As the January 19th fight between former WBA/WBC/IBF light heavyweight champion Roy Jones Jr. (51-4, 38 KOs) and former IBF welterweight and IBF/WBA light middleweight champion Felix Trinidad (42-2, 35 KOs) creeps closer, I’m beginning to suspect that this fight is going to be a blowout win for the soon to be 39 year-old Jones. Trinidad, 35, though he’s been training for months, he still looks nothing like he did in his prime, as he appears to be somewhat fleshy around the checks and chin, and looks to be still sporting a generous gut to go along with it.
Besides that, he looks old, much older than a person should normally look at the age of 35. Of course, Trinidad could very well prove me wrong by fighting well, like many fighters do when they’re slightly overweight, but judging how he fought last time out – a 12-round unanimous decision loss to Winky Wright in May 2005 – I have a hard time thinking that he’s going to come out on top over Jones. Recently, there’s been boxing news about Trinidad getting pointers on how to beat Jones from Glen Johnson, who viciously stopped Jones in the 9th round in September 2004.
It seems like a waste of time, if you ask me, because if Trinidad had bothered to take a look at the tapes of the Jones-Johnson fight, he’d have seen that Johnson basically pressured Jones all night long, keeping in front of him the entire time and basically outworking him. However, it wasn’t that Johnson had a particularly brilliant strategy on how to beat Jones, but rather it was due to the fact that Jones could no longer move or punch like he had in previous years, and had slowed way down in terms of punch output. Add to that the fact that Jones had been recently badly knocked out by Antonio Tarver, meaning that if he was hit enough times in the head, there was a chance that he might experience another knockout loss.
Sure enough, it happened, but it wasn’t due to a great strategy by Johnson. Trinidad is clearly going to try and follow Johnson’s blue print on how to beat Jones to the letter, but the difference is Trinidad isn’t capable of standing in front of Jones and pouring in enough punches to dent Jones’ vulnerable chin. It takes a lot of punches – or a big puncher – to get to Jones’ tender chin, and I see Trinidad as not having the youth or the conditioning to be able to test his chin.
More likely, it will be Jones who will be outworking Trinidad, hitting him with big pot shots and dancing around him. Jones may not move as well as he used to, but it won’t matter much because Trinidad has always been a plodder, and that surely won’t get better after a two year lay off.
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