There was nothing illusory about Jones’ performance but in truth, the entire night was an illusion. -Wally Matthews

I start with the above quote because ole Wally’s column today in Newsday is about the only beacon of sanity in a veritable ocean of platitudes that is today’s media coverage of Roy Jones’ defeat of Felix Trinidad last night. Everywhere else it’s “dominant” and “rejuvenated” and “classy” of all things, that last one from the BBC who should know better.

Even Manny Steward was celebrating Roy’s “rejuvenation” last night, going so far as to say that based on this performance he thought Roy would be a tough match-up for Joe Calzaghe. The Welshman now seems to be the desired next opponent for Roy, either after a Calzaghe/Hopkins fight or if the deal on the table for that bout falls through.

What I have to say to this is… ahem… has everyone gone insane? Does anyone remember what Calzaghe did to Mikkel Kessler just three short months ago? The level at which that Calzaghe/Kessler fight was contested was so much higher than what we witnessed last night as to make Jones/Trinidad seem like an exhibition sparring tour. I guarantee you this – the Kessler that Calzaghe beat in November would have knocked out either of last night’s principals in under five rounds.

Boxing is a strange sport when it comes to the comparative assessment of ability at any given moment. There is no league, no truly effective and untainted ratings system, no scientific way of telling the Devil Rays from the Yankees until they’re actually in the ring together. This is why the Jeff Lacy’s and Jean Pascal’s of the world look like fire-breathing dragon-slayers right up until the moment that they’re exposed as frauds. Any fighter, no matter how dubious his talent, can look like a champion in the ring just so long as the man he’s fighting is an infinitely more dubious talent.

Along this line of thinking, let me point out to those of you who doubt it that Tito Trinidad is shot. Even as far as nostalgia goes, I’d say that in his prime he was pretty heavily overrated, and I write that with full disclosure that I was always a Tito fan. Last night he admirably mustered up a pretty good imitation of his former self for about three rounds, but even that was more illusion than rejuvenation. His punches were wide and inaccurate. He didn’t have anywhere near the handspeed required to counterpunch effectively and find openings in Roy’s defense, so most of his blows were big, telegraphed shots to Roy’s gloves and forearms. And those rare blows that did find their mark clearly had next to nothing on them. For evidence of that, all you needed to do was take note of the man who was walking through them unfazed. Roy Jones is known for a lot of things, but taking hard punches well is not one of them.

Honestly, I didn’t realize it until I actually had the thing in front of me, but all that last night’s fiasco really boiled down to was a freakin MASTER job of matchmaking for Roy Jones Incorporated. Felix Trinidad is a mythical figure with an unshakable hold on the passions of Puerto Ricans and the fascination of fight fans. He’s also a slow, easy target of an all-but-retired fighter with nothing left in the tank boxing almost twenty pounds above his best weight. I mean, how could Roy NOT look good in there? It was a brilliant make for his cause and it has the nefarious genius of Don King written all over it.

That said, I still balk at the idea that Roy looked good. He’s ridiculously stationary now, for one thing. He absorbed a lot of leather from Tito, especially in the early rounds, and even though he blocked most of it, the mere fact of the ease with which Tito hit him does not bode well for him stepping off the senior tour. On the whole, I thought he fought at about the same level that he did in his last bout against Tony Hanshaw, and on that score, let me make another observation – I’m fairly confident that Tony Hanshaw also would have beaten Felix Trinidad last night.

Basically, I’m in complete agreement with Wally Matthews’ concise assessment of the affair – the entire night was an illusion. If you’re listening, Roy, I say call up William Joppy, or Gatti, or Vargas, or… Christ what is Macho Camacho doing these days? I heard Prince Naseem blew up to about 180 in jail. See if he needs some money. In short, find yourself another Tito, Roy. Because man, if you dare to stray from the nostalgia dream junket and venture into the cold hard reality of Reality, I promise you it’s gonna be ugly. Real ugly.

The match last night between Fed and Janko Tipsarevic was simply unbelievable, and immediately qualified for Large’s All-Time “I Cannot Believe That What I Am Watching Now Is Actually Happening” List.

Had Tipsy managed to pull it out in the end, I think it would have cracked my top five, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. For posterity’s sake, however, I thought I should record my top five as it stands right now. Not a lot of the big three on this list sports-wise, because with baseball, basketball and football, that “any given Sunday” vibe is omnipresent, particularly in the playoffs, and staves off the total realization of surreal shock-osity that I’m talking about here. The general criteria for making this list… ah, you know, I’ll just give you the stupid list. You’ll figure it out:

5. Holyfield/Tyson I, 1996
I watched this at a bar in Ridley close to where my parents live. I’ll never forget it for two reasons – there was a karaoke contest going on behind us fight-watchers that drove the cigar-chompers at the bar bonkers (the winner, I recall, did a particularly wrought, and loud, version of Heart’s “Alone”) and I won about $150 in the bar-pool because I had Holyfield in a stoppage after 10 (even back then, Large could prognosticate). But that was a wager – I still couldn’t quite believe it when I saw it. Buster always felt like a fluke (and believe me, the Douglas fight would be #1 on this list if I had seen it live) but this was clearly no fluke. Holyfield had no fear of Tyson whatsoever and completely exposed him. The Iron Mike mystique disappeared in the course of a single fight, and it was literally hard to comprehend.

4. Bob May v. Tiger Woods, 2000 PGA
This may seem like a bizarre choice, but I tell you that watching it was truly surreal. You have to remember that this is back when Tiger was straight-up bubonic – he’d won three of the past four majors, won the British at St. Andrews by eight strokes, and the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach by 15. So then at Valhalla he goes into Sunday with a one-shot lead and a final-round pairing with an unknown duffer (who still to this day has not won a PGA event) and you’re thinking that the only reason to watch was to see how many records Tiger would break in pantsing the dude. Next thing you know a golf war breaks out, as Bob May matches The Anointed One stroke for stroke and ridiculous shot for ridiculous shot in what has to be one of the greatest Sunday two-man duels in major championship history. I must have said “who IS this guy?” about a hundred times that day. Of course, Tiger won it in the end in a playoff – it was a lot like last night’s match, really, only, you know, it was the final of a major and not the third-round.

3. Maria Sharapova v. Serena Williams, 2004 Wimbledon Final
This was a real head-shaker. I’d heard of Sharapova going in and heard all the talk. This wasn’t at all a Bob May situation – everybody knew Sharapova had serious game. But still, to see a seventeen-year-old blonde cheerleader bitchslapping Serena all over the court like she owned her was about the most shocking sight I’ve ever witnessed in a big-time tennis match. It was a true “there’s a new sheriff in town” moment of the highest order.

2. Villanova v. Georgetown, 1985 NCAA Final
There have been a lot of great college basketball upsets over the years, but this is still the one that sticks out in my mind, the one that I vividly remember watching and thinking “this just cannot be happening.” It had a heightened edge for me, because I grew up about ten minutes from Villanova and we always rooted for them like a home team. Even now, I feel like you can watch replays of that game and sort of feel like at any moment Ewing might take over and end the Cinderella bullshit once and for all. I remember reading afterwards someone writing “they could have played a hundred times and Georgetown would have won 99.” And I thought, “yeah, that sounds about right.”

1. Antonio Tarver v. Roy Jones, 2004
I know a lot of people will be surprised to see this at number one, but boxing fans will understand. After the Roy Jones decade that was the 90′s, the effortless destruction, the impossible hand-speed, the behind-the-back knockouts, the pure what-will-he-think-of-nextness of the man, to see the great Roy Jones floored with a single shot and then struggle helplessly to get to his feet with a completely stupified look on his face… it just did not seem real. While HBO ran the interminable replays I just paced around my living room with my hands on my head saying, “OH SHIT! OH SHIT! OH SHIT!” about a thousand times. I could not get my head around the fact of what I had seen. It’s funny, because then Johnson knocked Roy out and then he ran like a bitch in the third Tarver fight and still almost got knocked out, and so now when I watch Roy fight it always seems possible that he’ll hit the canvas. Back then, though, after everything he’d been and done, the man just seemed invincible. It was a mind-altering moment indeed.

I’m not going to bother bashing this fight any further. It’s happening, and I think we all have the same misgivings about the whole enterprise, but so be it. We could ignore it if we so chose, but we can’t. The mere fact that it includes two legends compels our attention. As so often in the past, once again Don King has us over a barrel. So… onward and downward we go.

The question mark here is Tito. We know roughly where Roy Jones is at, and it’s not a pretty place. His last fight was in July against Tony The Tiger Hanshaw, and he won a convincing decision after putting Hanshaw on the canvas in the 11th. But he also had problems with Tony, who is a talented but troubled fighter and right now far from A-list competition. In spots, Roy showed flashes of the old razzle-dazzle, but those flashes were few and far between, and even they revealed a fighter way past his prime. The power is mostly gone, the legs too, and so when the supernatural speed does emerge, it’s only for ineffectual and quickly exhausted spurts.

But, depending on what Tito brings to the table, those spurts could be enough for Roy to win a decision tomorrow night or even earn a stoppage should Tito prove not to have twelve rounds of giddy-up left in him. The Felix Trinidad that we saw (almost three years ago now) against Winky Wright was an utterly incompetent edition, and I say that even taking into account the fact that Winky will make even the best of them look awkward. Facing Wright, Trinidad was embarrassingly slow with both his body and his hands, so easy to slip, so difficult to miss. He looked like an amateur in there, and though one could take that as a clear sign that it was time for him to get out of the game for good, it’s not hard to imagine why he’s coming back to try and erase that humiliating performance from our memory.

So the question is… was the Wright fight a fluke, or was it a good representation of where the natural deterioration of his skills has left him? I must say, I’m more inclined to go with the latter. Even in his prime, it was never that difficult to hit Tito. It was just that to do it you had to risk getting hit by him, which back then was a tremendously unwelcome proposition. Also, Tito always was flummoxed with true, high-level boxers, guys who wouldn’t stand and trade with him and whose speed and know-how made them hard to trap. His two career losses are to Bernard and Winky, the two most savvy ring technicians of our time, and a third might-have-lost was Oscar, who boxed the shit out of Trinidad and made him look like a fool for a good eight rounds before taking to his bicycle.

Now I don’t for a second mean to imply that Roy has a Winky/Bernard type of performance left in his tank. But I do think he’s got enough to stay out of the way of a ring-rusty, lumbering Trinidad and land enough crowd-pleasing combos to win the fight easily on points. Yes, Roy’s chin is suspect, but then to my mind so is Tito’s power at 170. Given the Wright debacle, I even doubt his ability to connect with big power punches against a guy who is going to be safety-minded and on the move. Maybe Trinidad will surprise me and summon the fearsome focus and pop that built his legend, but I’m willing to bet against it. My rationale pretty much boils down to this – if they had fought in their primes (forgetting about the weight discrepancy) I think Roy would have had a pretty easy go of it with Tito. Extrapolating forward a decade or so and allowing for time’s inexorable logarithm of decline in both men, I see much the same result tomorrow night.

Prognositification? Roy Jones UD. Take it to the bank.

The rumors have been flying around for days, but now it seems like all that is left to be decided is the venue for the Oscar De La Hoya/Floyd Mayweather rematch. The date is going to be either the 13th or the 20th of September, with the Home Depot Center, the MGM Grand and Dodger Stadium all in the running as possible sites.

Bob Arum is the one who first leaked word of this abysmal development when he went public a few days ago to say that his fighter Miguel Cotto definitely would not be facing Oscar in May, because Oscar/Floyd II is nearing completion and Cotto did not figure in either fighter’s plans.

So what then does the future hold for Cotto? Margarito? Paul Williams? Not so fast smart guy. Try Alfonso Gomez. Or such is the rumor right now.

You know, much as it pains me, I can’t really blame Cotto. He had a hell of a 2007, fought Zab and Shane back to back, and that Shane fight was brutal. He’s earned himself a soft touch, no doubt. You have to imagine that Arum is thinking, all right, the two big bucks are off the range for the time being, so let’s pass the time and shoot ourselves a little skeet. I’ll say one thing for that Contender crap – it definitely gives the real dudes a lot of easy-money bouts to take in between their fights against, ahem, actual contenders.

As for Oscar/Floyd II… man it’s bad news. It’s funny, because that first Oscar/Floyd bout was the fight that “saved” boxing, and here, to my mind, the rematch is putting it right back in the gutter. There’s absolutely no reason for it but money and cynicism and cowardice. The first fight was okay but not great. Certainly no one in their right mind came out of that thing with a burning desire to see them do it again. Floyd and Oscar both know that – EVERYBODY knows that – and yet there’s only one other viable opponent for either of them who’s remotely in their stratosphere money and talent-wise, and that guy unfortunately is not going to break any PPV records although he certainly might break their ribs.

So after mulling over the options for a while – Oscar considering the possibility of trying to make 147 for Hatton or getting his beautiful smile ruined by Cotto, Floyd considering the possibility of spending the next six months laying around Renzo Gracie’s trying to figure out how to break an arm-bar – the light-bulb finally struck. I guess we should have seen it coming. “Hey, Oscar, it’s Money… yeah yeah, all good, how you?… yeah… so anyway remember that fight we had last year where we made like a jazillion dollars for a glorified sparring session? Remember that shit? Yo let’s do that again.”

Meanwhile, as I write this, the first “big” fight of 2008 is just days away – Roy v. Tito in the War to Settle the Score or whatever bullshit Don King is calling it. I tell you, I’m feeling a little like the beat cops on The Wire. That magical stretch throughout the fall and winter of last year had me thinking that a new day was dawning out there in the game. But here it is, the new year, and we’re just back out on those same old corners doing the dirt.

All right, Maria Sharapova. Your legs are impossibly long, your grunts impossibly ferocious, and your forehands simply impossible. But I have one thing to say to you, Missy , your fist-pump is an abomination. Last night I was so disgusted with your variously disgraceful fist-pumps, I realized that you’d cracked my Top Five Worst Fist-Pumpers of All Time list. Cracked it, might I add, at number three with a bullet…

Check out my full list over at The Sporting Blog – Top Five Worst Fist-Pumpers of All Time

Will it be this way…

… or that?

More on this question come Friday…

Forty years ago today, Bill Masterton (the North Star still on his feet in the picture) died of massive brain injuries at Fairview Southdale Hospital. He was 29 years old at his death, and he remains today the only hockey player to die of injuries sustained in an NHL game.

The Masterton tragedy occurred in a game on January 13, 1968 between the North Stars and the Oakland Seals. Early in the first period, Masterton was checked by Larry Cahan of the Seals and fell straight backwards, slamming his head on the ice. He bled profusely and quickly lost consciousness – his last words before going out were reported to have been, “never again, never again…”

And so it was. Having suffered severe damage to his brain stem, he was inoperable, and he died shortly after midnight on January 15, 1968. The tragedy caused a movement in the NHL to force players to wear helmets, but that movement was short-lived. Helmets didn’t become mandatory in the league for another eleven years.

The North Stars retired his number 19 in 1987, and the number stayed retired when the franchise moved to Dallas. The Bill Masterton Trophy was created that very same 1968 season that Masterton died and has been awarded ever since to the NHL player best exemplifies perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to hockey.

I’ve been doing a bad job of of self-pimpifying my work at The Sporting Blog of late, so I thought I would throw down a few links and let you smell what the Large has been cooking over there. Mostly, I’ve been the resident history buff, but the Aussie Open seems to be of interest to the Sporting Blog crowd, so I’ll probably split my tennis observations between there and here over the next two weeks. I’m also doing a bullet-point Super Bowl Anniversaries series for them much in keeping with my traditional No Mas style. To wit:

Super Bowl Anniversaries: VII – Dolphins v. Redskins
A little time travel back to Miami’s final piece of the undefeated puzzle. Andy Williams and a watch-thief figure prominently in the goings-on.

French Tennis Gangsta
No, MC Solaar hasn’t joined the men’s tour. I’m talking about the stone-cold OG Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the new Young Jeezy. Homie is tiltin’ his lid with authority down under and all the little Melbourne hoppers are fearing for their corners.

Super Bowl Anniversaries: III – Jets v. Colts
The Guarantee? Check. The Heidi Bowl? Check? Anita Bryant, beauty pageant also-ran and anti-gay fanatic? She’s in there too, not to mention Joe Willie in pantyhose.

Goose Finally Gets Cooked
Gossage in the Hall at last, while the great Rice question goes down to the wire and The Hawk has to wait another year. Big Mac, on the other hand, looks like he’ll be waiting a lifetime.

Closing the NFC East Playoff Circle
Yesterday’s Cowboys/Giants game was the last piece of the NFC East playoff puzzle. It was the first Cowboys/Jints playoff tangle ever, and now all of the possible head-to-heads have been contested in the playoffs.

If you’re like me, the Australian Open shocks the shit out of you every January. I’m just not ready for Grand Slam tennis at this point in the year. But look, never fear, cause this morning while I was watching the Colts/Bolts, I took a bleary-eyed look at the draw and compiled the first thoughts that came to my mind. Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Men’s Draw
The most interesting first-round men’s matches down in Melbourne are in the second quarter of the draw – Dmitri Tursonov v. Xavier Malisse, Nicolas Kiefer v. Juan Carlos Ferrero, and the best first-round match of the tournament, Aussie by way of Cyprus Marcos Baghdatis, a 2006 finalist, facing the 2002 champion Thomas Johansson. The winner of that match gets no relief in the second round, where he likely will face the 2005 Aussie champ, Mr. Combustible Marat Safin. In the top quarter of the draw (a.k.a Federer’s Lair), ole Rog is coming off a stomach virus and has a potential showdown with the always entertaining and ever pesky Fabrice Santoro in the second round. Not that this will require Federer to even try very hard really, but it’s interesting nevertheless. Another possible second-round meeting of notables in Fed’s section of the draw is Ivan Ljubicic and Sebastien Grosjean. The winner of that likely would face James Blake in the third round, but the Blake-inator doesn’t have the easiest path to that match , his first-round opponent is Chilean Nicolas Massu, who has beaten Blake in their only two matches on tour.

Women’s Draw
Nearly all the female firepower is in the top half of the women’s draw, and in the earlygoing figure that most of the attention will be soaked up by the top quarter, where reside Mmes. Henin, Sharapova, Dementieva, the fiery Israeli Shahar Peer, and the resurgent tennis mom, Lindsay Davenport. In fact, in my memory it’s been a while since there’s been a second-round match in a women’s Grand Slam draw as compelling as the potential Sharapova/Davenport showdown. Is Lindsay far enough along in her comeback to handle the leggy supermodel/gruntmaster? It’s hard to imagine, but then again, Lindsay has surprised me before, and she’s won three tournaments since returning to the pro circuit last summer on a whim. The second quarter of the women’s draw is also jam-packed with boldface names , Jankovic, Mauresmo, Vaidisova and Serena (who’s playing as I write). No really sexy matches there, however, until the round of 16. One final note , in the third quarter of the draw, Venus has about as clean a trip to the semis as she could have hoped for.

(If you’re looking for a much more detailed exploration of the draw by a considerably more able handicapper than myself, check out our own Mr. Deep Tennis himself, Steve Tignor’s close-reading over at Tennis.com).

My most recent interview with Franchise went up over at Jarry Park yesterday. Among the topics kicked around by me and the Chise are the future of Paulie Malignaggi, the future of Ricky Hatton, the ongoing MMA/boxing debate and who’s going to win that Holyfield/Tyson III bout that everyone’s talking about.

Large at Jarry Park (jarrypark.com)