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by David P. Greisman - Time is unforgiving. Fortunately for the aging athlete, people are far more likely to buff away the tarnish and allow the luster of a legacy to linger.
Mike Tyson was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame and lauded for his pre-prison prominence — when he was the most-feared, most-famous heavyweight fighter around — and not for his many embarrassing moments from his last decade in the ring.
Michael Jordan was enshrined as the great six-time champion for the Chicago Bulls, not as the past-his-prime Washington Wizards player whose two seasons brought more losses than wins.
And for all of the oft-repeated stories about Willie Mays stumbling in the outfield or Brett Favre’s struggles at quarterback in his final few years, those end chapters of their careers become but footnotes, quickly read and recognized, informative yet inconsequential when compared to the greater story.
That doesn’t make watching those final chapters unfold any easier.
Perhaps it is better, then, that Roy Jones Jr. is becoming increasingly invisible as he becomes increasingly inconsequential, fighting on far smaller shows than he’d been accustomed to while winning world titles at middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight, and traveling outside of the United States to box in Australia, Russia and Poland, fighting in foreign countries for the first time since he’d been a 19-year-old amateur Olympian ripped off and robbed in South Korea. [Click Here To Read More]
Mike Tyson was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame and lauded for his pre-prison prominence — when he was the most-feared, most-famous heavyweight fighter around — and not for his many embarrassing moments from his last decade in the ring.
Michael Jordan was enshrined as the great six-time champion for the Chicago Bulls, not as the past-his-prime Washington Wizards player whose two seasons brought more losses than wins.
And for all of the oft-repeated stories about Willie Mays stumbling in the outfield or Brett Favre’s struggles at quarterback in his final few years, those end chapters of their careers become but footnotes, quickly read and recognized, informative yet inconsequential when compared to the greater story.
That doesn’t make watching those final chapters unfold any easier.
Perhaps it is better, then, that Roy Jones Jr. is becoming increasingly invisible as he becomes increasingly inconsequential, fighting on far smaller shows than he’d been accustomed to while winning world titles at middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight, and traveling outside of the United States to box in Australia, Russia and Poland, fighting in foreign countries for the first time since he’d been a 19-year-old amateur Olympian ripped off and robbed in South Korea. [Click Here To Read More]
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