FROM INVINCIBLE TO VULNERABLE
After his 1947 outing against Jersey Joe Walcott, Joe Louis lamented, “I saw openings I couldn’t use. A man gets old; he don’t take advantage of those things as fast as he used to.” Louis was 33 years old at the time. When Roy Jones stepped into the ring for his second fight against Antonio Tarver, he was 35.
ON May 15, 2004, Roy Jones and Antonio Tarver met in the ring at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas in a rematch of their November 8, 2003, encounter.
Jones had burst upon the scene as a 19-year-old prodigy at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and been widely recognised as the best fighter in the world for a decade. Boxing’s pound-for-pound rankings were divided into two categories – Jones and everyone else.
Jones at his peak gave the impression of being able to ride bareback on a tornado without wrinkling his gleaming satin trunks. He fought championship-calibre opposition and, at times, made boxing look like a game instead of the brutal competition that it is. He was one of the most gifted fighters of our time.
Boxing legacies are written in the ring. Jones won his first world title by beating Bernard Hopkins and his second by outclassing James Toney. He won belts against opponents whose weight ranged from 160 to 226 pounds and, during the course of his career, defeated 17 men who held alphabet titles. The sole blemish on his resumé at the time he fought Tarver was a loss by disqualification against Montell Griffin in 1997. Four months later, he knocked Griffin out in the first round.
Jones had his critics. Great fights are marked by a dramatic ebb and flow. And
