By Eric Thomas: After suffering an embarrassing 1st round knockout loss to Danny Green on the 2nd of December, Roy Jones Jr. (54-6, 40 KO’s) is considering retiring from boxing. Jones, 40, has fought professionally for 20 years and won titles in the middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight divisions over the years.

However, Jones has been on the slide since suffering back to back knockout losses in 2004 at the hands of Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson. Jones has continued to fight and win for the most part since then, but he’s fought lesser fighters to get those victories instead of taking on the champions like he had in the past.

Recently, Jones had been in line to fight a long awaited rematch with 44-year-old Bernard Hopkins in March. However, Jones wanted to squeeze in one more fight before that by stepping up to the cruiserweight division to try and capture the International Boxing Organization cruiserweight title from the powerful Danny Green. It was a bad mistake on Jones’ part in hindsight.

Green was too big and too powerful for Jones and jumped all over the 40-year-old Jones in the opening round of their fight on December 2nd. Jones, looking smaller and weaker than Green, was backed into a corner and dropped by a looping right hand that landed to the side of Jones’ head. Jones staggered to his feet and bravely attempted to fight on.

Green opened up with a huge salvo of uninterrupted to punches with many of them missing, but enough landing to have Jones looking ready to go. The referee decided he had seen enough and stopped the fight with one minute to go in the round. Some of Jones’ fans were angry and upset about the loss, claiming that the right hand that knocked Jones down was a rabbit punch and also saying that the referee had stopped the bout too soon.

But it’s hard to argue against the stoppage because Jones looked like he wasn’t going to be able to make it out of the round. Green was unloading punch after punch to the head of Jones at the time that the referee stopped the fight and it would have taken a near miracle for Jones to start fighting back and get through the remaining minute of action without going down again. Jones said later that he had recovered from the knockdown by the time that the referee stopped the fight, but Jones still wasn’t throwing anything back. He was just taking shots and it didn’t look good either way you want to look at it.

If Jones does decide to fight on and continue his boxing career, it’s hard to imagine for what purpose. If he’s doing it for the love of the sport and to make money, then I would say go ahead and continue. But if Jones is thinking about taking on top light heavyweights like Chad Dawson or Bernard Hopkins, I would prefer that Jones retire rather than risk getting knocked out again. I don’t see Jones being competitive with a top light heavyweight right now, and I think he’d have problems against most of the fighters in the top 15.