Jon Jones the video-game content curator always knows when Jon Jones the professional fighter is up to something. He doesn’t always know what that something is right away, but he knows that all he has to do is wait and keep an eye on social media and the answer will come to him, whether or not he wants it to.

Take, for instance, the August day when the UFC light heavyweight champion threw his belt on the floor and crossed a Las Vegas stage to brawl with Daniel Cormier in the lobby of MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

“I got onto Facebook and saw my name as a trending topic and thought, ‘Oh no, what now?’” Jones – the other one, the one who’s a 30-year-old art management specialist for Epic Games, currently living in Brooklyn, N.Y. – told MMAjunkie. “Generally speaking, you never want to be surprised to find your name as a trending topic on Facebook.”

It was a similar story on Tuesday, when news broke that the fighter Jones had failed a drug test due to cocaine metabolites in his system. Before he knew what was happening, the other Jones found himself buried by tweets urging him to get off drugs and get his life together (or, as one person put it in a tweet they later deleted, according to Jones, “JESUS DIDN’T DO CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!”).

And yet, in a weird way, Jones has gotten used to this particular brand of Internet madness. Maybe that’s the price he pays for sharing a name with one of the world’s most famous professional fighters, and for snatching up the @JonJones Twitter handle before the champ and his people could get it. Maybe it’s also good that he’s the one forced to deal with the flood of tweets and taunts every time the champ finds himself in the news, since he does seem to have a rare gift for being gracious and good-natured about it all, so much so that there might be a lesson here, if we’re willing to look for it.

If you’ve spent any time at all on Twitter, especially the MMA-specific fringe of it, it probably won’t surprise you at all to learn that there are a lot of people who are eager to express some very strong opinions about the fighter Jon Jones, but somehow not nearly so eager to do even the minimal research required to ensure that they’re expressing those opinions to the right person.

“Generally speaking, it’s mostly just people who are really excited and happy, or really excited and angry,” Jones said. “Or they’re just drunk.”

The remarkable thing is not that it happens, but that Jones maintains such a good sense of humor about it. Most of us? We’d probably get pretty annoyed if we were inundated by messages – not all of them polite or positive or even written in a language we understand (Jones ends up reading a lot of tweets in Portuguese, he said) – intended for another person with the same name. Instead, Jones somehow manages to be consistently funny about the whole thing, even long after most people would have lost their patience with it (via Twitter):

It’s not a problem that’s likely to go away any time soon. Jones the fighter is obviously going to be a news-worthy figure for the foreseeable future, and there will probably always be some subset of MMA fans who get so riled up that they tweet the wrong guy. And who wants to be thought of as “the other guy” with any name? To the man who’s been Jon Jones since before Jon Jones was even alive, it’s a strange way to have to think of himself. It’s also, he acknowledges, a strange way to learn things about his more famous counterpart, since this Jones follows MMA only in a casual sense, though he did attend one of Jones’ title defenses in person when a friend happened to have an extra ticket.

“Honestly, this is the only way I keep up on the news about him,” Jones said. “It is a really, really weird way to form an opinion about someone, because I’m only hearing from the sort of people who won’t even bother to look it up and make sure that they’re actually talking to the right person, and they’re often fairly illiterate. It’s not always the most scintillating intellect at play.”

Still, Jones seems surprisingly unperturbed by it. When people ask him why he doesn’t change his Twitter handle, maybe go by Jonathan instead, he responds by sending them a clip from “Office Space” where a character named Michael Bolton deals with a similar problem, though with far less of a sense of humor about it all.

Not only does Jones have the Twitter handle, he also owns JonJones.com, which he says he “accidentally” bought out from under the other Jones, who then declined to buy it from him even while he was “driving around in Bentleys.” As a self-described “social media whore,” Jones said it’s actually a point of pride to have staked out his own Web presence under his own name, even if it comes with some baggage.

“It’s kind of special to me, in a way, and it’s never gotten bad enough that it didn’t seem worth it to me to have it,” Jones said. “At this point I see it as a traveling circus that occasionally shows up on my doorstep. Then I just say, ‘OK, I’ll play the clown for a couple days.’ Other than that, it doesn’t really affect my day-to-day life.”

In fact, Jones said, the only “remotely annoying” thing about it is the other Jones himself. The champ has never spoken to him or tweeted at him, never even acknowledged his existence. Even when they were both at the E3 expo – one Jones was there in his capacity for Epic Games, the other to promote the new UFC video game, which featured him on its cover – the fighter ignored the brief attempt Jones made at making contact, he said, which irked him a little, since he’d wanted to see something “vaguely humanizing” from the man he mostly knows as the intended target of all this vitriol.

“I’ve never asked him for anything,” Jones said. “I just take his hate mail and try to be funny and cool about it because I figure one of us has to. But he’s actively ignored me. He actually blocked me on Twitter a few weeks ago. I have no idea why.”

In the couple years that he’s dealt with the online cases of mistaken identity, Jones has seen his share of oddities. Beyond the normal people who want to yell at him or congratulate him, he gets frequent queries from “tiny MMA sites that do zero fact-checking,” he said. Even the official Reebok Twitter account included him in a tweet announcing its recent endorsement deal with the other Jon Jones (via Twitter).

Then there was a time a man emailed him about what a huge fan his wife was, how Jon should come to Pittsburgh and stay with them, if you catch his drift.

“If I’d been single at the time,” Jones said, “I would’ve been tempted to show up and say, ‘Yeah, I know, I look different on TV. So where am I staying?’”

For now, Jones is doing his best to be good humored about it all without being cloying. It’s not anything he asked for, and yet it is, he admits, sometimes kind of fun. His name has become a bizarre link to another world. He gets hate he doesn’t deserve, accolades he didn’t earn, and a recognition that found him by the sheer coincidence of two common names.

But when you see him interacting with the people who are looking for the other Jon Jones, you tend to see a charmingly weird thing happen over and over again. Someone will tweet him, usually telling him he’s too arrogant or fake, that he’s about to get beat up, or simply that he should “stop using Jesus that way,” and Jones will respond with mock sincerity? Someone wants to hurt him? Oh dear. They think he’s arrogant? Well, that is something he’ll work on.

Usually (though not always) that’s when the other person gets the joke. They’ve spent all this energy, whether positive or negative, a bit of unsolicited life advice or a damning rant, on the wrong person. The whole thing is pretty silly, really. Maybe they even realize that it would have still been silly even if they had found the right Jon Jones, because, honestly, what are they doing? Who are they talking to?

With a little bit of humor, the situation is diffused. The intensity dial drops from 100 to zero. They can only smack their foreheads and shrug and smile, while Jones smiles along with them. It’s almost pleasant to watch. Plus it’s funny, at least for now.

“My one promise is, as soon as people stop finding it amusing, I’ll shut up and let it go,” Jones said. “I never want to seem like I’m trying to get this attention. I just agree to what anyone asks and have fun with it. I don’t want to be the kind of dweeb who goes, ‘Oh wow, a lot of people are paying attention to me. I should pimp my band.’ That’s not my way. I just hope people have fun with it. If I start to get annoying, just let me know, and I’m done.”

If only the people who keep tweeting him would agree to the same terms.

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