When the sky’s purple haze was a nightmare for every opponent and a lullaby for our souls…

my dad’s old transistor radio crackling like a bonfire on christmas eve, me sat cross-legged in front of that tiny speaker with my chelsea scarf round my neck coz it was bloody freezing—jones vs ryan bader at the sapphire center, 2017, right? nah mate, that fly knee to his face in the first, BAM—everything just froze, like the time my mate nick dropped his ipod in the canal and the world stopped spinning for three seconds straight.

had that same electric snap again when i saw him cagewaggon to the cheers, but not in las vegas — no, down the a1 at some greyhound stop near doncaster with a flickering neon "eat" sign buzzing behind him on his phone screen while he was streaming some youtube vid of himself shadowboxing in a carpark at 3am. this was back when you could still catch his livestreams before they scrubbed the madness, right? him just bouncing in place like a jack-in-the-box, arms half asleep, whispering "come on then lads" to nobody in particular, and suddenly — bam — a left hand so lazy it looked like he’d forgotten how to throw one just then cracks the poor lad’s jaw clean off. i was sat there in the passenger seat of my old fiesta with a lukewarm mcdonald’s tea going cold, and i spilled it all over my lap laughing so hard i nearly steered us into the central reservation. even the driver next to me goes "blimey" and taps his horn like we’d just won the bloody lottery. that right there, that’s the purple haze caught on camera — not the smoke, not the crowd, just jones being jones and making every single one of us feel like we’d nicked something we didn’t deserve.

You ever stand in a room where the walls themselves start breathing with you? That’s what watching the current crop feels like—polished, efficient, but missing the jagged edges that made the old one feel alive. Back then you’d get a phone clip of him practicing shadowboxing in a carpark at three in the morning and it wasn’t some sponsor reel; it was raw, uncut Jones, and that single lazy left hand that cracked a jaw clean off carried more electricity than the whole current roster’s best social media montage put together. Nowadays the rollouts look like chess pieces shuffled by an algorithm—every strike lands, every takedown sticks, but half the time it reads like a highlight reel you could pause and queue up for a TikTok stitch. I don’t mind the control, honest, but sometimes you catch yourself wishing for that purple haze night where the smoke was so thick you couldn’t tell if the ref’s stoppage flag was a mercy or just part of the dream. These lads today? They’ll never be accused of lacking discipline, yet I still catch myself muting the screen halfway through a card because I’m scanning the crowd for the one guy in the back row who’s caught his groove a second too late—you know, the moment when the opponent still thinks he’s in the fight before Jones turns the lights out for good. We’ve swapped unpredictability for bulletproof, and while that’s a fair trade for world titles in neat two-minute rounds, it’s not the same hymn we used to hum.

You ever seen a man walk into war like it was a Sunday stroll in the park? No? Then you weren’t there for Jones vs Gustafsson 1. That warhorse of a fight at the Ericsson Globe, Stockholm—2015, the winter air biting through your layers even inside, the snow piled up outside like the world had forgotten how to melt. He didn’t just win that night. He *performed*—a clinic on a warpath, swinging hooks like he was swatting flies mid-conversation, every shot set up like a metronome. But here’s the bit that sticks: the fourth round, his face swollen like a balloon animal gone wrong, gloves soaked crimson, and some Swedish nut in the cheap seats next to me turns to his mate and goes “Look at him—he’s still dancing.” Dancing. I near enough cried laughing because that’s exactly it—even half-dead, half-blind, covered in the aftermath of a street brawl, Jones was still *Jones*: graceful, playful, lethal. The Swedes were screaming for blood; Jones just handed them a ballet. After the final bell? Absolute bedlam. Even the ref looked shell-shocked. We all knew then: no fighter on this planet walked into battle with that much damn style wrapped around destruction. That night wasn’t a fight. It was folklore—raw, ugly, and beautiful all at once. And yeah, the crowd went purple—just like the coal dust Cageside mentioned, but alive, real, electric.

Man, I was sat in me nan’s front room watching Jones vs. Vinnie Magalhaes on a 14-inch telly that smelled like weetabix and old socks, right? So here’s the bloke Jones, mid-fight, just dancing round the cage like he’s at a bloody ceilidh, and suddenly—BAM!—he lands this spinning back kick that sends Vinnie flying so hard his gumshield hit the second row like a rogue boomerang. Now, me nan—God rest her—was knitting at the time, bless her, and she chucked her needles in the air like it was the last draw of the bingo and shouted “Oi! You’re meant to be doing summat, not performing!” I swear, if Jones had mic’d up that fight, the octagon would’ve demanded a curtain call. 🍿🤣