Classic Roy interview as ESPN tracks him to Pcola

**Super_Lightweight** · 12-06-2005, 03:27 PM

hmm

Sitting in one of the Barnhill�s Country Buffet�s lavender chairs, Jones works on the baked fish, chicken and dumplings and mashed sweet potatoes he�s served himself for lunch. Two smiling sisters wait until he�s through to ask if he�d wish their grandma a happy 90th birthday. Jones walks across the restaurant to a bespectacled woman in a flowered dress, surrounded by relatives.

"Happy birthday," he says, shaking her hand.

"They say you some big fighter," she says.

"Yep."

There�s a moment of silence. Jones sees that her hand is still extended. The woman wants a little more. He smiles and shakes it again.

"That ain�t no money," she chirps. Jones smiles as he peels off a crisp $20 and puts it in her palm.

Roy Jones is two creatures in one. There�s the boxer; the ego, the showman. Then there�s the man; the neighbor, the friend. Criticism may bother the boxer; it never touches the man.

To know the boxer, you need only view the highlight reels of him breaking Virgil Hill�s ribs with a body shot, or dismantling David Telesco one-handed (three weeks after breaking his left hand). To know the man, you have to follow the winding backroads to Pensacola.

Jones knows these roads as well as the smell of distant thunderstorms or the fishing hole where he pulls out speckled trout. He knows them all because he was born and raised in a trailer in these woods, because he�s never lived anywhere else. "I�m a country boy," he says.

He�s a country boy who charters jets to Salina, Kan., to play basketball for the USBL�s Lakeland Blue Ducks. A country boy who owns a music label and cuts his own rap albums. A country boy who celebrates his 31st birthday by defending world titles in New York�s Radio City Music Hall. A country boy with his own golf tournament, golf-course-sized ranch and country-club-sized extended family: mama and daddy, three sisters and a brother, three sons, grandfather, 11 aunts and uncles, and many, many cousins.

Later in the day, Jones pulls his truck into a dirt driveway, to a place that�s half scrapyard, half wildlife preserve. Decrepit cars and a rusty trampoline sit near several buildings of varying sizes and states of construction. Dozens of handmade cages sit empty. Calling this home are cows, ducks, dogs, a goat and roosters. Hundreds of roosters: roundheads, hatches, grays, pumpkins, brown reds. Fighting birds.

This is Roy Jones Sr.�s farm, the one his son bought for him in 1989. It�s Nirvana to the father, a Bronze Star recipient in Vietnam and a retired aircraft electrician at Pensacola Naval Air Station. Senior is much more country than Junior. ("You got to go number two?" he says when asked about the bathroom. "No? Then just go around one of them houses.") Dressed in shorts, tattered yellow tee and flip-flops, Jones Sr. lifts a rooster, pressure-tests a wing and cradles him as if baptizing a child. "This one�s ready," he says, in the same country mumble his son slips into when he�s excited.

The man who trained these roosters also made the baddest man in boxing. But there is not much overt love between the two. Although their well-chronicled falling out of a decade ago is resolved, it�s not like they were effusive to start. "The roosters brought us back together," says Junior, who in 1992 fired his father, the only handler he�d ever had. "My father was used to running everything," he says. "When it was my time, he couldn�t understand. Now I think he does."

Sometimes the son couldn�t understand either. Why did his father train him for 12 hours straight? Why did he make him fight bigger boys, one after another? Why did he hand out all those whippings? The son didn�t understand that his father was creating a champion, and champions need a sense of self that no one can destroy. You don�t get that with your daddy telling you how great you�ll be. You get it from work and pain and fear.

Even when he and his father didn�t speak for seven years, Jones didn�t leave his hometown. "I�ve been standing alone for a long time," says Jones. "The only person who used to convince me to listen at all is the same person I listen to now. That�s my daddy. People call me stubborn and hardheaded, but I can�t do it their way."

Doing it his way, however, may end up shortchanging the legacy. Considering the reputation of the boxing establishment, managing and promoting himself seems like common sense. But the independence has cost him. Promoters like Don King and Bob Arum are institutions for a reason, powerful men who control the sport and influence its media coverage. Jones has notoriously eschewed the press. He listens only to his own voice and that of those who really care about him. "Jones has managed himself great," says fight manager Frank LoCascio. "If he�d worked with King or Arum, he�d have had to give up control and lots of money." But his image might be leaps and bounds better.

Jones doesn�t need the chorus of sycophants or the dubious promises of boxing�s businessmen. He will walk away from the sport with his senses, wallet and will intact. He will walk away his own man.

***

"I�m just me �"

***

The baddest man in boxing is overseeing his grounds in the quiet of a Southern morning. There�s a placidity to this ranch, 83 acres of woods and ponds, that puts him comfortably out of the pubic eye. There are no Tysonesque hangers-on, just roosters and farmworkers, dogs and friends, the people and animals who know a good man when they see one.

By now, Jones was supposed to be preparing for a fight with middleweight Felix Trinidad, but the once undefeated Puerto Rican�s career was derailed by Bernard Hopkins. That makes Hopkins, the first undisputed middleweight champion since Marvin Hagler, the only major fight on Jones� radar. But that�s a fight that Jones cannot win. If he loses, he forfeits his belts and his legend. If he beats Hopkins (a much more likely outcome), he�ll have beaten someone he�s already beaten.

In the meantime, he�s gone out and befuddled Glen Kelly, another "contender." And once again the voices regurgitate the grievances. They say he�s afraid to test himself, lazy because he�s made millions. If only they knew that the answer is even more blasphemous. He�s neither scared nor greedy; he just has nothing left to prove. He�s won every title, beaten every fighter. Three years ago, he and his father reconciled, which is just about the time he decided to fight Otis Grant. Then Richard Frazier.

Coincidence? The essence of fighting is to prove something. With nothing to prove there is little motivation to take risks. Jones has nothing left to prove to anyone -- the press, his friends, his father, himself. "I could have fought a heavyweight and made a lot of money," he says. "I ain�t taking chances when I don�t got to."

He�ll go on a little longer. Doris Law will sew his shorts, Shorty Ward will sit and chat with him down at McGuire�s. Maybe he�ll fight Hopkins.

And when it�s over, maybe boxing historians will look back and understand who he really was.

**Super_Lightweight** · 07-02-2007, 06:59 PM

**-Hyperion-** · 07-02-2007, 09:29 PM

Roy is the GOAT

Classic Roy interview as ESPN tracks him to Pcola