If you thought the drama between self-proclaimed “King of Jiu-Jitsu” Crag Jones and Olympic gold medalist and two-time NCAA Division I Heavyweight champion, Gable Steveson was finished, think again.
That’s because Steveson dropped a bombshell earlier today (Mon., Sept. 15, 2025), claiming Jones asked him to take a dive ahead of their canceled “super fight” last month at CJI 2. The match never took place after Steveson pulled out with turf toe just days before (full details here).
“Long story short, there were a couple of funky stipulations around there that we didn’t agree upon. They wanted to keep it, I got turf toe, and wasn’t there,” Steveson told Ariel Helwani today.
Pressed on what those “stipulations” were, Steveson doubled down on his claim that Jones wanted him to throw the bout.
”If you really want to ask, there was a look in the eye of saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to retire after this match. I don’t want to take this loss. Can you do this for me?’ And we’ll leave it as that,” Steveson said. “I was looking at an exciting match…Eventually, the question did come along. We sat, we thought, we disagreed. We went back to them as time got closer — just popped up with a bad injury and had to focus on my next thing.”
“My foot, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to go out there and just limp around and not look good for anybody, and just make sure everything just runs down a hill that it doesn’t need to be run down? I stayed quiet because I’m a man,” Steveson said. “I’m not going to go out there and speak badly about somebody because something’s wrong or something didn’t go my way. I look at things in a different way. Maybe Jones doesn’t because he hasn’t accomplished anything in his field.”
“He’s lost to Gordon Ryan about three or four times,” Steveson concluded. “His team, The B-Team, won the Craig Jones Invitational but probably shouldn’t have. So that’s a weird thing too — he’s got more digging than worrying about me.”
As you might expect, Jones fired back almost immediately. Posting on Instagram, the Australian grappler brought up Steveson’s past legal issues while ridiculing the dive accusation.
“A man of truth,” Jones wrote in his Instagram post caption, while adding:
“So you agreed to a “work”?
But then got injured and had to pull out of a work.
Make that make sense for me?”
This rivalry clearly isn’t over, and the bad blood may only be getting started.
