I have always been more interested in the way a fighter loses a bout than in the glory that goes to the winner. A losing boxer is, perhaps more than any other athlete in any other sport, exposed and embarrassed in a visceral, humiliating way. And so it was last Saturday that Roy Jones, Jr., once the best boxer in the world, submitted himself to a beating at the hands of light heavyweight champion Joe Calzaghe, a cocky Welshman known for his rapid-fire assault that overwhelms opponents not through power–most of his punches are really just slaps–but rather a kind of accumulation of indignities, as his opponent is hit over and over and over and over again until he does not know what to do about it any more.
Against the 39-year-old Jones however, Calzaghe’s punches seemed more than slaps–by the middle rounds they had opened an ugly cut over Jones’s left eye that kept spraying blood across his face and down his chest, minute after minute, round after round. Jones’s cutman was unable to do anything with the cut–all the normal tricks failed to work. It was perhaps after the ninth or tenth round that Jones was heard to ask the men in his corner, innocently, as if a child, “Is there any way to make it stop bleeding?” No, there wasn’t. But to his credit, Jones kept going out into the ring and taking another beating. It was clear he had no shot at stopping Calzaghe, who was well ahead on the scorecards and too fast for Jones to handle, but he went out anyway, to take more punishment, until the bell mercifully tolled at the end of the twelfth and final round, and the 36-year-old Calzaghe was declared the winner by three judges who all marked the bout 118-109 for the younger man.
Calzaghe acted like an arrogant schoolboy throughout the fight, in a reprise of the role Jones used to play when he was in his prime. But Jones, unlike Calzaghe, was good at looking cocky, whereas Calzaghe simply looked absurd, as if he were caricaturing himself. So he wiggled his shoulders, shook his butt, mimicked Jones’s style of fighting with one forearm raised at a perpendicular angle to his elbow. Perhaps this is just Calzaghe’s way of expressing the joy he experiences in conducting his business in the ring, but I suspect to most of the non-partisans in attendance it was severely off-putting. The only joy the Calzaghe haters got came in the first round, when Jones floored Calzaghe with a straight jab followed by an awkward punch that connected Jones’s forearm to Calzaghe’s face, sending the Welshman to the canvas and, momentarily, into a stupor that seemed to hold out hope that Jones could finish off his opponent early.
But the killer instincts of a finisher that Jones once possessed, many, many years ago, long before he was beaten twice by Antonio Tarver and once by Glen Johnson, were clearly gone. In truth, Jones had just gotten lucky with that first round punch, and all that was left after that was for the business of boxing to commence. And in that contest, Calzaghe was the quicker, stronger, and more skilled man. Jones looked every part the shot fighter who should retire rather than subject himself to any further beatings of this kind in the ring.
This is my card. Out of pity I gave Jones three rounds. In reality he won two rounds at the most, and probably, only one. It was not even remotely close.
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