By Ron Borges

NEW YORK – Time does not stand still but Felix Trinidad did. That’s why he ended up on the floor Saturday night.

Once one of the most feared punchers in boxing, a man who had not fought in nearly three years squared off with a 39-year-old opponent who was 2-3 in his last five fights and had twice been left quivering on the canvas, wondering why the lights kept blinking on and off above him.

It was Trinidad who was coming off that lengthy retirement (his second but hopefully not his last) and it was Roy Jones, Jr. who was coming back to Madison Square Garden to try at 39 to convince a skeptical public that he was still relevant. He isn’t really but he was relevant enough (not to mention big enough) to send Trinidad collapsing to the floor twice on his way to a convincing unanimous decision that left the Puerto Rican icon reportedly $15 million richer and Jones much less so but still believing his own hype that he had found what Ponce De Leon could not.

The fact is there is no Fountain of Youth in Florida and most definitely none in boxing. As a fighter ages his skills erode, his reflexes slow, his power decipates with the loss of timing and flexibility but his ego often expands. The latter would be difficult in Jones’ case since he was an early practitioner of addressing himself in the third person (to wit: “Roy can do whatever Roy wants to do in boxing as long as Roy’s motivated by being Roy.’’ Or something like that) but the erosion of his talents has been on display for some time and no one should be fooled by what he did to Trinidad into believing he is what he once was.

The 35-year-old Trinidad proved to be the more decipated of the two though, a dilemma intensified by the fact Jones was the naturally larger and faster man. Those advantages of size, power and speed ultimately cut Trinidad down in the second half of what was actually a more entertaining fight than many had anticipated.

In its early stages, Trinidad was able to use his jab and some consistent and surprising body punches at and below the belt line to keep Jones at bay. But late in the sixth round, only minutes after Jones complained to referee Arthur Mercante, Jr. about Trinidad’s punches straying too often below boxing’s demilitarized zone to be an accident,  the four-time world champion began to press Trinidad, closing the gap on him and beginning to back him up with lead right hands and several combinations that seemed to come at Trinidad faster than he could react.

At the end of that round, Jones smiled slyly as he walked back to his corner. Ninety seconds later Trinidad was knocked to the floor for the first time by a sweeping right hand to the temple that caused the kind of delayed reaction one sees in aged fighters and stubborn buildings after the wrecker’s ball strikes.

Trinidad took two short steps back and then simply fell straight down to the floor as if someone had pulled a chair out from under him. That collapse was so stunningly unexpected that Jones was not able to react quickly enough to land what would have been a second telling blow and that remained the case even after Trinidad got up.

The Trinidad who pushed himself off the canvas was not the same one who had been trying to outbox Jones up to that point. He was now a wary combatant, a good example of why governments don’t send old men to fight wars. It is a young man’s game because whether in the ring or on the battlefield participation demands a cessation of wise judgment, a trait more common in youth.

Trinidad seemed to realize at that moment that he was up against an opponent who was too big, too strong, better conditioned and better schooled in their shared craft. Trinidad had always been a powerful puncher but because of it he became someone who’s other skills remained under developed, especially defensively.

As a welterweight and junior middleweight champion he went down more than a few times but was always able to get up and make his opponent pay dearly for damaging him. But nothing he landed against Jones seemed to affect the older man after the first few rounds. The same could not be said for Trinidad, who from the moment where Jones first drilled him with two hard combinations in Round 6, fought a fight for survival not victory.

“He took a lot of hard punches,’’ Jones (52-4, 38 KO) said. “Everyone said we were too old but we had a great fight. I can’t believe he stayed in there 12 rounds with me.’’

The fact that Trinidad did said as much about how diminished Jones is as it did of the courage of the former welterweight champion. Once there was a time, five or six years ago, that Roy Jones would never have let Trinidad off the hook after dropping him in both the seventh and 10th rounds. Though overly cautious much of his career, Jones was a great finisher because he had the quickness to leap on an addled opponent and batter him with flurries so fast people at ringside couldn’t see them coming much better than his woozy opponent could.

But though his hand speed still exceeded Trinidad’s Saturday night it was not the machine-gun fire it once had been. Now it was more like a powder-and-musket attack, still lethal but requiring more time to lock, load and land.

Both had come to the Garden willing to do the best they could though and had they never been what they once were what they accomplished would have been satisfying to the 12,161 who gathered at the Garden to observe them. But these fighters were once Titans, as promoter Don King kept insisting for weeks, and that was the problem. Now they are not even titans.

Jones clearly hammered out a unanimous decision by dominating the final seven rounds though, with judges Nelson Vasquez and Tom Kaczmarek seeing him a 116-110 winner while Julie Lederman took it a step further and scored the bout 117-109, meaning she gave only one round to the shadow of what Trinidad has become.

Yet as one watched Jones’ superiority in size and speed one unmistakably had to see that the assault on Trinidad in rounds seven and 10 would have gotten Jones off his shift early not so many years ago because he would have finished the job right then.

“I tried to put him away a few times but he slipped a lot of my good punches,’’ Jones admitted, perhaps forgetting this was the kind of thing that never used to happen to him. “I felt like I was missing knocking him out by inches. He’s got a pretty hard head.’’

Once Jones was sure of his size and strength advantages the concreteness of his opponent’s cranium mattered little to him and he opened up and took over the evening, knocking Trinidad down with that right to the temple in the seventh round and then with a quick, straight left in Round 10 that slammed into the middle of Trinidad’s face and creased his features, sending him down on the seat of his pants.

“Roy Jones was very fast,’’ Trinidad (42-3, 35 KO) said. “He fought a good fight. I take nothing away from Roy but I took off two years and eight months. If I could have avoided the knockdowns I think I would have won the fight.’’

Trinidad then said the required “I have no excuses’’ after having just made them. The real point is that the layoff was not the problem. The problem was that his speed and legs are gone and he could never match firepower with bigger men like Bernard Hopkins or Winky Wright, who both beat him up worse than Jones.

Once Jones knew was on relatively safe ground he began to go after Trinidad more forcefully, a fact made clear by the edge in power punches thrown by both according to CompuBox’s statistics (97-52) over the final seven rounds. In the first five, those numbers were nearly even, but when Jones began to step up his pressure and close in Trinidid could not rely any longer on the punching power that had made him one of the more feared knockout artists in the history of the welterweight division.

That was 23 pounds and nearly eight years ago, which is a lifetime in boxing, so by the final rounds, a beleaguered Trinidad faced a difficult choice. He could take a great risk and try to land the kind of left hooks that won for him on so many nights in his youth or he could accept the reality of what he no longer seemed to be and box only to survive. In the end, that was the choice he made and, frankly, who could blame him?

As the fight wore on and Jones began to realize Trinidad could not hurt him nor contend with his strength, he inexorably closed in like a shark but not a ravenous one. The more he moved in, the less Trinidad threw to his body as he had done effectively in the first half of the fight, perhaps calculating like an insurance adjuster the risk-reward ratio and opting to avoid the inherent dangers. But the less he threw the more he got hit until boom! – he was down.

Round 7 seemed to be going along fairly quietly until with about 90 seconds to go Jones unleashed a short right hand to the temple that landed flush. Trinidad backed up two steps and then suddenly dropped straight to his knees without Jones moving a step closer to him. Trinidad seemed shaken as he watched Mercante count. He slowly pushed himself up and worked his way through the rest of the round without further damage but Jones had seen what he’d been waiting more than half the fight to be sure of. He was on safe ground with the smaller man.

Clearly more sure of himself, Jones began to potshot Trinidad, snapping his head back with a quick left uppercut late in Round 9 and then coming back with a rapid-fire left-right combination that left Jones smiling again as the bell sounded.

He had reason to smile all the more by the time the bell tolled to end the next round for he had again caught Trinidad with a hard left jab that drove the former welterweight backwards and then down on the seat of his pants so quickly that the right Jones threw behind it missed the target, although at first it didn’t seem so. That was only because Trinidad went backwards like an out of control school kid wearing sneakers with roller blade wheels on them.

Again he was up quickly but with two rounds to go, Trinidad had fallen so far behind he had to put himself at further risk to punch his way back into the fight against an opponent who was both stronger and quicker. As the final bell sounded Trinidad sat on his stool with the grim look of a man who knew how this was going to end and uncertain whether to try to avoid it at great risk or content himself with accepting defeat.

In the end, Felix Trinidad chose the latter. He boxed the last round not to lose on the floor rather than trying to win on his feet. There was no shame in choosing to avoid the indignity of a third trip to the canvas or worse but it was not a decision he would have had to face only a few years back.

As for Roy Jones, he said again after the fight that he can beat “110 per cent of the champions out there’’ if properly motivated. He insisted he would travel to Wales soon to challenge super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe, the kind of overseas trip he was never willing to make when he was in his prime and the undefeated light heavyweight champion, Dariusz Michalczewski, lurked and longed for him in Germany.

In his youth Jones was not willing to challenge Michalczewski or anyone else in their own arena but old age fools many of us into thinking we still are what we used to be. Saturday night in New York it appeared to Jones that nothing had changed but appearances can be deceiving. Fortunately for him. Felix Trinidad could not be.

“A lot of people thought I was done, but I’m still capable of doing a lot of things,’’ Jones said. “I’m capable of beating anyone I get my mind right for. I’ll fight anyone, anywhere, anytime.’’

If Roy Jones, Jr. really means that one thing is sure. Before too long he’ll leave the ring looking like Felix Trinidad, forlorn and fearsome no longer.