Jon Jones Takes to Twitter; Offers Phil Davis His Teddy (Bear)

Jon Jones isn’t quite done pouring salt in the wounds of Phil Davis.

The reigning light heavyweight champ hopped on Twitter a few days ago, continuing to poke fun at Davis’ shocking loss to Anthony Johnson at UFC 172.

As the old adage goes, don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.

Unfortunately for Davis, he’s been on the wrong end of a continuous joke ever sense his lopsided unanimous decision loss to Johnson, who wasn’t even officially ranked as a top-10 light heavyweight.

Perhaps all of this is karma for Davis’ pre-fight media behavior, at least from Jones’ perspective.

Leading up to the fight, Davis turned up the volume on his typically cool and relaxed personality. The road to a UFC title shot isn’t always about defeating the best fighters in the world. Davis, who owns wins over Alexander Gustafsson, Antonio Rogerio Nogueira and Lyoto Machida, soon realized that it was going to take something else to finally get himself over the hump.

On that same fight card, Glover Teixeira was challenging Jones in the main event for the light heavyweight title, despite not having a single win over a fellow contender. Teixeira’s reputation as a finisher propelled him to the Promised Land. If Davis ever hoped to receive a crack at UFC gold, he would have to adopt another strategy seeing as he wasn’t much of a finisher and didn’t boast a flashy fighting style.  

What better way to stir the pot than verbally eviscerating the champ in the media?

“He's [Jones is] the champ, and he needs to learn that I soon will be the champ,” Davis said during the UFC 172 media conference call, according to Bleacher Report’s Hunter Homistek.

Davis continued, “So he should probably just either just give it to me, which would be the easiest thing, or he could fight me and he could give it to me that way. Probably the easier way would be to just give it up, just walk over here and say, ‘You know what? Honestly, I’m scared. I’m just going to give you the belt.’”

The dramatic personality shift sent some over the edge, condemning Davis for creating senseless drama. However, others took a liking to the new Phil Davis. He was no longer the quiet beast that kept his head low and punched his timecard like the average working man whenever it was down to business.

For the most part, Davis’ verbal antics succeeded in stirring up the necessary controversy that would have undoubtedly put him in position to finally challenge for the UFC title.

All he had to do was beat Johnson.

Initially, the task seemed relatively simple, but as Davis soon learned, nothing is ever simple in MMA. After two weeks of hype work, Davis was completely outclassed by Johnson for a full 15 minutes at Baltimore Arena in Baltimore.

While Davis no-showed at the post-fight press conference, Jones was all smiles next to the podium after dominating Teixeira in his seventh consecutive title defense.

“Phil was talking all that greasiness and now he’s somewhere pouting,” said Jones.

It has been proved over the years that talking a little noise is an expedited method of garnering attention and ascending the ranks. But the agony of falling flat on one’s face is all too real for most to ever consider taking that leap.

Jordy McElroy is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report. He is also the MMA writer for Rocktagon.