At his peak he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, boxer of his generation, blessed with lightening-fast hand speed and the ability to entertain, so it was with sadness that I watched the 40-year-old Roy Jones Jr crumble to Aussie Danny Green last week. English ref Howard Foster stopped the fight after only 122 seconds and even Green admitted he 'felt bad' beating up on Jones, one of his boxing idols. Boxing retirements are rarely as tidy as say Joe Calzaghe's (another man to have defeated Jones in recent years) who retired undefeated earlier this year. More often than not boxing retirements are long, drawn-out, painful affairs as the Jones episode proves.
Incidentally, the Australian commentator bills the fight as "the biggest fight in Australian boxing history". Well, maybe it's the biggest involving an Australian boxer on home soil, but the biggest fight in Australian history has to be Jack Johnson claiming the world heavyweight championship on Boxing Day 1908 against Tommy Burns in Sydney, brilliantly described in Geoffrey Ward's book, Unforgivable Blackness.
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