9. Roy Jones (57-8-0, 40 KO)

Birth: 16 January, 1969 

 

Roy Jones was a phenom, one of those one-in-a-lifetime talents that comes along and just dazzles.  Of all fighters that appear on film, Jones is the one who appears most otherworldly.  For all that the other phenoms in boxing history are extraordinary it is Jones who has the appearance of being plugged into a totally different matrix; he was a fighter upon whom seemed  to work the magic that left the professionals with whom he shared the ring spellbound. 

 

He fought his sixteenth professional fight against former strapholder Jorge Vaca, playing a seemingly crude fairground game against the fleetingly aggressive Mexican, winging in the kind of wide hooks a prospect must be cured of in order to progress.  Such was Roy’s speed that not only could Vaca not take advantage, but in fact he was stopped in the first round, a look of confusion betraying his uncertainty as to what had hit him as he struggled to regain control of his forearms, which gingerly controlled his swaying weight.  Not a technician in the truest sense of the word, Jones punched all the way from his boots and had a supernatural grasp of positioning from his earliest days as a professional.  He organized himself in ways that demonstrated natural feints against an opponent desperate for any opportunity to land on an opponent who was almost impossible to hit.  If an opponent moved in the way Jones expected, his trap was sprung without providing an opportunity for the opponent to react—and if they didn’t move in he had still positioned himself in such a way as to throw his punches with fractions of seconds shaved from them, fractions that mattered because he was a fighter already arguably peerless in terms of speed.

 

This brought him wins in twenty-two 'world' title fights between 1993 and mid-2004 from middleweight up to heavyweight.  Although not at light heavyweight his most notable victims include, James Toney, Mike McCallum and Bernard Hopkins.  All were completely outclassed, world-class talents who looked to all intents and purposes as though they did not belong in the ring with Jones.

 

Arguably his best win came up at heavyweight, when he became the first man since Bob Fitzsimmons to hold titles at both middle and heavy.  Ruiz was a strapholder rather than a legitimate champion, but even so, like the greater but smaller men Jones dominated, he offered little in the way of resistance.  Roy’s one loss during these peak years was a questionable and brutally avenged disqualification.

 

Such was his domination and pound-for-pound standing in his own era that his crash was bound to be spectacular, and so it proved.  Devastating knockouts rendered by fighters not of his standing brought into question a chin that was so rarely tested in his dizzying prime, but from late ’94 to early ’96, Jones appeared peerless—not just in his own time, but for all time.

 

Please, please hang up the gloves.