ben Askren and Izzy Martinez, that match could be something that could get put together.<\/p>\n
\u201cBen\u2019s pretty close to Daniel, and so is Izzy, and then Izzy obviously trained Jon Jones for quite some time,\u201d Bronstein told MMA Fighting. \u201cSo far [with] RAF, you\u2019ve seen that matches, all matches, can happen. So I\u2019ll leave it at that, that anything\u2019s possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
RAF 5 features a slew of past and present MMA fighters and champions from the UFC and beyond. The event is headlined by former interim UFC welterweight champ Colby Covington facing past middleweight champ Luke Rockhold, while current middleweight Bo Nickal takes on multi-time title challenger Yoel Romero. Current UFC lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan faces former, two-time PFL season champ Lance Palmer in the featured bout.<\/p>\n
Former two-division UFC champ Henry Cejudo is set to face Urijah Faber in the main event of RAF 6 in February. While Cormier discussed his interest in facing Jones on the RAF mats, former welterweight champ also said he\u2019s love to face Covington, a two-time UFC opponent, in a wrestling match under the RAF banner.<\/p>\n
Seeing the interest of MMA stars seeing the value of competing for RAF is music to Bronstein\u2019s ears.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s wrestling \u2014 to all of them, to me, to Izzy, to Eric [Bischoff] \u2014 I love wrestling,\u201d Bronstein explained. \u201cSo it\u2019s actually just more so that we\u2019re seeing that the people\u2019s true love for the sport and wanting to compete, it\u2019s bringing back competitive juices to people who are done with their careers, and they think they can still wrestle.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, to answer your question, I\u2019m excited every time I hear that we\u2019re drawing more attention to the sport of wrestling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bronstein says that the UFC also sees value in their fighters competing on the mats for his promotion, and hopes it\u2019s a relationship that continues to thrive for years to come.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, the UFC\u2019s been great to us,\u201d Bronstein said. \u201cWe\u2019re not competitive. I think we\u2019re additive to all of MMA, as well as other organizations, because, [with] the UFC, the top fighters fight three times a year at max, right? Some maybe four, like Merab [Dvalishvili] who had a lot of fights this year. But I think we\u2019re additive because we\u2019re giving the ability to their MMA superstars to actually continue to compete, continue to train, and build their brand.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo UFC\u2019s been great to us. They\u2019ve approved a lot of their fighters to wrestle, and I think that also, wrestling tends to have less injuries. So to your point, it\u2019s less risk for them to come wrestle and then get injured for their fight. So I think that\u2019s why we\u2019re able to allow wrestlers to come and wrestle, and still fight, because it\u2019s part of their camp anyways. They\u2019re training wrestling every day, so the chance for injury for a UFC fight wrestling training, or for training for wrestling for ours is the same.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Daniel Cormier said he\u2019d like to face Jon Jones in a wrestling match for Real American Freestyle, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702,3194],"class_list":{"0":"post-401222","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","16":"tag-videos"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401222","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=401222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}