Photo © Wray Edwards – By Jim Dower: I’m not sure that former IBF super middleweight champion Jeff Lacy (25-2, 17 KOs) made enough of a case of himself last night to inspire light heavyweight Roy Jones Jr. to want to fight him after Lacy had to dig deep in order to defeat Otis Griffin (19-5-2, 7 KOs) by a 10-round majority decision at the Sun Dome, in Tampa, Florida. The final judges’ scores were 95-95, 96-94 and 97-93. Lacy, 31, fought well in first couple of rounds, landing hard right hands and powerful jabs.
Lacy’s famous left hook wasn’t a factor in the early going. However, Lacy, fighting in front of his home audience, tired out after the first few rounds, at which point Griffin began to take over the fight landing right hands and body shots through Lacy’s porous defense and beating him to the punch.
Griffin, 31, then began to get more and more confident, finding it easy to hit Lacy with pretty much everything he threw. Lacy looked like a shell of his former 2006 form in rounds three through seven and didn’t have the old power that he used to have.
In the 8th round, Lacy started to get back in the fight somewhat, landing a few nice right hands later in the round. However, Lacy was still taking an awful lot of punishment from a fighter that isn’t ranked in the top 15. This was someone that Lacy should have been able to walk through with ease, yet Lacy was struggling in a life and death fight.
In the 9th and 10th rounds, both fighter fought toe-to-toe, firing back at each other with big shots and making it hard to tell who the winner of the rounds were. In the end, it looked as if Lacy had just barely nicked the fight, but at a cost. His face was badly swollen from the shots he’d absorbed in the fight and he looked more like a loser than the winner of the fight.
Following the end of the bout, Lacy said that he wants to fight Roy Jones Jr., who just happened to be at ringside watching the bout. I can’t imagine that Jones was impressed with Lacy’s performance tonight, but who knows? Maybe Jones’ standards have dropped in recent years with losses to Joe Calzaghe, Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson.
Apart from whether Jones is interested in fighting Lacy or not, the major question is what will Lacy be doing beyond this or a fight with Jones? I can’t see Lacy being a factor in the super middleweight division if he’s forced to struggle with fighters like Griffin.
If this was a one-time thing, I could ignore it possibly, but Lacy has looked bad in his last six fights starting with his loss to Joe Calzaghe in 2006. Lacy no longer is knocking out his opponents since injuring his left shoulder and hasn’t seemed like the same fighter he was back before the Calzaghe fight.
He barely beat Peter Manfredo Jr., Vitali Tsypko, Epifanio Mendoza and now Griffin, getting all four victories by narrow decisions. Three of the wins – Tsypko, Mendoza and Griffin – have come by 10-round majority decisions.
I don’t know if a fighter could get those identical results so often if they tried, but the larger picture is that it seems to indicate that Lacy is in need of some serious soul searching about his career, because it doesn’t look like he’s fighting at the top of his game anymore and he’s only inviting more beatings should he continue further with his career. Like I said, this was the kind of opponent that Lacy should have easily beaten, but he didn’t. What does that say about Lacy?
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