This my friends is Roy Jones Jr. A fighter who made tons of money and could have left the game with his reputation and dignity intact. But his career as a hip-hop artist didn't quite pan out, and it's not like he would have gone to college to get a degree. Having nothing else to fill the empty void that looms when a once-dignified athletic career is over, many athletes continue on until their skills have eroded to the point where a once-proud and talented fighter winds up like the jackass pictured above.
Here he is, sprawled out on the canvas like a bum getting hurled out of a bar after having one too many. And to think he went all the way to Australia to take this pounding (which was so disgraceful he didn't even make it out of the first round) from Danny Green, a 36-year old pug with absolutely no technique. And what was on the line? The IBO cruiserweight title.
Roy Jones Jr. was a good boxer, but he had the luck of timing on his side. He came up when there really weren't any good fighters for him to take on. Antonio Tarver, the only name fighter he faced in his career that was close to him in skill and talent, beat his ass two times in a row. Felix Trinidad was a dead man walking by the time Roy got to him, so he doesn't really count. The list of guys Jones Jr. defeated in his career reads like a murderer's row of hobos. And due to this pathetic pedigree he was voted the best boxer of the 1990's. Go figure.
I would rather remember him the way he was, an arrogant, self-important asshole who loved to talk about himself in the third person and who always enchanted us with his eloquent diction, which eerily resembled an epileptic mute attempting to recite the alphabet while falling down a flight of stairs.
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