Aljamain Sterling remembers Jon Jones ‘going nuts’ at the bar before early UFC fights

Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC

Aljamain Sterling started his MMA journey with Jon Jones, and was blown away — for multiple reasons — with the success of the now-UFC heavyweight champion.

Sterling and Jones went to college together early on before the former bantamweight champ transferred to a different school. After going through old school social media, “Funkmaster” saw Jones training in mixed martial arts and wondered how he could be a part of it. Sterling not only trained with Jones, but he also said that he would go out on the town with him, and was stunned to see Jones partying close to his fights in the octagon — and still winning convincingly.

“Suspect No. 1, and I got to see this first hand, was Jon Jones,” Sterling told Demetrious Johnson. “When we were in college together, and he was in the UFC, and I was still at school at Courtland... some way, some how, I messaged him on MySpace, and he’s training right down the f*cking block from my college. I hit him up like, ‘Yo, I see you doing the grappling stuff and the fighting, and I always thought it was cool. I think I could be good at this. Can I check it out? How do I check it out?’ He was like, ‘I’m training here,’ I was like, ‘Bro, I go to school right here.’ He was like, ‘Come down,’ so I came down and he was like... ‘Man, you’re not going to show up.’ I was like, alright, bet. I showed up the next day, and I haven’t stopped training since then.

“But I would see this man, a week before his fight, him at the bar... going nuts. In my head, I was like, no sex, no drinking, no smoking, and I just thought the way of [Mike] Tyson and [Muhammad] Ali and those guys. That’s what they said, don’t do it if you want to be a champion. I’m like, OK. And then I would see him and was like, I don’t get it — and then that weekend he would just murder a guy on International TV. I was like, ‘He’s doing something right.’”

Sterling recently moved up to featherweight after dropping the 135-pound title to Sean O’Malley at UFC 292 in August 2023. In his first appearance in a new weight class, Sterling dominated Calvin Kattar for a unanimous decision at UFC 300 in April. He was slated to face Movsar Evloev at UFC 307 next weekend, but an injury forced Sterling to withdraw.

After seeing Jones’ success, plus learning his body and himself over the many years of fighting at a high level, Sterling has found a system to enjoy training camp a little bit more than the absolute grind it can be at the gym on the road to a UFC fight.

“I went from cold turkey, to like six weeks — nothing changed in my fights,” Sterling said. “[Then it was] four weeks, and then I got to two weeks and it was like, ‘It’s all mental, baby.’ Just put the damn work in, and you’re good.”