JONES GOES FROM “RELUCTANT ROY” TO “RUSSIAN ROY”

Published

9 years ago

November 6, 2015

It isn’t the kind of box-office smash more likely to draw teenaged crowds to movies about the fictional exploits of a billionaire crime fighter dressed in a bat costume, a flying man from the planet Krypton, a science nerd bitten by a radioactive spider or a guy with extractable steel claws, but “Bridge of Spies,” currently in theaters, is a gripping, inspired-by-true-events tale of early 1960s Cold War tensions starring Tom Hanks and directed by Steven Spielberg.

Fortunately for all of us on either side of that great ideological divide, the Cold War began to thaw on June 12, 1987, with American President Ronald Reagan’s plea to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev “to tear down this wall” during a speech in West Berlin. Demolition of the infamous barrier separating East and West Berlin did, in fact, begin in June 1990 and was completed in 1992, two years after the reunification of Germany.

Of even more significant note, the dissolution of the Soviet Union formally was enacted on Dec. 26, 1991, bringing sighs of relief to hundreds of millions of Cold War-era survivors around the world who dared to believe that the leaders of the United States and Russia no longer were apt to consider actually punching in the numbers to nuclear launch codes that would mark the beginning of World War III and, quite likely, the end of civilization on a global scale.

Recent events, however, have raised alarm that the old Cold War is again getting frosty. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has hardly made a secret of his desire to resurrect the USSR, and his first step toward that end, but quite possibly not the last, was Russia’s forcible annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine. The United States and Russia seemingly are at cross-purposes in Syria, a crisis that has sent millions of refugees scurrying for safe haven in any country that will take them in on compassionate grounds.

Into this maelstrom of intrigue, deceit and apprehension steps a onetime superhero of the boxing ring, Roy Jones Jr., who represented the U.S. with distinction at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and once possessed such luminescent skills that his many admirers could be excused for mistaking him for one of the Avengers.

In his June 24, 1995, bout against Vinny Pazienza in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall, Jones unleashed a burst of eight left hooks, a one-handed combination so blurringly quick and accurate it stunned even those who had come to expect uncommon feats from the boastful Floridian.

“George Foreman (who did color commentary for HBO that night) told me after that fight that Roy fights like a great jazzman plays,” former HBO Sports president Seth Abraham told me in 2007. “He improvises. He does riffs. I thought that was such an insightful way to describe Roy Jones. George said, `Seth, I’ve never seen anyone throw eight hooks in a row like that. I’ve never seen anything remotely close to that.’

“And that wasn’t the only such conversation George and I had about Roy. George told me something later, not at that fight. We were talking one night and he said, `You have to understand something about Roy. The better he is at his craft, the less people understand it because he breaks the mold.’”

Jones’ mold-breaking apparently is a pendulum that swings both ways. No longer the electric talent he was in his prime, the now-46-year-old holder of world titles in four weight classes (middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight) is still an active boxer, albeit a severely diminished one, and still capable of feats that are perplexing and, to many, polarizing.

Once called “Reluctant Roy” for his seeming proclivity for sidestepping dangerous opponents and his aversion for fighting abroad, Jones picked up a new nickname – “Russian Roy” – last month when he was personally handed his Russian passport from Putin inside the Kremlin. Putin signed a decree to grant immediate citizenship to Jones after the boxer made the extraordinary request during a trip to Crimea in August. Jones said at the time he hoped boxing could help “build a bridge” between the U.S. and Russia.

“Thank you very much to everybody, mostly Mr. Putin for presenting me with a passport,” Jones said at a press conference in Moscow. “Nothing feels better than to be a citizen of the United States of America and Russia, two powerhouses of the world.

“This was definitely something that was ordained by God and not myself. I had no clue, no thought in life of ever becoming a Russian citizen. This is much bigger than life. For me, personally, I am here to be happy, to enjoy people, to help make it a better place, to encourage other people to come to Russia because Russia is good and the people of Russia are good. This is one of the happiest days of my life.”

Jones further stated his intent to learn the Russian language, to establish residency in Russia and “earn 2 or 3 billion dollars” from what remains of his career as an active fighter while opening boxing schools in Russia and continuing his attempts to become a well-compensated rapper, presumably a bilingual one.

In and of itself, Jones’ divided loyalty isn’t as startling as it would have been in “Bridge of Spies” 1960 or even 1980, when the U.S. hockey team shocked the heavily favored USSR squad in the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. There are Russian fighters happily living in America these days, such as IBF, WBO and WBA “super” light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev, who now calls Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home. The once-stark lines of demarcation separating the U.S. and Russia have gotten fuzzier; an avowed socialist, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is seeking the Democratic nomination to the Presidency and capitalism-loving Russian billionaire Mikhail Dimitrievitch Prokhorov owns the Brooklyn Nets NBA franchise. At first glance, it does seem that what for so long was, no longer is. If there is a loose-cannon American sports figure, Jones would have to take a back seat to retired power forward Dennis Rodman, who traveled to North Korea several times without State Department approval and is the subject of a documentary, “Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang,” which details his failed efforts to organize a basketball game between retired NBA players and a team of North Koreans to “celebrate” the 31st birthday of the communist nation’s dictator, Kim Jong Un.

No doubt, it is a different world than it was in December 1989, when California entrepreneur Lou Falcigno brought the first three Russian professional boxers to these shores in an experiment to bring about peace through pugilism. But for the most part, those early U.S. tour stops by middleweight Viktor Egorov, heavyweight Yuri Vaulin and lightweight Sergei Artemiev, presumed representatives of what President Reagan had termed the “Evil Empire,” were met with undisguised hostility.

“He wants so much to be liked,” New York-based trainer Tommy Gallagher said of Vaulin, “that when he hears that `USA! USA!’ stuff, he feels like a villain. He has to be able to learn how to deal with that b.s., to block it out of his mind.”

Maybe the supposed “good guys” aren’t always so good, or the “bad guys” so dastardly, when viewed through a less-judgmental prism. Progress toward a higher purpose almost always is slow and arduous. Whether or not any athlete, even an internationally renowned one, can accelerate the process remains to be seen, particularly when his rationale for the healing of old wounds can be deemed to be self-serving. And that is the test that Jones must pass as he straddles the gap between the U.S. and Russia that alternately expands and constricts, depending upon the political climate of the moment.

Would RJJ be doing what he is doing now if he were still at the top of his game, as he was in being voted “Fighter of the Decade” for the 1990s by the Boxing Writers Association of America? Are his motives for making nice with Putin as unsullied as he would have people believe? Or is he merely seeking to trade upon the remnants of his ring fame in a closed society that had previously known him mostly by reputation?

Jones’ star power began to dim, precipitously so, in 2004, when he was knocked out by Antonio Tarver in the second of their three bouts and then even more emphatically by Glen Johnson. The man who made HBO dance to his tune suddenly found himself without a backing orchestra, and he was reduced to playing off-off Broadway in places like Boise, Idaho, before getting his passport stamped for working trips to Russia (three times), Latvia and Australia. He is still a champion, but the only title he holds now is the German version of the low-rent WBU cruiserweight crown.

So why does a man, who had no qualms admitting that he feared sustaining the kind of permanent injuries that left his friend, former WBC/WBO middleweight champ Gerald McClellan, severely brain-damaged, blind and nearly deaf, continue to court disaster inside the ropes?

Money, or lack of it, and ego, a surfeit of it, are two possible answers.

Retired HBO boxing commentator Larry Merchant, who at various times has described Jones as a “prima donna” and a “diva,” in 2007 said that financial pressure and an inflated sense of worth has kept more than a few elite fighters in the game well past the time when good sense dictates that they step away.

“Will somebody pay him what he wants to see if he has anything left? You never know,” Merchant said. “It all depends on how desperate he is for money and attention. I’ve heard he had significant losses in investments he made in the hip-hop industry. Then again, this (making outlandish purse demands) may be his way of retiring. He gets close to the fire, then pulls out before he gets burned.

“As long as he was performing at the top of the world, people would let him get away with anything. But once he started to sink, nobody was eager to throw him a rope. Look, Roy Jones is not the only fighter who looked at himself as being above it all. Ray Robinson was like that. But you can only rub people’s noses in it so often.”

Perhaps Vladimir Putin is the Russian rope-thrower who finds it suits his purpose to haul Roy Jones, who has maintained his vanity and billion-dollar dreams, onto dry land. Who knows? Perhaps there really is a last hurrah for a fighter who, at his absolute peak, had faster hands and more pulverizing power than Floyd Mayweather Jr. ever demonstrated, if not Mayweather’s defensive genius.

Just last week British promoter Frank Warren and Russian promoter Vlad Hrudnov announced that Jones (62-8, 45 KOs) would take on former WBO cruiser titleholder Enzo Maccarinelli (40-7, 32 KOs) for the WBA’s vacant “super” cruiserweight championship in Moscow. But WBA president Gilberto Mendoza Jr. responded to an inquiry from ESPN boxing writer Dan Rafael by stating in no uncertain terms that a sanctioning request had not been made for Jones-Maccarinelli, and likely wouldn’t be granted in any case.

“Well, I’m not fighting for a regional belt,” a miffed Jones texted Rafael when informed his shot at a world title in a fifth weight class might never be fired.

It might or might not have occurred to Jones that Putin has welcomed him to Russia not so much for his charm and engaging personality as for his usefulness as a propaganda tool. Echoes of the Cold War are beginning to be heard again, and it just might be that what was, still is.

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Bernard Fernandez

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

3 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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