Written by E. Spencer Kyte at The Province.com
Taken independently, Jon Jones getting a bunch of citations for revving his engine at a red light isn’t a big deal. At some time, most of us have been pulled over for one reason or another and though getting a ticket is a pain and takes some money out of your pocket, it’s far from the end of the world.
The problem is that you can’t take Jones’ latest run in with the police as an independent incident. If this were the first time the sublimely talented light heavyweight had crossed paths with the police, you could brush it off as a non-issue, but since Jones has a lengthy history of doing stupid things behind the wheel of a car, the two-day story that started with him getting ticketed and bickering with a member of the Albuquerque Police Department and advanced to Jones being arrested for violating the terms of his probation on Tuesday becomes a big deal.
On the most basic level, this feels completely avoidable.
With his sketchy track record behind the wheel, someone in Jones’ inner circle should have figured out that the 28-year-old fighter shouldn’t be driving himself anywhere at this point. There have to be a dozen people that would be willing to chauffer Jones around “The 505” for a bi-weekly stack of bills and at the absolute worst, his management team could set up a permanent car service for its star client in order to avoid these situations in the future.
But you would have thought someone would have taken this step following last year’s hit-and-run incident that left a pregnant women with a broken arm and prompted Jones being stripped of the light heavyweight title and suspended by the UFC. However, that wasn’t the case, as Jones collected a “driving with a license or proof of insurance” ticket prior to this latest moving violation and not that far removed from being placed on probation where one of the conditions was to stay out of trouble with the police.
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