Roy Jones, Jr. vs. Felix Trinidad

By Ron Borges

NEW YORK – Don King is selling memories at Madison Square Garden this weekend but few people are buying.

King has done all he could to convince the boxing public that there is a reason to be interested in watching two old geezers well past their prime fight for nothing special, unless one considers fighting for their lives and to avoid embarrassing themselves something special. For one of the few times in King’s career, bombast and bullshit have failed him.

Six or eight years ago, a match between Roy Jones, Jr. and Felix Trinidad would have been electric. Pay-per-view sales would have challenged the best of the non-heavyweight numbers. The Garden would have been jammed with Puerto Rican fans waving flags and hollering Trinidad’s name and Jones supporters arguing that on this night he would finally convince the doubters that he was more talented even than the greatest fighter who ever was, Sugar Ray Robinson.

There would have been a buzz in the air at 33rd and 7th Avenue. Tonight there are only bits of trash swirling in the air. Instead of a rush to the box office there is the sound of slush under the shoes of commuters slogging their way to that address not to go to a fight but to get on a commuter rail train to the suburbs. Nobody’s flocking to the Garden to see two shadows fight. Not even Don King could pull that off.

King went so far, at one point, as to compare this fight with the Rumble in the Jungle, when Muhammad Ali went to Zaire to facedown the fiercest young heavyweight in the world at the time, George Foreman. That night was history. This night will not even be a footnote.

Mike Tyson once said, when talking about his many missteps, “Old too soon, smart too late.’’ That, sadly, seems to be the case here for the 39-year-old old Jones. Jones could have been SOMEBODY in boxing instead of just somebody in boxing but when he was in his prime he was the most reluctant dragon in the game. He wanted no part of guys who punched like Trinidad or even guys who boxed like Dariusz Michalzewski and so his reputation never caught up with his self-esteem.

Jones’ vast physical gifts were obvious. Speed, timing, quick hands, ring intelligence. He was arguably the most gifted boxer of his day. Problem is he wasn’t a fighter. Jones never seemed to come willingly to the arena and because of it he missed too many of the big names and big fights that he should have had. He made money but he fought every form of municipal employee. A teacher, a trash man, a cop, a firefighter, a mail man. What he didn’t fight were the guys who the world wanted to see him in with.

Even when he won the heavyweight title, to become the first former middleweight champion in 106 years to accomplish that feat, he beat a carefully selected champion named John Ruiz. No Klitschkos for him. No Holyfield in his prime. No Tyson in his prime. No Lennox Lewis. Not even a follow up unification fight with a guy who never could have hurt him, then IBF champion Chris Byrd.

Jones said a Byrd fight didn’t interest him. Maybe that’s why he didn’t interest many fight fans. They admired his skills but they loved lesser boxers like Arturo Gatti, Micky Ward and Marco Antonio Barrera far more fervently.

Roy Jones, Jr. chose Ruiz because of what he knew he wasn’t. He wasn’t a skilled enough fighter to hit him very often. He won but then he went back to Pensacola and no one much cared. Now he’s back trying to win what he lost long ago – the love of fight fans.

Once I was asked if I thought Jones belonged in the boxing Hall of Fame. I said yes because I thought he was one of the greatest managers who ever lived. A manager’s job is to get maximum money for minimum risk. No one ever did that better than Jones did but now even that is in question.

Rather than leave the stage as his skills decline, Jones now insists on fighting on. When he could fight he didn’t want to. Now that he’s a bad imitation of what he used to be, Jones won’t leave even though the public began to reject him a long time ago.

Jones is 2-3 in his last five fights, two of those losses coming via crushing knockouts. His two wins came against third tier opposition in backwater towns like Boise, Idaho and Biloxi, Mississippi. His career is at least ending in the same places Sugar Ray Robinson’s did. In jerkwater towns far from the big fights.

Even this night is not what it appears. The names are well known but the men behind the names are not the same ones who made those reputations. They are facsimiles of those fighters. They look the same on the outside but on the inside they are not.

Saturday night Jones is back at the Garden facing a blown up welterweight whose had four fights in the last 6 1/2 years and was 2-2 in them. Trinidad is facing a guy who has fought once a year the past three years. The public, for once, has not been fooled. They’re not coming.

King and the Dolan brothers, the same guys who gave the Knicks Isiah Thomas and Stephon Marbury, tried to charge $15,000 for premium ringside seats for this fight in an attempt to prove P.T. Barnum was right when he said there’s a sucker born every minute. Judging by the way those tickets sold, the people behind them will have plenty of room to put their coats.

The fight itself is supported by an atrocious under card, although the match between young prospect Devon Alexander and former WBO junior welterweight champion DeMarcus Corley is worth noting because it is a step up for Alexander, who is arguably King’s hottest young prospect and a fighter with a crowd-pleasing style.

As for the main event, the inevitable seems to be that Jones (51-4, 38 KO) will give poor Trinidad (42-2, 35 KO) a beating because he is too big for him and still too fast for him. Trinidad has not fought in nearly three years and when last seen in the ring was losing every round to Winky Wright while absorbing a one-sided beating.

The former welterweight champion failed to carry his punching power up with him from 147 pounds to the middleweight division and that does not bode well for him. Neither does the fact that 160 pounds is the highest weight he’s ever fought at until he meets Jones at 170. Judging by the way Bernard Hopkins beat him to the floor and Wright beat him to a pulp one does not need a crystal ball to see the likely outcome. Trinidad simply is not a true middleweight, despite some limited success there with undersized guys like William Joppy and Ricardo Mayorga. When pushed in with a legitimate 160 pound man, the 35-year-old Trinidad got beaten up. Why should he fare better against a guy weighing another 10 pounds more?

Trinidad’s defensive lapses have been well exposed by Hopkins, Wright and Oscar De La Hoya but when he was in his prime it didn’t matter as much because his punching power destroyed most of the welterweights he faced. He continued to hit with authority even after he moved up to junior middleweight but not with the same kind of concussive force. At 160, he hurt no one who was truly a middleweight but they all hurt him.

Now he’s in with Jones, who has fought as a light heavyweight since 1996, won a version of the heavyweight title and then got himself knocked cold by Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson when he tried to move back to 175 too quickly. He has not been the same fighter since because as his reflexes have slowed, his technical flaws have been exposed. Yet he is still the bigger man and the better boxer, two things that have previously led to Trinidad not just being beaten in the ring but being destroyed there.

The same thing that has happened to Jones happened to another guy who fought too long, as they all seem to do. Ali was one of the greatest fighters of all time and perhaps the most important sports figure in history but when age began to put a layer of rush over his reflexes the fundamentals of the game that he had always ignored came back to haunt him. The differences between Ali and Jones are many but the one to focus on in this case is that Ali was blessed with a rock for a chin. Roy Jones, Jr. has fragile china.

That is the one chance Felix Trinidad has. If he can catch Jones with one of those crushing left hands at a moment when Jones has put himself in a perilous position because of his own technical flaws Jones’ reflexes will no longer be able to pull him out of harm’s way. If Trinidad lands a bomb, he could take Roy Jones out of boxing for good.

But don’t bet on it. Although Jones is a shadow, he’s a lesser one than Trinidad. He has more hand speed, far more boxing skill and a considerable size advantage. In other words, Roy Jones, Jr. has what he always tried to make sure he had back in the day when he still could fight. He has all the advantages in this match.

All but one. There is no Fountain of Youth in boxing. Not for Jones. Not for Trinidad. Not even for King. Men grow old inside the ring at their peril. When the first bell tolls Saturday night, both Jones and Trinidad will be trapped in a place where they no longer belong. Often times that can make for a thrilling fight because the slippage in skills leaves both more vulnerable than in their youth and hence more interesting.

The sport of boxing is as much about vulnerability as it is dominance and sadly it is the former that is the most compelling aspect of this fight. Each man is at a dangerous time in his professional career. He is at the confluence of diminishing skill and self-delusion.

The view Trinidad and Jones have of themselves as boxers no longer coincides with reality. The fighters they see in their heads are still the ones who strode across the boxing world years ago like dominate lions but now they are graying lions. Lions in winter whose arrogance now outstrips their ferocity.

When two such lions meet anything can happen but, at the worst, we can be left with a mutually assured destruction pact. It would be sad if that’s how it ends for Roy Jones, Jr. and Felix Trinidad but they are grown men who made this choice to go on.

Jones has said this week that, “I know I can beat 110 per cent of the champions out there right now. I just have to be motivated.’’

Trinidad has countered by arguing against the facts that, “I still have my power.’’

Both are in for a surprise Saturday night. A sad surprise that, thankfully, at least won’t be witnessed by as many people as Don King hoped.