By Jim Dower: According to the Latimes, Roy Jones Jr. (53-5, 39 knockouts) has a verbal agreement to fight former International Boxing Federation (IBF) super middleweight champion Jeff Lacy (25-2, 17 KOs) in July. The bout apparently will be taking place in Florida, where both of them currently live. Neither Jones nor Lacy have looked their best in quite some time, going back a long six years ago when Jones defeated Antonio Tarver in 2003.
Lacy, 31, hasn’t looked like the same fighter since losing a 12-round decision to Joe Calzaghe in March 2006. However, due to high name value of Lacy and Jones and due to their deteriorating abilities, it will make for an interesting, circus-like bout. For me, it will kind of like watching a fight between an old Larry Holmes against Butterbean.
What a victory could mean for Jones or Lacy is unclear, because it’s hard to imagine where they can go after this. Lacy would be hopelessly over-matched if were to be put in with a top super middleweight like Mikkel Kessler, Lucian Bute, Andre Dirrell or Andre Ward, and I could only imagine that Lacy would end up being pummeled worse than he was against Calzaghe.
As for Jones, he would stand no chance against Chad Dawson and would likely have equal problems against champions Hugo Garay, Adrian Diaconu and Zsolt Erdei. I doubt Jones would even consider fighting any of them, because the money and fan interest just isn’t there.
Jones has said that he’ll be moving up to heavyweight in the next year, so that’s one possibility for him.
Lacy’s opportunities seem to be much less hopeful, especially if Jones beat him like I suspect he will. Lacy seems to be out of place at super middleweight and is in a tough situation.
He can stick around, maybe win some fights and lose a couple more, but I can’t see him as any more than a gatekeeper in the division at this point. Some boxing fans think Lacy should stick it out just for the love of the sport, but I doubt Lacy sees things in the same way.
If he keeps losing, his paychecks will get smaller and smaller to the point where it might not even been worth the trouble to fight. This is why he needs to do something drastic like either move up or move down a weight class.
He could stick around and look for big fights against top middleweights, light heavyweights or cruiserweights, but I wouldn’t like to see him waste time fighting as a super middleweight any longer. I don’t see a future there for him and there’s not as many established fighters in there that he can land fights with. He needs to try and lure someone like Kelly Pavlik, Paul Williams, Chad Dawson or Tomasz Adamek into a fight.
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