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

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