Jones talks Hopkins, Green and younger fighters

By Jim Dower: Boxing great Roy Jones Jr. (54-6, 40 KO’s) seems to be in denial about his 1st round TKO loss to Danny Green on December 2nd. In that fight, Green, the IBO cruiserweight champion, rushed across the ring and opened up with a barrage of heavy shots while Jones covered up in his corner. Almost immediately, Green landed a huge right hand that connected to the side of Jones’ head, sending him down on the canvas. Jones was clearly hurt by the punch.

Jones got up and instinctively covered up and tried without success to grab Green in a clinch. However, Green continued to land punch after punch to the head of Jones until the fight was mercifully stopped by referee Howard John Foster at 2:02 of the 1st round.

At the time of the stoppage, Jones wasn’t throwing any punches back and was just taking awful punishment from Green. It’s likely that Jones wouldn’t have been able to take much more from Green without tasting the canvas for a second time in the round. And there was far too much time left in the round for Jones to survive for long in looking at the slaughter.

However, Jones feels that the fight was stopped too quickly. This is what Jones had to say at Yahoo Sports “The problem was that they didn’t let me use my conditioning. I was in superb shape. Everyone knows it was a quick stoppage. He [Green] was dead tired. He couldn’t have gone three more rounds. He was done. They know that. That’s why they stopped it so fast.”

This sounds kind of sad, because Jones was taking a real beating at the time of the stoppage and the referee looked to have done him a huge favor by stopping it before Jones really got hurt by Green. It looks as if Jones didn’t realize how big of a puncher that Green is. If he had looked closely at some of his recent fights, he would have likely seen that Green is a bigger puncher than Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson, both of which knocked Jones cold in 2004.

Jones’ April 3rd fight against 45-year-old Bernard Hopkins will go forward despite Roy’s humiliating 1st round knockout loss to Green. Jones may need to continue to place a spin on his loss to Green if he wants the Jones-Hopkins bout to do as well as it would have had he not made the mistake of using a dangerous fighter like Green as a tune-up for Hopkins. In hindsight, that seems like a huge mistake by Jones to try and squeeze in a fight against Green before a big money fight against Hopkins.

Jones has this to say about Hopkins: “This guy [Hopkins] is older than me. It would be dumb to fight guys who are 26, 27, like Chad Dawson. He [Hopkins] fought a younger guy in Pavlik, but he was smaller and slower. He wouldn’t fight no Chad Dawson…He [Hopkins] made a living off Tito [Felix Trinidad], Oscar [De La Hoya], Pavlik. He beat Glen Johnson when he was a nobody.” Jones may be right about Hopkins not wanting to fight Dawson. Bernard hasn’t shown much inclination to get into the ring with Dawson, who is considered by many boxing fans to be the best fighter in the light heavyweight division.

Despite Jones’ recent losses to Joe Calzaghe, Green and would could be another loss in his upcoming fight against Hopkins in April, Jones remains stubbornly resistant to retiring from boxing. Jones says “Go back and look at the Jeff Lacy fight against. Look at my hand speed, look at how much fun I had, what I gave to the fans even compared to what I gave to them back then [in his youth]. If I can still deliver that at 39, 40-years-old, why should I stop?” Jones shouldn’t stop if he likes boxing, but he should be more selective in his opponents if he wants to avoid getting knocked out again in the future.

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