The winding backroad out of Pensacola, through farmland and featureless
countryside, leads to a secluded 88-acre ranch, with woods and ponds on the
perimeter and dozens of small cages holding roosters – roundheads, hatches,
stags, fighting birds – at the rear of the house. Out of one of the barns
adjacent to a small basketball court a burly, black farmhand carrying
hedge-clippers and wearing a red polo shirt, blue dungarees and a sceptical
expression approaches. “Mister, you show up here carrying no credentials,
saying you’re somebody, but how the hell do I know who you are?” he says,
his threatening demeanour a further sign that, although this is the state of
Florida, culturally and in every other way we are actually in Mississippi
Delta country – rural, racially segregated in parts and less than 50 miles
from the border with Alabama.
“Hey, what’s goin’ on, man?” Roy Jones Jr shouts over as he emerges out of the
back door of his old, southern-style home, one of several he owns in and
around his hometown, instantly persuading the hired help to return in
silence to the barn. Lean and casually attired, Jones extends a welcoming
hand before hoisting himself on to the bonnet of his Bentley, which is
parked alongside a Rolls-Royce and a Hummer, some of the trappings of
success for a boxer who appeared to be invincible through much of the 1990s
and in the early years of this decade when he completed his rise from world
champion at middleweight (11st 6lb) to become World Boxing Association
heavyweight titleholder. Then, twice in 2004 he was shockingly knocked out
by fellow Florida residents Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson and his great
career appeared to be over. But in boxing, a fighter’s name can mean more
than his current form, so the pugilistic prince of Wales, Joe Calzaghe, is
courting Jones for a possible career-ending showdown in November at
Cardiff’s Millennium stadium.
“Joe’s open to travelling again because he said [after defeating Bernard
Hopkins last weekend in Las Vegas] that he wants to fight at Madison Square
Garden in New York,” says Jones. “I would love to fight in Wales, but
whoever offers the best deal is where we’re goin’ to go.”
Ross Greenburg, president of HBO Sports, the American cable TV network that is
a key player in making boxing’s biggest bouts happen, met Jones in Vegas to
discuss a prospective deal. The two fighters and their respective camps have
also talked.
“I saw Joe as a potential opponent a long time ago,” Jones reveals. “But I had
my eyes on higher things, such as winning the heavyweight title, so it was
nothing against Joe, I love everything about him. He’s a fun guy, an
entertaining guy, a good person. We took some pictures together with his
sons after the fight on Saturday and we’ve talked on the phone.
“Look, boxing is business. When I was the best pound-for-pound boxer in the
world [between 1994 and 2003] it wouldn’t have been smart for me to go and
fight Joe. You don’t go to somebody else when you’re the best, they must
come to you, so I wouldn’t take the risk, and why would I? Why would I meet
that challenge when I’m already the best? Why would I go to your country and
give you a chance to allow the powers that be to take a close decision and
give it to you?
“Right now this is the best fight out there, better than the Oscar De La Hoya
v Floyd Mayweather rematch [scheduled tentatively for September] because we
all know what the outcome of that fight is going to be – another win for
Floyd. You don’t know the outcome of this fight, however, so it’s a fight
people are going to want to see. There’s suspense, and that’s what makes for
a big fight.”
At 39 years old, however, far removed from his best, Jones has no need to
enlist in another war, so why is he doing it? A payday worth as much as £10m
beckons, but he has earned an estimated £65m already in his 19-year
professional career. Money cannot be his only motivation, for he has enough
to fund a record label, Body Head Entertainment, for which he has cut his
own rap and hip-hop albums, including a debut single called Y’all Must’ve
Forgot, containing lyrics such as: “I’m getting sick of this/Y’all critics
can kiss where the sun don’t shine.”
He cruises around P-Cola (how locals refer to their town) in his Bentley or in
the back of a pimped-up limousine. If he wants to play basketball out of
town, he will charter a jet, as he used to do regularly when he played for
the semi-pro Lakeland Blue Ducks in the United States Basketball League
(USBL). Once he played 15 minutes in a USBL game for the Jacksonville
Barracudas, scoring six points, before going on to stop Canadian opponent
Eric Lucas in the 12th round that night at the Jacksonville Coliseum in an
International Boxing Federation super-middleweight title defence, fuelling
the feeling that his love for fist-fighting was ephemeral. Maybe he was not
in love with boxing at all.
Yet, having suffered three defeats in his past six bouts, he is preparing to
challenge an unbeaten two-weight world champion regarded by some observers
as, pound for pound, the sport’s best exponent behind Mayweather. Gazing
into the distance, Jones considers this anomaly. He was born and raised in a
trailer in these woods alongside his brother and three sisters and he has
never lived anywhere else, so his whole outlook on life remains rooted to
this closeted environment. “I’m a country boy,” he says proudly. “Growing
up, I had hogs, cows and dogs, too, though I never fought dogs, despite what
some people say [Jones took legal counsel recently when the New York Daily
News ran a story in which he allegedly admitted to allowing the pit bulls he
breeds on his property to fight]. Not once in my life did I fight dogs. I
just couldn’t stomach a real dogfight. I’d be crying because my heart is too
soft for that. My pit bulls (he has 50 of them) are more for show, they’re
not the kind for dogfighting. You see them get into it sometimes and they do
go at it hard, but I would never like to watch that.
“But these here chickens [more than 1,200 in total], my dad had them when I
was five and I’ve raised them since I was 12 years old, watched them develop
a pecking order and learnt a lot about fighting from them, the way they take
care of themselves, the way they approach the battle, the way they are
willing to fight to the end. That never-give-up attitude taught me so much
about the fight game. I learnt what separates the good from the bad. Some of
them can hit hard, some throw one punch and some throw a lot of punches
which aren’t that effective, but the good ones can do it all. Cockfighting
never was legal in Florida, so I used to go to Louisiana [where the state
legislature will proscribe cockfighting and the possession of chickens for
the purpose of cockfighting from August 15, 2008] to take my chickens to
compete.
“I got more nervous and more excited for my roosters fighting than I ever did
before stepping into the ring myself. I’d train them and I’d give them
names, all kinds of names, maybe basketball names like Larry Bird or
celebrity names and superstars because of someone they reminded me of. Man,
I used to take it really serious, but it was also the most fun thing I used
to do, the best high in life I would get, preparing my chickens to dance or
fight. In a cockfight, if you want your chicken to live, you have to hope
that he wins because these birds will fight with their dying breath. Just
like me and Joe, if we get in the ring together, one of us has got to go.
That’s just how it is because this is the life we chose.”
He betrays not a trace of guilt about his participation in cockfighting. “Let
me tell you something, I didn’t get into gang fights when I was a kid and I
didn’t bother with drugs because I got such an adrenaline rush out of the
time I spent with my chickens,” he insists. “That’s what kept me out of
trouble. I was in ninth grade the first time a kid introduced me to cocaine
and I tried to kill him because I chose to raise my chickens. Now it ain’t
politically correct no more, but I would much rather have my kids competing
with their chickens than fighting among themselves, especially the way kids
can’t fight today without using a knife or a gun.
“Are the people who run this country doing anything about that? No, but
they’re banning something that comes as naturally to a chicken as breathing,
and meanwhile they’re sending 18 and 19-year-old kids to war, training them
to be assassins and killers and people are dying and we ain’t really sure
what it’s all about.”
But his ambivalence about boxing opens up a window into a complex mind. Long
before he looked like a shot fighter on the night that Johnson put him on
the floor for 20 minutes with a single overhand right to the head in round
nine, Jones was a ruthless amalgam of fluent footwork and blazing hand
speed. He was 34-0 with 29 stoppages before he suffered his first defeat by
disqualification in 1996 when he punched a defenceless Montell Griffin after
he had floored him. In their rematch five months later, he knocked Griffin
out cold in the first round.
But his stomach for the fight was deeply affected by the brain injury suffered
by his friend, Gerald McClellan, in a fateful bout in 1995 in London against
Nigel Benn. They fought together as amateurs and they talked frequently but
Jones has never been able to bring himself to visit McClellan in the
darkened room in which he spends his days in Illinois, blind and requiring
round-the-clock care provided by his two sisters.
“Me and Gerald, we were very close and we kept up with one another’s career,
so I felt really bad about what happened to him,” Jones says. “I never went
to see him even though I talked to him and sent him money for his kids, the
reason being I’ve got a soft heart and, as a fighter, that would ruin me. I
just couldn’t see him like he is.
“As you start getting older, you realise that what happened in my losses
against Tarver [who knocked him out in the second round] and Johnson can
happen to you the first time you step inside a ring or it can happen the
91st time. If something like that happens to your friend, it’s going to
register, but a boxer has to blank out the risk. When I fought Vinny
Pazienza I really felt bad because I thought I might have reinjured his neck.
“At one point I was fighting Bryant Brannon and I tried to get the referee to
stop the fight before I put him down because I didn’t want to hurt him. The
referee said, ‘No, go ahead’, so I put him down and said, ‘See, I told you
to stop it before I did that to him’. I don’t want to hurt nobody. I knew I
had those guys. When I fought Pazienza [four months after Benn-McClellan] I
cried in the ring because I was scared that I had hurt the dude [after
stopping him in the sixth round with a battery of blows to the head]. But
for myself, I’m scared of nothing.
“I see what’s happened to Muhammad Ali because of the accumulation of punches
he took over the years. Me and Joe, we got 25 years each in boxing, maybe
we’ve taken too many already. When I fought Felix Trinidad [in January] the
HBO guys asked me, ‘Say we took away your two knockout losses and we also
took away the heavyweight title, would you do the same thing again?’ I told
them I would because I wanted to make history. That’s what I want to do now
against Joe Calzaghe, win the world super-middleweight title after having
won the heavyweight title. Not even Bob Fitzsimmons [the only other
middleweight, light-heavyweight and heavyweight titleholder] could do that.”
The hard edge remains in his voice, but the lustre that once surrounded Jones
has faded, some of it eroded by a positive test for the anabolic steroid,
androstenedione, which was discovered in his system after a
light-heavyweight title defence in 2000 against another American, Richard
Hall. Shortly after the result became public knowledge, Jones’s career
nosedived with those successive defeats by Tarver and Johnson.
In his autobiography, No Ordinary Joe, Calzaghe asked the question, “Was it
age or coincidence? All of a sudden he fell from the Premier League to
League Two, from being absolutely peerless to distinctly average.”
But Jones maintains his innocence in the matter. “I took an over-the-counter
product called ‘ripped fuel’ which I didn’t know was illegal,” he says.
“Unlike other sports, there has never been a proscribed list distributed by
any of the boxing authorities,” he says. “So the problem is that you don’t
know what you can or can’t take, and sometimes there can be something
contained in cold medicine which can show up in a test. I have the worst
sinuses in the world, so now I write everything down.
“But I’m no cheat. If I was going to cheat, it would have been when I was
moving up to heavyweight, trying to gain all those pounds, but I didn’t fail
a drugs test then because I didn’t take anything. I stopped taking ‘ripped
fuel’ because that was the problem, I believe. I don’t even take the natural
herbal stuff because you just don’t know any more.”
Whatever the truth, Jones’s abilities as a boxer have been damaged more by the
passage of time. His reflexes are no longer razor-sharp and the damage he
inflicted on Trinidad for 12 rounds was an illusion, for the Puerto Rican’s
decline was precipitated by a brutal beating he sustained against Hopkins in
2001.
“Joe says this could be his last fight and it may be mine, too. It just
depends how it turns out,” Jones claims. “I’ll miss it, the preparation,
getting myself together and going in front of the crowd to perform. All of
that will definitely be missed.”
He looks across to the roosters in their cages, tugging at their leather
leashes and staring at each other through bloodless eyes, oblivious to the
fact that their fighting days are over. Just like Jones.
He wasn’t known as the best fighter in the world for nothing . . .
- As an amateur, Roy Jones ended his career with a 121-13 win-loss record. He
represented the United States at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, where he won
the silver medal despite outclassing his Korean opponent in the final - the
three judges who voted against him were later suspended and Park Si-Hun, who
was awarded the gold, apologised to Jones. The Olympics adopted a new
scoring system as a result of the fi asco involving Jones
- In his prime, he was widely regarded as the best pound-for-pound boxer on
the planet. Now aged 39, he was named Fighter of the Decade for the 1990s by
the Boxing Writers Association of America. He captured IBF world titles at
middleweight, super-middleweight and light-heavyweight, and won the WBA
heavyweight title in his only fi ght in this weight class. He also held the
WBC, WBA, IBF, IBO, NBA, WBF and IBA light-heavyweight titles at the same
time
- Jones has had 56 professional fights, winning 52, 38 by knockout, and losing
four times. His first defeat came against Montell Griffi n in March 1997.
Jones was disqualified for hitting Griffin while his opponent was on the floor.
In their rematch, Jones knocked him out in the first round
- He was unbeaten again until May 2004. Jones suffered a TKO in the second
round against Antonio Tarver, whom he had beaten a year earlier in a
controversial points decision. Jones lost the light-heavyweight title and
would go on to lose his next fight to Glen Johnson when he was knocked out in
the ninth round
- Since those defeats, Jones has only fought three times, beating Prince Badi
Ajamu in July 2006, Anthony Hanshaw in July 2007 and Felix Trinidad in
January this year. He won them all on points. He has also released a couple
of rap albums and appeared in several movies, including The Devil’s Advocate
and The Matrix Reloaded, alongside Keanu Reeves
