If Quinton Jackson is to be believed, UFC 135 is starting to resemble Martin Scorsese's The Departed (or the original 2002 Hong Kong film, Infernal Affairs, for those cultured in Cantonese-language film). Jackson told Yahoo! Sports' Kevin Iole that he believes his camp has been infiltrated by a rat.
The reason? A fan on Twitter warned Jackson that Jones had a spy in his camp. To test out the theory, "Rampage" told his gym about an "injury" to his hand. Four hours later, UFC matchmaker Joe Silva contacted Jackson's camp to inquire about the injury rumors.
Jackson's manager, Anthony McGann, quelled Silva's fears about another injury messing up his plans. When McGann asked Silva who told him the news, Silva responded that he received a phone call from Malki Kawa, Jon Jones' manager.
Kawa spoke with Iole and denied the spy accusations (emphasis mine):
Quote:
"I promise to God, I have no spy in that camp," Kawa said. "It's completely and totally untrue. There is nothing to it at all. It's funny he said that, though, because we've heard he has had old training partners of Jon coming in to work with him. We don't care and it's kind of hilarious he's doing this. But I can guarantee you there is nothing at all that is true about this other than that I called Joe Silva after someone put out a thing on Twitter that Rampage was injured and pulling out. I wanted to know what was up, but it was no more than that. That is it."
Malki Kawa follows 64 people on Twitter. Four members of the Bloody Elbow staff, including myself, have no recollection any report about an injury to Quinton Jackson, be it on Twitter or elsewhere.
This isn't the first time Jackson has been paranoid about the integrity of information in his camp. Following his loss to Rashad Evans at UFC 114, Jackson told Fighters Only that he suspected Evans had prior knowledge.
"I remember one other thing he was doing - he was punching me in my knee," Jackson said. "It was weird because I had suffered a real bad knee injury in camp but we kept it secret, we didn't say anything about it and we didn't even tell the UFC. I told my doctor and that was it, he helped me out but I was going to back out of the fight. ... Why was he punching me in the knee though? That's kind of weird - did he find out about the injury? I don't know. Its weird."
Source: Quinton Rampage Jackson Believes Jon Jones Is Spying on Him
