On August 23, 2012, the UFC canceled its first event since the promotion was bought by Zuffa in 2001. At a press conference that day UFC president Dana White announced that Dan Henderson had withdrawn from his main-event fight with light heavyweight champion Jon Jones due to a knee injury and that Jones had declined to fight Chael Sonnen, who had agreed to take the fight on eight days’ notice. Rather than go on without their main event, the UFC shut down UFC 151. Within minutes of White’s announcement, Jones went from being a respected champion to the biggest heel in MMA, hated by both fans and fellow fighters alike.

Immediately the negative messages started flooding into the @JonJones Twitter account:

@ShinErick16: Wow @jonjones you are seriously a fuckhead

@AJIsTheReal: Man, f*** @JonJones. Yeast infection-ish.

@Heavy_Chase: hahahaha @JonJones is a bitch!!!!! @OGDankSinatra

Hundreds, thousands of angry tweets. The problem was that Jon Jones the UFC fighter didn’t own the @JonJones Twitter handle. The Jon Jones who did was was just a mild-mannered video game developer in Austin, Texas, who had acquired his handle back in 2007, when Twitter was new and no one had heard of Jon “Bones” Jones, and who had no idea the whirlwind he and his computer were about to reap.

Over the next four days, Austin Jon Jones received more than 6000 tweets. Over one six-hour stretch he was receiving five tweets every 10 seconds. An avalanche of vitriol. But Jones kept his cool, replying to and retweeting the worst, or best, of the attacks. He even offered to accept Sonnen’s offer to fight. Someone, he figured, needed to stand up for the good “Jon Jones” name.

For his troubles, Jon Jones the video game developer suddenly found himself a minor Internet celebrity. His story spread around the MMA-blog community. He got a mention in Sports Illustrated. An MMA gym in Austin offered him a free lesson so he could be ready to fight Sonnen. People even started a meme—“Good Guy Jon Jones”—the surest sign that you’ve made it in the 21st century.

Following UFC champion Jon Jones’ controversial victory over Alexander Gustafsson last weekend, we decided to give Austin (now-Relocated-to-Brooklyn) Jon Jones a call and see if the trouble had started up again. Also to find out what it’s like being famous for having the same name as someone famous, what it means to be the recipient of all that hatred directed at somebody else, and what the definition of “identity” really is in a world where the line between fame and anonymity is becoming increasingly blurred.

What’s in a name?

Who is Jon Jones?

Jon Jones: I’m famous for not being someone. The whole experience has been kind of mind-bending.

Last Saturday, the night of the Jones/Gustafsson fight, I was out drinking pretty late. I woke up to a mannequin torso on my patio, and I go to check Twitter and I have 75 tweets, all variations on “You fucking loser! You stole it!” So I sat down and wrote a tweet saying, “Oh that’s great. I woke up to a bunch of people calling my wife and mother ugly whores and telling me to fuck my dead dad. Thanks guys!”

But this time hasn’t been nearly as bad as when UFC 151 got canceled. That was odious. The first day or two there were a lot of mouth breathers being really, really angry—nothing but unbridled hatred. I would type a tweet and literally by the time I was done typing it there would be another 30, 50 tweets waiting for me. I was refreshing every few seconds. It was page after page after page almost instantly. It just wouldn’t let up.

I took the entire day off work, actually. Because I’d never been through anything like that before, and for all I knew I might never again. So I decided, I’d been having fun one on one, I’m going to have fun with all of these people all at once. So I started responding and retweeting the really, really awful ones.

I spent 14 hours straight at my computer.

When he was first getting popular, maybe five to 10 times a week I’d get tweets from someone saying, “Jon Jones, you’re a piece of shit! So-and-so is going to kill you. You’re going to bleed out your face!” Really vile stuff. First I ignored it but then I started having fun with it. At first I’d reply like I didn’t know anything, like, “What?!! Who wants to hurt me?! Oh my god! Who are you?!” I always replied as me. I never deliberately try to pose as him in a way that anyone would ever take seriously.

I’m a minor MMA fan. I did fly out to Denver for UFC 135 when Jones fought “Rampage” Jackson. When it came time for the title fight and 20,000 were chanting my name, I realized, 1) This feels right; and 2) My life has peaked. It’s never going to get cooler than that.

During the 151 incident, I instantly offered to fight Chael Sonnen, within the first hour, hour-and-a-half of everything coming. I said, “Fuck it, if he won’t fight him, I will. I’ll train.” And that’s what the attention of Cooper’s MMA in Austin, which gave me a free MMA lesson. A friend shot a video of me training and put together a montage. That’s me training to fight Chael.

Honestly, I haven’t tried to get any publicity from this; I haven’t sought out anything. I’ve just basically agreed to anything anyone’s asked. Everything’s been coming to me, but I’ve been trying very hard to stay conscious of seeming like I’m trying too hard or like I’m trying to keep it going. I shut up the instant it seems like people aren’t amused anymore. And life goes back to normal.

The meme thing has played weird with my psyche: Wow, all these people are aware of me and this is the image they’ve created of me. There are, like, 15,000 memes of me. It’s a mind-bending 21-century situation I’ve found myself in.

I’ve been really good about staking out web real estate for my name. I used to own 30 or 40 Jon Jones-related domains before he was even a thing. Because I lost one domain because I let it expire a while back, and I said, “Never again!” And I’m a social-network whore, so I always camped out “Jon Jones” everywhere and actively use them. I’ve had the Twitter account since 2007.

I'm a stereotypical computer geek in many respects, and I've always had more online friends I'd never met than friends in real life. Staking out claim to your name or nickname without having to add a bunch of numbers to it is something to be proud of. It's your online identity! I don't want to be jonjones420. … Once, though, I accidentally let my domain expire, and couldn't get it back for over a year. I went from a couple thousand hits a day down to maybe 100, and it never recovered. I decided I'd never let it happen again, and there were no other notable Jon Joneses at the time that I'd be disrespecting, so I decided to find and get the best ones I thought I could use. If I couldn't, no big deal.

I also own JonJones.com. I had been waiting 11 years for it. I had an email alert set up so GoDaddy would tell me whenever it became available. I waited 11 years for it to go on sale, and the day that it did, I contacted the guy, and he said that Bones Jones’ manager had contacted him and wanted to buy the site, and the selling price was $1600, and he didn’t want to buy it. So I bought it instead. I think he was driving Bentley’s by this time, and his manager didn’t want to spring for $1600.

I also have JonJones@gmail.com. I’ve had people email me asking me for training tips, inviting me to fights or gyms. One guy emailed me and was very clearly trying to get me to fly to Pittsburgh to bang his wife. Sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge: “My wife’s a huge fan. She’d love to meet you. You should come to Pittsburgh. You can stay with us.” If I had been single at the time I would seriously have considered flying out there, showing up, and saying, “All right, let’s do this. Oh yes, I look different on TV.”

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