While this might have been more than a little tongue-in-cheek, Craig Jones has vowed to retire if he loses the upcoming intergender matchup against Gabi Garcia. He revealed in a post on his official Instagram account that he will be travelling to Los Angeles to meet Garcia at her gym and compete against her in a no time-limit submission-only match on Sunday 28th March. Jones explains that the he will be arranging for the match to be streamed live and free of charge for any fans that want to watch it, although he did make the offer to FloGrappling who reportedly weren’t willing to arrange the match for one of their events.
This strange series of events all started after the antics backstage at the last edition of Who’s Number One, when Gordon Ryan and Andre Galvao got into an altercation that resulting in the latter getting slapped twice. In the footage that emerged of the incident, Garcia was seen getting involved in order to separate the two men after competing herself earlier that night. She then decided to use her interview time to issue a challenge to Ryan to see if he would be interested in competing against her, something not many fans took too seriously at the time.
Then came along Jones, the Australian phenom who is widely regarded as one of the funniest men in BJJ. He offered himself as an alternate for Ryan and was clearly interested in competing against Garcia, who outweights him by a significant amount. It wasn’t long then before Garcia also verbally agreed to the matchup and despite both grapplers being eager to make good on their promises, most fans were still more than a little skeptical about this match going ahead. Now it seems like everything is official and regardless of whether he ends up having to retire or not, it’ll certainly be interesting to see how Craig Jones fares against the greatest female grappler of all time.
