Roy Jones Fall From Grace - Never Saw Anything Like It ..

To this day I find it hard to believe .. just how far Roy fell, how nasty were his KO losses and why he kept fighting as long as he did .. from 1988 to 2003 Jones was one of the greatest fighters in the history of the sport but man when he lost it he lost so definitively and far more often than he should have gone on .. it is pretty inexplicable ..

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When you get ko’d like Roy did you lose that aura of invincibility. Makes winning much harder, his chin was cracked on top of it.

 

Me too....only thing you can compare it to...is the most beautiful young woman...who is also a banker at goldman sachs comes from a good family.....has turned her nose up at every handsome eligible batchelor...until she is engaged to one....who than meets a lowlife ugly criminal hustler....breaks the engagement...throws it away to become a abused junkie........as,much as it pains,me to say it...thats been the decline of jones jnr in the ring....

Still an ATG...incredible man....and my metaphor is a gross exaggeration......a crude possibly offensive one i confess ....but its the only way i can express how mind boggling it was to see Roy fight on so long and get knocked out so often... when for 15 years he was de facto a unbeaten 50-0 gold medalist...who acted like it all came too easy and he didnt really want to box ...ffs he played in a semi pro basketball game hours before a fight!!

But life goes on.....even Madonna grew old....Roys still rich,Hes still Roy ....Hes still a superstar looks a million bucks...and he left with his faculties.....his legacy is as one of the greatest boxers ever ..in another 20 years the decline will be forgot ten just like ray robinsons was

 

I am completely baffled myself. He was head and shoulders above his comp. But the decline was instant. And to Tarver? I'm still clinging to the lost rapid weight theory.

 

Yeah it is unprecedented. Up until the 2nd Tarver fight in mid-May of 2004 people were predicting that he would do to Tarver in that rematch what he did to Montell Griffin in their second fight. I saw numerous people predicting a kayo in the first or second round.

Flash forward 4 months to September and he's been knocked out twice in a row. He's just been body-bagged by Glen Johnson and Jim Lampley is looking into the camera, more or less pleading for him to retire.

In May 2004 many people have him in their Top 10 boxers of all time (seems crazy now, but it's true). After 3 more fights, by 2006 people are holding their breath, praying that he can take a decision win in a fight with Prince Badi Ajamu in Boise Idaho. Crazy

 

I think what's more surprising is how long Jones hung around despite having nothing left, which gave his critics so many chances to be smug and talk about how he'd been 'exposed' and suchlike.

Jones was threatening retirement as far back as 1997, citing a lack of exciting opponents, the personal and time pressures of boxing, wanting to do other things etc. Fair enough, at that point it was probably just hot air and a way of voicing some of his frustrations, but after beating Ruiz in 2003 he reiterated that he was very close to the end of the line and was lacking the motivation to continue, unless there was enough money in a Tyson fight. He felt he didn't really have anything to prove anymore.

Given all this, you'd think that after Johnson had proved that the first Tarver loss was no fluke, Jones would have been straight out the door, as he'd had one eye on retirement while he was on top, never mind getting flattened by guys of a similar calibre to those who he was humiliating for more than a decade beforehand. Yet in terms of time elapsed, his post-2004 career was nearly as long as what came before. He must have known that he was in some way jeopardising his legacy in some quarters, or at least sullying the memory of his glorious prime, yet he couldn't let it go, despite him always claiming he'd be out of the sport at the right time, still on top. Turned out to be the complete opposite.

 

Sometimes it just goes..... Whatever that "it" was.
But especially fighters who's style are built around
physical ability/reflexes opposed to sound boxing skills.
It's a millisecond difference from making someone miss
completely and getting ko'ed.

Jones also placed a great strain on his body by gaining
almost twenty pounds to fight Ruiz at heavyweight, than
immediately dropping back down to fight at Lt.heavy.
This is the point in his career it seemed to go off the
rails for him, he loss that millisecond difference
and began to get ko'ed.

 

Jones Jr was an ATG but you can see from this video how weak his fundementals were

 

Roy had perhaps the best natural speed and reflexes of his generation at his weights as well as the highest ring IQ .. he was also as superbly conditioned as any fighter .. all of these added to possibly covering the fact that maybe he didn't take the worlds greatest punch ... as he became weight drained and honestly using who knows what to aid him in doing so, he also may have drained his ability to absorb punches .. whatever it was unlike a Robinson or an Ali who went on way too long after their naturals gifts diminished, Roy didn't just lose he got flattened five or six times like John Tate did against Weaver and then Berbick ..

 

I can’t find the video but I remember E. Steward saying Jones Jr went back to sparring and then an actual boxing match way too soon after his knock out loss to Tarver. Basically when you get knocked out twice in a row in a short span of time, Steward said the fighter and specifically their brain lose the ability to take a punch. I believe this is what happened to Roy.

 

It may have been sudden. But he was old and had been around for years.
Barring a 4 month period after he was DQ'd against Griffin, he was a world champion (across several divisions) for 11 straight years.
He was 35 years old and had been a pro for 15 years when he was KO'd by Tarver.

 

Exactly, Chris. Given his seeming indifference to the game when he was on top, he didn't strike me as someone who would hang around that long after slipping. That's actually the thing that shocked me more than the Tarver loss, the willingness to go on for so long after he lost it. Weird.

 

I have never seen anything like it, either.

 

What is even weirder is he fought for another 15 years AFTER he faced Tarver the first time.

The second 15 years of his career all but erased his accomplishments from the first.

 

Yeah, his continuing his career for so many years as a 'shot fighter' reduced to a sideshow third-rater picking up losses is definitely something I would never imagined in his prime.