Jon Jones wants you to know he's growing as a person.

On Saturday, a 19-year-old Albuquerque driver named Bryan Beltran posted footage — filmed through Meta Glasses, because of course — showing Jones confronting him in a parking lot near Central Avenue and Eubank. Beltran's account: Jones nearly clipped his vehicle three times. Beltran revved his engine and flipped him off. Jones then stopped his truck in the middle of the road, backed up, and followed Beltran into the parking lot.

The video shows Jones approaching Beltran's car with one hand in his pocket — which Beltran speculated might have been concealing a firearm — and delivering the kind of motivational speech you'd expect from a man who headbutts police cars.

"You gotta calm down, bro. You gotta relax yourself, bro."

Then he flipped off the camera and walked away.

Jones took to X to share his version, claiming Beltran "chased my car down for two blocks, revving his engine and trying to intimidate me." He added: "I am glad this happened to me and not one of the senior citizens in our community. I am proud of myself for standing up for myself and not allowing that kind of bullying or intimidation."

Proud. Of himself. For not beating up a teenager in a parking lot.

Let's calibrate where that bar sits. This is the same Jon Jones who fled a hit-and-run involving a pregnant woman in 2015, came back only to grab cash from his car, then disappeared again. The same Jones arrested for DWI with a loaded handgun under his seat in 2020. The same Jones whose fiancée had blood on her face when cops arrived at a Las Vegas hotel in 2021. The same Jones who allegedly assaulted and threatened to kill a drug-testing agent visiting his home in 2024.

The timeline of incidents is long enough to need its own Wikipedia subsection — which, in fact, it has.

So when Jones says he's proud of himself for walking away from a 19-year-old kid in a parking lot, that tells you everything about where his personal baseline sits. Most people don't need to congratulate themselves for not committing assault before lunch. Jones does, and he wants credit for it.

Here's the part that makes it genuinely weird. This is the same man currently mentoring Gable Steveson — the Olympic gold medalist wrestling phenom who's 4-0 in MMA with four first-round finishes. Jones predicted Steveson will be a future UFC heavyweight champion. Steveson calls the partnership "the best thing we can have" and shut down Daniel Cormier when DC suggested maybe having Jones as your role model has some obvious downsides. Steveson headlines RAF 09 on May 30 against Alexandr Romanov.

The mentorship pitch is basically: learn from the most talented mixed martial artist who ever lived, who also happens to have been arrested more times than he's lost rounds in the octagon. The ceiling is UFC gold. The lesson plan apparently includes parking lot conflict resolution.

Jones is the greatest fighter in MMA history and also a guy who followed a teenager into a parking lot to tell him to relax. Both of those things are true at the same time. His talent has never been the question. The question is whether "didn't assault someone today" is something a 38-year-old man should be posting about on social media.

Beltran, for his part, said he didn't realize it was Jones until afterward and holds no hard feelings.

Somebody in this story showed maturity. It wasn't the one tweeting about it.

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