With only a month to go before Felix Trinidad (42-2, 35 KOs) comes out of retirement – for the second time – to face Roy Jones Jr., I’m wondering how much Trinidad has left in the tank at this stage in his career. At 34, soon to be 35 by the time they fight, Trinidad is getting up their in age, and hasn’t looked good in recent press conferences, appearing fat and, well, old. He’s old fought twice in the past five years, winning one (an 8th round TKO over Ricardo Mayorga in October 2004) and losing a one-sided 12-round unanimous decision to Winky Wright in May 2005, prompting yet another retirement from Trinidad.
Obviously, the ring rust is a major concern on the part of Trinidad, as he’s taking the bout with Jones without any warm-up bout whatsoever, possibly for fear of looking bad and scaring off potential fans for the Jones bout, not to mention the fact that Trinidad – due to his inactivity – is vulnerable to losing to almost any decent B-level fighter at this point. Ideally, Trinidad should have had at least a couple of easy bouts before taking on someone like Jones, that way he would fine tune his rusty skills and and somehow try go get it back together. Another problem is Trinidad’s weight.
He’s used the training camp to trim off a ton of blubber, instead of focusing completely on boxing training, so in a sense, his training camp has been a kind of a fat farm in which he’s rather quickly been forced to melt off much of the blubber that’s accumulated in the past two years due to his sedentary lifestyle. As most people are well aware, anytime a fighter is forced to take off a lot of weight in training camp, they often perform rather poorly. However, even if Trinidad had kept himself in top shape, he’s still the smaller fighter, having fought most of his career at welterweight.
It was only late in his career, when he started dealing with ballooning weight gain, did he move up to the junior middeweight and middleweight divisions. Trinidad, while in his prime, was always considered slender for the welterweight division, as he had naturally thin frame. However, his power made up for his lack of a solid frame, allowing him to stop much stockier opponents. Jones, however, would seem to be asking a bit too much for Trinidad to have to deal with, given his time off, weight issues, and size disadvantage.
That being said, Jones, now 39, has looked average in his last six fights, having lost three of them (four, if you count his victory over Antonio Tarver in November 2003, a gift majority decision), two of them by vicious knockout. Most recently, Jones won a controversial victory over Anthony Hanshaw in July, a bout in which Jones spent almost the entire fight on the ropes, taking shot after shot from the younger Hanshaw. It wasn’t a pretty picture, reminding me of past champions, such as Muhammed Ali, taking a terrible beating at the end of his career against Larry Holmes. However, Jones was given the decision, albeit not a conclusive one, moving forward to the bout with Trinidad.
It’s unlikely that Jones will fight any different than he did against Glen Johnson, Tarver, Hanshaw or Prince Badi Ajamu, fights in which Jones was unable to use his legs due to his advanced age, and will probably perch himself either resting along the ropes or with his back against a corner post for support. From there, Jones will try and pick off punches with his gloves, and duck the rest, while throwing his occasional pot shots and flurries. It would seem that Jones, now that his legs are gone, is an ideal opponent for Trinidad, as he’s always done well against fighters that rest along the ropes as Jones will no doubt be doing. If Trinidad has enough stamina to take the fight into the later rounds, he has an excellent chance of giving Jones a terrific beating, and, perhaps, taking him out.