Struggling to place Roy Jones Jr...

Depends on your criteria. If we're looking at achievements your rankings look quite right to me, but if we're looking at how dominant his performances were in the ring he should be higher. I've never seen anyone look a level above his opponents like he did during his quite long prime. On the other hand, there are some names missing of guys I'd like to have seen him face. No matter if he was to blame or not for them not happening, the fact of the matter is that they didn't happen.

But how he handled fighters like Johnson, Hill, Griffith, Ruiz and Toney... It was like they didn't belong in the same ring. And even though the fight with Hopkins was more competitive, Bernard wouldn't be as clearly beaten again until he was 47 years old.

There's going to come lots of posts about how Hopkins was green as a baby pup, how Toney was drained like a dried up turnip and the rest were utter crap - but the fact is that prime Jones was an extraordinary fighter. Likely among the best to ever lace them up.

 

Name me the other 19 you have ahead of him at MW, please.

 

I usually place him in the "china chin fraud" or "total bum" categories.

Today, I'll settle for "great fighter".

 

I think this is a good ranking. He has some good names in his resume and was completely dominant during his prime

 

Pound for pound, I’d probably put Jones inside my top twenty. Had he retired at a better time, he might well have been higher. I’ve got a top ten, maybe dozen or so that I’m pretty happy with, but after that it’s nigh-on impossible. There are about forty guys who I could think were dead certs for those top twenty spots on any given day, but Jones is one I’d always make room for.

I tend not to bother rating him all-time as a 160 pounder in terms of accomplishments. He just wasn’t there for long enough. I do, however, think he’s a head-to-head monster at the weight and I’d start absolutely no Middleweight in history better than 50:50 against him.

Looks as if I rate him a fair bit higher than you as a 175 pounder, though. For me, he definitely belongs in the all-time top ten there. Not quite top five – Charles, Moore, Spinks, Tunney and Foster are pretty much immovable in my opinion – but I think he’s next cab off the rank.

His record perhaps doesn’t quite match his phenomenal talent – BUT! Just because others have deeper resumes, it doesn’t mean that Jones’ resume is a shallow one in its own right. More to the point, that’s more a reflection of just how awesomely talented and dominant he was.

 

I am not going to discredit a fighter for not quitting at the right time. That is just bad career management. Jones was 35 when he first lost. If we are going to count those losses against him, we must count Langford's and Charles' and Duran's against them, also. We must also consider that other greats such as Dempsey and Marciano and Leonard were retired (or essentially so) by that age. He hung on too long; he did not suddenly get "exposed" after 14 years in the pro game.

If we look at what Jones actually accomplished in the first 14 years of his career it's pretty stunning. How many rounds did he even lose? Meanwhile, he beats two of the best fighters of his generation in Hopkins and Toney, and some guys on the next level but still very high in Johnson, McCallum, Hill, Griffin and Tarver and caps it with grabbing a belt way out of this weight class at heavy. And he didn't just win these fights, he was blowing these people away.

To put into comparison (and I am not picking on Jack here just contrasting) did Dempsey, universally rated top 10 ATG heavyweight, ever beat anyone on the corresponding level of a Toney or Hopkins? Did his resume have the depth of quality or longevity that Jones' possessed?

 

Fair play, but I think Roy spanks many on that list.

 

Agreed.

ATG MW
GOAT @ SMW
ATG @ LHW
HW Champ

All of that in fourteen years is phenomenal.

Had he retired in '03 we would have been calling him the GOAT.

 

Exactly. People were including him in that conversation at that time. Even if I think that is misguided to an extent, that was the perception.

 

He has the deepest resume of any fighter since 1960. And in terms of DOMINANCE winning rounds the only fighter even close is Vitali Klitschko. In Roy's first 49 fights he lost fewer than 25 rounds.

 

I have him top 3 p4p and number 1 LHW.

 

GOAT