Time the Avenger

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.