SHATTERED OR SHOT

The Great Roy wasn’t supposed to have such a hard time with Tarver but he did. GRAHAM HOUSTON left Vegas weighing up what was up. No, we weren’t dreaming. There, before our eyes at the Mandalay Bay casino resort in Las Vegas on 8 November, Roy Jones Jr, the best boxer in the business and perhaps one of the best of all time, was in a life-and-death struggle with 8-1 underdog Antonio Tarver.

At the end of 12 rounds, Jones got the win but the questions started flying. Had he taken too much out of himself coming down from heavyweight to reclaim the light-heavy championship that he never lost in the ring?

Is he showing signs of decline at the age of 34 (he turns 35 in January)? Or is he, perhaps, not really the fighter we thought he was? It is to Jones’s credit that, on a bad night, he eked out a majority decision that was widely scored by two judges but unpopular with the crowd of 8,974.

As he said afterwards, you find out what a fighter is all about when his back is to the wall and he’s facing adversity. But Jones has never looked this vulnerable. Never have we seen him backed up on the ropes and getting pounded like this.

Yes, true, it has been a habit of Jones to go to the ropes and let the other man whale away. He even did this when he fought the bigger John Ruiz in March. But in this fight, for the first time, one had the impression that Jones was under serious fire when the ropes were at his back.

Jones, unusually for him, actually looked like he had been in a fight, with his bruised and swollen left eye. The Jones of this fight hardly looked like an all-time great. I think we are all agreed on that. But the more I think about it, the more I am of the opinion that losing around 20lbs of muscle mass, at a mature age for a fighter, took more out of Jones than he had thought it would and had a lot to do with his display. At the weigh-in the day before the bout I thought that Jones looked almost ashen and his body didn’t look quite as ripped as it has in the past. If we were in the era of day-of-fight weigh-ins, Jones might have been in real trouble.

He had some 30 hours to replenish his system, but it wasn’t enough. Also, at his age, and after all he has accomplished, it is difficult for Jones to get “up” for fights. He tried to pump himself up psychologically for Tarver by bringing a “personal” element to the proceedings, promising a powerful performance against a fighter who has been baiting him for some time.

Truly, though, I do not think that Jones felt the same sense of challenge as in some of his other big fights. Bearing all this in mind, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised at what happened.

Scaling the light-heavy limit of 12st 7lbs (175lbs) after having weighed a muscled-up 193lbs for the win over Ruiz, Jones seemed lacking in zest. His punches did not seem to have a lot “on” them, not to the extent, certainly, where Tarver was rocked or otherwise seriously inconvenienced. (“I don’t recall ever being hurt,” the unmarked Tarver said afterwards.)

Also, Jones’s movements were not as smooth or as rapid as they have been in other fights. It seemed clear that he was trying to pace himself, to keep something in reserve for the later rounds.

He was, I thought, looking to steal rounds with single right-hand shots to the body, while occasionally he would dart in with a couple of head punches, such as a right-hand lead followed by a quick left hook. There was no sustained barrage of punches, no combinations. His big left hooks, which he tried to bring over the top of Tarver’s southpaw right, fell short time and again

Although Jones had promised in pre-fight teleconference interviews that he would not be careful, that is exactly what he was. He fought a calculating type of fight, lots of feints, seemingly very aware of Tarver’s punching power and thus not wanting to get caught.

The idea seemed to be to keep Tarver guessing, keep him from being too assertive, then snatch the opportunity to score and bail out without being countered.

Far from being explosive (Tarver had hinted that the first three rounds could be Hagler-Hearns all over again, Jones had promised to stop his man) the contest became something of a chess match punctuated with bursts of activity, and booing was heard in several rounds as each man looked at the other, neither willing to commit himself in case he ran in to something.

Tactically it was interesting, but in terms of spectacle the fight left a lot to be desired. What we had was Jones, the Superman of the ring, being fought on level terms by the tall southpaw who many thought would be blown out in similar fashion to Montell Griffin in Griffin’s rematch with Jones.

Level terms did I say? Jerry Roth, considered Nevada’s finest judge, thought so, because he had the bout a draw, 114-114, but the other two judges, Dave Hess of Texas and Glen Hamada of Washington state, had Jones a runaway winner, Hess scoring the fight 116-112 while Hamada had it a blowout 117-111. What fight were they watching? Not the same fight as me.

The “consensus” score, which means awarding a round to the fighter who gets the vote of at least two of the three judges, came out as a more realistic 115-113 in Jones’s favour. I had the fight, from ringside, 115-113 in Tarver’s favour but it was a matter of what the judges liked: Tarver’s big bursts when Jones was on the ropes, or the steady points-pinching of Jones in ring centre, when Tarver, whether he admits it or not, wasn’t doing a lot.

Jones had a point when he said afterwards: “He was winning 30 seconds of a round, I won the other two minutes, 30 seconds.”  But in terms of punches landed, there really wasn’t too much in it. The CompuBox punch counters had Tarver landing more over the course of 12 rounds but Jones landing more “power punches”, which means anything other than a jab.

You could say that Jones was the superior ring general or take the contrary view that Tarver was keeping Jones contained, and not be that far wrong either way. Despite the booing and the chant of “Bullshit!” that greeted the decision it was not, to me, a controversial verdict. This was a fight where neither man showed clear superiority and could have been scored a draw or 7-5 in rounds either way.

I thought that Tarver hurt Jones more than Jones hurt him, but long periods of inactivity hurt Tarver because even if Jones was only getting off one or two shots every so often he was doing something. That’s where the experience of 49 fights came in handy for Jones, who had had more title fights than Tarver (now with a record of 22 wins and two losses) had had fights.

I thought of something that the American TV boxing personality Max Kellerman often says about scoring fights: “Think which fighter in the ring you would rather be, and that’s the guy who’s usually winning.” I would rather have been Tarver than Jones in this fight, but while you could make a case for saying that Tarver won the fight it is quite possible that Jones scored more points. But by margins of 116-112 and 117-111? I really don’t think so.

Jones, to me, looked in bad shape after getting hit by some heavy shots in the 10th. He slumped on his corner stool looking drained and done in (amazingly Glen Hamada gave this round to Jones; it had been Tarver’s biggest round, landing 17 punches to Jones’s five according to CompuBox, and to give the round to Jones was akin to Jean Williams giving Evander Holyfield the fifth round against Lennox Lewis in their first fight).

But Jones showed the heart of a champion to suck it up in the last two rounds, sweeping the 11th in the scoring and capturing the 12th on two of the three cards, with Jerry Roth going for Tarver. But when I heard Michael Buffer announce the score of 117-111 I thought Tarver was going to get the decision because I thought there was no way that Jones had won nine of the 12 rounds.

The crowd’s anger at the decision, the way Jones was booed when he got up on the ropes in anticipation of victory, surprised me. But the crowd had switched allegiance to the underdog by the later rounds, chanting “Tarver, Tarver” as they sensed an upset. Jones said afterwards he wasn’t surprised that the crowd turned against him.

“When you set a bar so high,” he said, “and you don’t come out and crush a guy, then you don’t do what they expected of you. If you don’t crush him in the first round then you’ve failed — in their eyes. If you just do good, in their eyes you’ve failed.” Where Tarver failed — where he let himself down — was in rounds three to six inclusive.

After two strong opening rounds — neither of which he won unanimously on the cards — Tarver seemed to ease off and Jones was able to start coming on. I think that Tarver, in his own mind, thought that he had established control and that as long as he wasn’t getting hurt, he was still winning. So, Jones was able to pull back points and move ahead in the scoring.

Tarver did have a brief offensive surge near the end of a nothing-much fourth round but fell into the trap of taunting Jones (he said afterwards that he hadn’t said anything to Jones, that it was just body language). I think that Tarver might have lost a little focus at this point, lost a little mental intensity, and Jones was able to dictate the fight clearly in the fifth and sixth. Tarver rallied in the seventh and eighth, Jones came back to have a good ninth, then Tarver practically beat up Jones in the 10th, blasting him on the ropes, mocking him, shaking his head “No” when Jones threw some punches back.

But Tarver failed to press his advantage in the 11th. He said afterwards that he was satisfied with the way he fought, that he believed he was winning. But in boxing you can never be sure. A fighter doesn’t know how the judges have it. Instead of letting fly with all he had and trying to close out the fight in a champion-like way, he kept doing what he was doing and it wasn’t enough, although even if Tarver had won the last two rounds on the cards the best he could have got would have been a draw.

Tarver talked like a winner afterwards. “I’m the most underestimated fighter in the game today,” he said. “I proved my skills tonight against Superman. If he’s Superman then I had a fistful of Kryptonite tonight. We stopped Roy Jones in his tracks.

“I thought I pressed the fight. I was dressed down in defence. I saw everything coming. He threw punches, I blocked them.

“I hit Roy flush repeatedly, backed him up, punched him on the ropes. I think I did my job. I should have deserved that victory. We need to do it again.

“I guess everything he threw, they [the judges] counted it, but they wasn’t really seeing the fact that he wasn’t really landing anything sharp. He didn’t hit me with the wide hook, he didn’t hit me with the straight right — a couple of times, but it wasn’t no big punch.

“If you look at who pressed the fight, who threw combinations — ba-ba-ba-bap! — I think I did my work tonight. I don’t feel like a loser up here tonight.”

Rematch? It won’t happen, although Jones didn’t close the door on one. But Jones’s thinking seems to be just one more big fight — Mike Tyson — and out.

“It was a tough task to come down to 175, tougher than I thought it would be,” he said. “I promised him I would come down and give him a fight and I kept my promise.”

The inference was that he wouldn’t be doing it again.

There will be no big demand for a rematch, anyway, because the fight was not a thriller and I do not think there is any feeling of controversy in the States, where Home Box Office Pay Per View scorer Harold Lederman had Jones winning by 116-112; I have always believed that viewer reaction is commentary-led.

Tarver had his chance and he came up short. Jones, on probably the worst night of his professional life, found enough to get by. No, the logical fight, the biggest moneymaker and the one with the most intrigue, is Jones against Tyson. In what is likely to be his finale, I believe we will see Jones depart in a blaze of glory and that the Tarver fight will be accepted for what, after much consideration, I think it was: An off night for a fantastic fighter.

For additional on-site coverage from this show, see the December issue.