Anderson Silva has a desire to face a certain Jones, but it’s not UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones. The UFC middleweight champion and pound-for-pound great was on today’s UFC 162 media call and let it known that he still has a desire to fight Jones, a boxer who has won titles in numerous weight classes and a man who Silva has expressed interest in fighting on more than one occasion. According to Silva, he wouldn’t mind fighting Jones after he fights Chris Weidman at UFC 162. “Of course I want to fight him, and after the Weidman fight, regardless of the outcome, I would love to fight him. He already said he’d like to fight me, so that’s something I would like to happen,” Silva told said through an interpreter on the UFC 162 media conference call. Silva (33-4) is the greatest fighter in mixed martial arts history. The Brazilian has won 17-straight fights, including a record 16-straight wins in the UFC, and he’s defended his middleweight championship a record 10 times since first winning it from Rich Franklin at UFC 64 in October, 2006. Silva is regarded as by far the best striker in MMA today and he’s compiled an astonishing 20 wins by T/KO despite facing the best of the best in the world for the last decade. Still, Silva wants to keep challenging himself and that’s why he wants to take a fight against Jones, who is one of the greatest boxers of all time. Jones (56-8) is one of the only boxers in history to capture titles in five different weight classes. Although he’s not the fighter he was in his prime, the 44-year-old Jones is currently riding a two-fight win streak and seems to still have something left in the tank. Still, even though Silva isn’t a spring chicken himself, Jones is quite old in the combat sports realm and if he took on Silva I’d have to imagine he’d enter the fight as a sizeable underdog, even given his strong history in boxing. If this fight does materialize — and it’s highly unlikely it will, given that Silva recently signed an exclusive, 10-year contract with the UFC — it would be the first cross-over superfight bout between a boxer and a mixed martial artist since Randy Couture took on James Toney at UFC 118, an MMA fight which Couture easily won via first-round submission. If a fight between Jones and Silva takes place in MMA, I would have no doubt saying that Silva would win the fight inside the distance, likely by submission. But if the fight happened in boxing — where Silva only has a 1-1 record — the fight would be a lot more intriguing and it wouldn’t even shock me if Silva ended up losing because of his passive style. Regardless, this fight isn’t likely to happen and it definitely won’t happen if Silva loses to Weidman next weekend. But if he does win, look for Silva to continue to run his mouth about a matchup with Jones as the 38-year-old looks for the biggest superfights available for him — and, of course, the biggest pay day.
