Jon Jones retires, Tom Aspinall becomes undisputed heavyweight

UFC President Dana White dropped major news on Saturday night that changes the look of the heavyweight class.

Jon Jones has retired, making Tom Aspinall UFC’s undisputed heavyweight champion, White announced from Azerbaijan on Saturday.

“Jon Jones called us last night and retired. Jon Jones is officially retired,” White said during a press conference. “Tom Aspinall is the heavyweight champion of the UFC.”

Jones had not agreed to a fight with Aspinall this year, and White said earlier this week that UFC was ready to move on if something couldn’t get agreed on.

“I don’t know, we’ll see how this thing plays out over the next couple weeks,” White told radio host Jim Rome. “If we can’t get this fight done, we’ll move on quickly. I said a couple of weeks. We’ll have answers in the next couple [of] weeks.”

Aspinall, who taunted Jones in the fall for not facing him, was called out by Jones in November after he beat Stipe Miocic at Madison Square Garden.

“He’s annoying to me and that’s my own personal — he annoys me,” Jones said of Aspinall then. “I get to you guys, you find it entertaining, but I find him annoying and I just don’t like him and at the end of the day, if I give him the opportunity to fight me, I want to be so compensated — I want to say it, I want that ‘f–k you’ money, honestly. That’s just what it is.”

“I want to be compensated to the point where if I won or lost, that it really wouldn’t matter,” Jones added.

If Jones, 37, is indeed fully done, his record in UFC will stand at 28-1-0 (1 NC).