Roy Jones: The Pedro Martinez of Boxing?

Sometimes I think I’ve been too hard on Roy Jones. Over the past few years, I’ve killed the guy mercilessly in print and urged him to hang up the gloves. And yet this past Saturday night he put on a hell of a good show in Biloxi, Mississippi, battering Jeff Lacy into submission over the course of a dominant 10 rounds.

There are two ways to look at this performance in terms of the arc of his career, and both of them bring to mind aging Phillies pitchers of past and present.

The first, Pedro Martinez, is of recent vintage. One could make a case that Roy Jones is the Pedro of the fight game right now. He’s without question a first-ballot Hall of Famer, once the best boxer of his era, a lightning-fast fighting machine with power in both hands and a natural-born gift for showmanship that made his fights must-see TV back in the 90’s even when they were clear mismatches.

But, as it does to pitchers, catchers and boxers alike, time caught up to Roy. He slowed down a little, lost some heat on the fastball, and the next thing he knew he was getting taken out of the park. Antonio Tarver knocked him out, pulverized him in fact. Glen Johnson did the same. When he fought Tarver again, he ran like a scared child and coasted to an undignified loss on points, an ignominious state of affairs for the once mighty Roy Jones. And then last November, he got utterly humiliated by Joe Calzaghe in a farce of a fight that saw Jones lose by nine points each on all three scorecards.

He’s a junkballer now at best, Roy, 40 years old and looking his age. It’s clear that he can no longer hunt with the big dogs. At the same time, he still clearly likes to fight, and as he proved this last week, he can still get outs against name-brand competition. Jeff Lacy has been overrated for years now, and for some strange reason continues to have some cache in the boxing world even after Calzaghe exposed and destroyed him back in 2006. Nevertheless, his fight prior to Jones was with Jermain Taylor, and though he lost convincingly to Jermain, you couldn’t say that Jermain dominated Lacy with quite the same gusto that Roy did.

Maybe that’s a silly comparison, and maybe it’s utterly irrelevant. Jermain is famous for running out of steam in his fights, and it seemed as if he might have knocked Lacy out in seven or so if he’d had the stamina. There’s also the fact that Jermain and Lacy, former Olympic teammates, are very close friends, and some observers of that fight wondered if Jermain took his foot off the gas once it was clear that he was going to prevail easily over his old stablemate.

Roy did not show Lacy any such mercy this past Saturday night. He looked a little like the late-period Ali, actually, fighting against inferior competition. He spent a lot of time lolling on the ropes in true rope-a-dope fashion letting Lacy flail away at him, and every now and then emerged from his torpor to throw ferocious, breakneck combinations from all manner of angles, punches that quickly cut and swelled Lacy’s face beyond recognition.

It was the spped, force and accuracy of those combinations that got me thinking about Pedro. No one is going to mistake Martinez today with the Cy Young-winning headhunter of the '90s. But he at least proved last Wednesday against the Cubs that he can still get people out, and here and there, he showed flashes of his former brilliance. The fact of the matter is that a considerably diminished Pedro Martinez, if healthy, is still probably a more-than-serviceable major league starting pitcher.

The same may be true of Jones. He was embarrassed by Calzaghe, but Calzaghe was a truly great fighter still at the peak of his powers. I couldn’t help but wonder on Saturday while I was watching Roy take Lacy apart how he would fare in Showtime’s super middleweight tournament. Of course, Roy hasn’t fought at 68 in over ten years, and it’s unlikely that he’d be inclined to go back to that weight now. But if he did … could he compete in that tournament? Could he eke out wins over the likes of Jermain and Andre Dirrell and Carl Froch?

I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s at least an interesting question. And if Roy is still a fighter at that level, maybe he’s right not to retire. It’s the age-old conundrum when facing the natural deterioration of a former superstar athlete. Does Michael Jordan have a right to stay in the NBA as a so-so shooting guard and tarnish our pristine memories of the days when he owned the court? Does Pedro have a right to slog it out in Philly as a fifth starter living on junk and the ghost of his former fastball?

Of course, the answer is yes, and yes. Then again, Jordan and Pedro play sports that are much more systematized than the world of boxing. If Jordan could still contribute in the NBA, then he belonged there as long as he wanted to keep playing, and likewise for Pedro with the Phils.

But that brings me to the other Philadelphia pitcher that comes to mind in this debate, a true giant of my childhood: Steve Carlton. Ol' Lefty seems now like the paradigm of the once-great athlete who hung on too long, and nothing was more painful for me than to see his descent from immortality to those last, dreadful seasons when he was not great, not even serviceable, but actually pathetic, surviving on his Hall-of-Fame credentials and the idea that maybe, just maybe, he had a few innings remaining in that magical left arm of his.

And here’s the thing about Carlton, and baseball, and Roy Jones: I bet you anything that if in 1987, when Lefty couldn’t get anyone out in the bigs, if he’d gone down and pitched for a Class A squad, he would have looked like a million bucks. He probably could have thrown a no-hitter against a college team.

I guess what I’m saying is … well, just how good, or bad, is Jeff Lacy? He made Roy Jones look like a world-beater the other night, and even had veteran announcer Barry Tompkins saying in the eighth round or so, “This makes you wonder how Antonio Tarver, or anyone in fact, could have knocked Jones out.”

Boxing is like that. It’s all relative. You look great in there right up until the moment where you’re in over your head, at which point you look terrible. To put it another way, I have a feeling that what we were seeing on Saturday night between Jones and Lacy was the equivalent of Steve Carlton in 1987 pitching class A ball and not Pedro against the Cubs.

Then again, if Carlton wanted to play in the minors when he was 40 years old, wouldn’t that have been his right, too? Jones is planning his next fight to be against Australian Danny Green down in Sydney for Green’s IBO cruiserweight title. One thing about boxing is that there are a lot of amateurs out there who think they’re professionals, and I guess the way I’m feeling right now is that if Roy Jones wants to travel the world beating the crap out of those guys and getting a paycheck to do it, well, what can you say but “good on ya, mate.”

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.