Who Could Roy Jones Not Have Beaten?

[QueensburyRules]

LOL, Hopkins was 22. His Mw career didn't even mean anything until he beat Tito.

- -Need to step away from the Rusty koolaide son.

Popkins was a full grown 28 in the full pomp of the traditional athletic prime when he was well embarrassed by a one armed Roy. He collected a spurious title when 30 and most of his defenses were club level scrubs until he met Tito.

[The Old LefHook]

Sometimes a great legacy will need to do more than just accept available challenges. Crawford, lads, will obviously need to do something besides passively accept the best challenges made to him. Sometimes you actually have to call guys out. There were a few fighters Roy should have been aggressively calling out, even as champion. The fight might not get made after all, but it still works out better on the legacy to know he was trying to FORCE the best fights. And we know this never happened. Oh, it did? When was that? I musta forgot.

[Rusty Tromboni]

Hopkins a Better win than Toney? I think Toney was a solid favorite in that fight

Good catch! What I said is NOT true. Hopkins was still a little raw, while Toney was at his best weight and much more experienced than Roy.

I also think Hopkins' move to LHw was delayed to avoid even the possibility of a rematch w/ Roy.

[Rusty Tromboni]

- -Need to step away from the Rusty koolaide son.

Popkins was a full grown 28 in the full pomp of the traditional athletic prime when he was well embarrassed by a one armed Roy. He collected a spurious title when 30 and most of his defenses were club level scrubs until he met Tito.

He has an overrated title reign, for sure. But he was a lot like fellow Philly Fighter, Jersey Joe Walcott. He aged well. He developed his skills as he went.

Hopkins also tended to do best when he enjoyed a size advantage.

I think we can both agree that Hopkins is overrated, but Roy did not beat him at his best. Probably Roy makes it look even easier if they had met at 175 in the 2000's, though.

Is that ^ fair?

[robertzimmerman]

Final analysis: it doesn't matter whose fault it is; it happened, that is the only cogent fact. You get credit for what you did, nothing else. I do not really care how long he lasted, either. He beat a long line of shoe clerks. His quality of opposition averages just above mediocre in total. Most of them were slightly-above-mediocre fighters who were larger than he was, however. Their natural size advantage must be factored in.

Jones wanted to circumvent the powers-that-be in boxing. He is the great talent with the most illusions about his abilities outside the ring. He would win that poll easily. Robinson had quite a few too: he thought he could dance and he thought he was a businessman, or at least was cagey enough to hire honest people to watch over his financial empire. His first European tour was Robbie's solution to the powers-that-be, and it worked.

Jones had no solution up his sleeve other than to deny the PTB control over him by sacrificing his own legacy. They could not get near him. But neither could he get near a great opponent in a timely fashion.

A cǒckfighter who farms pitbulls put himself up against the world's best legal minds and promoters in their familiar arena. You only do that if you have seriously overestimated your own position. When a $5 million dollar check from HBO arrives like clockwork after every scrub mandatory you fight, it is hard to even see that you have miscalculated anything. Roy probably believed the bigger fights eventually had to come, so he saw himself as escaping with easy money until then.

But those big fights never came before he was knocked wedge-cold by a so-so fighter named Tarver.

If you're going to criticise his resume, then it does matter who's fault it was that the bigger fights didn't happen. Very much so.

[robertzimmerman]

I haven't done much in this thread and yes a lot of it has been done before. We must find a consensus really.

The thing is here, that you don't see the pattern. All you see is reasons (excuses) for Jones not fighting the best. There's always an excuse: Don King, Seoul, daddy, money etc.

To me it adds up to Jones being a trinket collector and not a champion looking to leave a big legacy in the sport. Possibly because he didn't want to make the concessions needed.

To you it adds up to Jones being a victim og various circumstances that prevented him from getting the resume his talent deserved.

Is that an agreeable conclusion?

Bat,

You are the guy who claims that anyone who was missed was simply avoided.

You've been doing that for years now.

If valid reasons are given, then how can they be excuses?

He gets criticised for Nunn.

Nobody else.

Eubank is on record saying it would have been career suicide to have fought him, and that he never sought out the big named U.S. fighters as he was content to defend his WBO belt.

Despite what you claim, Dariusz' promoter would not sit down with HBO to discuss any specifics. He was happy enough to keep the WBO and let the others go, and his resume reflects that.

Liles' own manager was pi$$ed with him for blowing a fight with Roy after he went and asked for more money at the last moment.

Calzaghe said he wasn't chasing Roy, as he didn't want tough fights.

Hopkins walked away from a $6m C-W, which was over 2 x his career highest pay day, by demanding $10m or no fight. And after HBO had declined his ridiculous demand, he then challenged out all of the JMW champs instead.

So please tell me how he avoided the above guys.

Please tell me how he made excuses not to fight them.

They didn't want to fight him.

No concessions were going to alter that.

[robertzimmerman]

It's certainly unfortunate (from a fight fan's perspective) that Jones ended up meeting Pazienza rather than the likes of Benn or Eubank.

Right from the outset I figured Paz (who I liked) was made for Jones and we really weren't going to learn anything we didn't already know.

I mean, Jones would undoubtedly enter the ring as favourite against either Benn or Eubank. But neither were guys he could afford to take lightly.

Roy had great respect for both of those guys.

Benn really wanted to fight Roy in 1995.

Eubank had no intentions of fighting Roy.

[robertzimmerman]

LOL, let's not play this game. We all know what you were doing. There's no need to pretend. You grabbed some names out of the air to appear informed and educated on Boxing. It's a lot like how people would mention The Black Murderers' Row 20 years ago. It's like they say about my nephews,
Question: "What's the Hipster's favorite band?"
Answer: "You haven't heard of it."

It was the same w/ those Emo kids not too long ago. It's the same w/ Boxing nerds. Find a legit, but relatively unknown/forgotten fighter and pimp the hell out of his legacy on internew chat boards.

I don't doubt those guys could have done well against Jones. We really didn't see him against a good Mw. But to confidently pick them to beat Jones is a bit of a stretch. There are definitely surer bets, but they don't carry the same currency do they?

Beating giardello isn't special. Beating Giardello when he was on his game, now that was a special feat. I doubt either of them ever could.

*As an aside, I did get to meet Benton. One of the memories of the 80's worth moving. I am from South Jersey. That was before I moved to Pittsburgh. Benton trained Frazier, then Spinks, then Qawi... ain't that something? He also worked for Duva after retiring from the ring, who supposedly screwed him over somehow when he was a fighter.





LOL, Hopkins was 22. His Mw career didn't even mean anything until he beat Tito. All his current glory, it's retrospective.
Toney was a strong favorite over Jones. The weight drain and lack of focus really hurt him.

Ruiz may not have been any more than just a "good" Hw, but it was a Hw. Weightclasses exist for a reason.

Tarver met a severely weight drained Jones. He had physical tools Toney and hopkins didn't.

Hopkins was 28.

[robertzimmerman]

Thats my point, Hopkins was green but it's still Jones best win (second best, whichever). What does this say about Jones.

You keep writing off Carter and Benton but they fought live oponents. No they aren't "sure wins" over Jones, but Jones isn't a sure win over them either.

Benton and Carter obliterate Jones middleweight competition, including 22 year old overated Hopkins, so why do they have such little chance in your book vs Jones?

People forget about ring craft and only look for speed and power, then you watch a fat old benny Briscoe take a near prime Hagler to hell and back and remember there is more to boxing then just looking cool and being fast. Another great example is Foreman vs Briggs.

Hopkins was 28.

[robertzimmerman]

I don’t think the fight was a toss up but I would have loved at that time to see Roy fight him instead of some guys he did.Guy had a big undefeated record didn’t want to leave germany I believe it was.

I would have too.

No, he didn't want to leave Germany.

He was content there.

He was happy defending his WBO belt.

Roy wouldn't go over to Germany. It was a shame. But nobody should criticise him for that. Why should he have taken 3 belts over there? We know what happened in the Olympics. We know that Dariusz conned the ref in order to get Graciano Rochigianni disqualified in their first fight. And we saw the Robin Reid-Sven Ottke fight, where Ottke and the referee were a tag team.