Out With The Old, In With The …?

Some things never change. Roy Jones Jr. scheduled a breakfast press conference with the media this past Saturday morning in Memphis, and he showed up 40 minutes late.

By Jones’ skewed sense of punctuality, his degree of tardiness seemed almost inconsequential. The self-absorbed Mr. Jones also flouted personal convention by being semi-courteous to those reporters in attendance.

What was different about this Jones appearance before the media is that, in a town full of reporters to cover the Jermain Taylor-Winky Wright middleweight championship fight that evening in the FedExForum, only a few chose to avail themselves of the opportunity to break bread with one of the finest fighters of the 1990s. (For purposes of full disclosure, I was not among the attendees.)

Could it be that that Roy Jones Jr., at age 37 and riding a three-bout losing streak that includes two knockouts, has ceased to matter to the mainstream press? Could it be that his next bout is against a second-tier opponent (Prince Badi Ajamu)? Could it be that that bout, on July 29, is in the great boxing capital of Boise, Idaho?

With all due respect to Idaho, which performs the necessary function of keeping the world supplied with French fries, Roy Jones Jr. in Boise is the equivalent of Robert De Niro doing dinner theater portrayals of Jake La Motta in, well, Boise. It’s not only off-Broadway; it’s off-off-off-off-off Broadway.

But an aging Jones in career denial is only symptomatic of a plague that is, or soon could be, sweeping through the world like bird flu. The biggest names in boxing, the must-see attractions that once gripped our attention and refused to let go, are fading into the past like so many ghostly apparitions. And those who would take their place – take a bow, Jermain Taylor – thus far are proving themselves to be something less than epic figures.
In short, boxing is suffering the same sort of charisma shortage that has reduced another individual sport, tennis, to fringe status and severely reduced its popularity.

Think not? While many are of opinion that Switzerland’s Roger Federer is the most gifted tennis player ever to wield a racket, the prevailing wisdom is that his colorless demeanor is as neutral as his homeland. No amount of brilliant ball-striking is going to elevate Federer to the sort of attraction that Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe were in the 1970s and ’80s. Style counts, and always has. Ask around and see just how many of your friends gave a damn about the French Open final.

In Memphis, where life is defined by the blues and barbecue that are so abundantly available on Beale Street, big-time boxing is still something of a curiosity. When the Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson megafight arrived there in 2002, it was more of a result of Tyson’s legal troubles, which made him persona non grata in more familiar fight venues, than the opening of a fertile new territory. So unsure of what had landed in their laps were the editors of The Commercial Appeal that they hired a New York-bred, Las-Vegas based outsider to anchor the newspaper’s coverage of the big event.

Fast-forward four years and Memphis’ approach to boxing still is on unsure footing. The powers that be priced the tickets for Taylor-Wright apparently with midtown Manhattan in mind, with a top cost of $1,250 and next-high at $1,000. The overly expensive ducats contributed to just 9,678 well-heeled or going-into-debt spectators turning out for the show. With more realistic pricing, the house almost certainly would have been more than half-full, given Taylor’s standing as the almost-local hero.

“The people running this shindig cost themselves millions of dollars (at the box office),” someone involved with one of the fighters’ camps said. “I realize Taylor is from Arkansas and Arkansas is right across the Mississippi River from Memphis, but this is crazy. Arkansas is, like, 49th in per-capita income among all the states. They priced the event as if all of Taylor’s fans were from Beverly Hills or something.”

One of the spectators who did not have to pay for his ringside seat was former heavyweight champion-turned-HBO commentator Lennox Lewis, returning to the scene of his beatdown of Tyson. Lewis got a nice ovation when introduced, but maybe not so much because of his place in Memphis’ thin boxing history as because of his status as one of the last bright stars to exit a dimming pugilistic galaxy.

Think about it. Lewis, Tyson, Felix Trinidad and Bernard Hopkins are retired. Evander Holyfield should be. Oscar De La Hoya might fight once more; he hasn’t decided yet. Arturo Gatti’s career has more past than future. And Jones, despite his somewhat dubious decision to soldier on, has been reduced to playing Idaho. Let’s hear it for Mr. Potato Head.
That leaves Floyd Mayweather Jr., the finest pound-for-pound fighter on the planet, as the only premier attraction who is in his prime and possessed of all the components for superstardom as we have come to define it. But even “Pretty Boy Floyd” has been sketchy as a pay-per-view attraction, and he will not be the draw if and when his much-discussed showdown with De La Hoya takes place.

Remove Mayweather from the equation and the list of ready-for-prime-time attractions is alarmingly short. Taylor has been groomed for the marquee since he came out of the 2000 Olympics, but three successive question-mark bouts – two with Hopkins, one with Wright – have yet to certify him as an exclamation-mark kind of fighter. Manny Pacquiao? Maybe, but he’s a little guy from the Phillipines. Wladimir Klitschko? Best of a dubious lot of heavyweights, but he is more a suspect than Richard Kimble was while in pursuit of the one-armed man.

Hopkins, the 41-year-old Philadelphia icon whose last hurrah was this month’s spectacularly efficient dispatching of light heavyweight standout Antonio Tarver, still maintains that he should have been awarded the decisions in both of his close points losses to Taylor. But the “Executioner” respects the history of boxing enough that he wanted someone, anyone, to emerge from Taylor-Wright as the indisputable king of the middleweights. Tradition, after all, must be observed.

“I was hoping a clear winner would emerge,” said Hopkins, who decided against going to Memphis and instead watched the bout on TV. “I have no axe to grind with Jermain Taylor or anyone else. The middleweight division and all of boxing needs clarification as to who the top people are. It’s not about who holds the titles. It’s about who’s the best.”

Truth be told, boxing probably would have been best served by an emphatic victory by the 27-year-old Taylor, who is rough around the edges but nonetheless regarded as having considerable upside. Defensive genius Wright, 34, probably already has peaked and has spent too much of his journey on low-paying excursions to places like Luxembourg, France, England, Argentina, South Africa, Monaco and Germany before he was allowed to return from exile.

“I was fighting in places I had never heard of, that I could not even pronounce,” Wright said of the 5½-year chunk of his career spent in far-flung locales before he again made himself available for domestic consumption.

Taylor – handsome, personable and endowed with the requisite physical gifts – was the anointed one, the golden child behind whom HBO has placed so much faith and repose. It is a comprehensive prayer that must be offered up whenever one era ends and another hopefully begins. Boxing not only wants a new star, it needs someone to accept the figurative baton proferred by the last generation of world-class relay runners. Taylor and Miguel Cotto are two of the few present practicioners of the sweet science who have the look of continuing the race at a brisk pace.

In preparation for answering that prayer, Taylor’s decision-makers — promoter Lou DiBella, manager Al Haymon and adviser Ozell Nelson – signed off on the decision to replace Pat Burns as trainer with Hall of Famer Emanuel Steward.

It is now clear that the six weeks Taylor spent with Steward in training camp were not sufficient to transform him into the flawless wonder who might save boxing from the threat of a shadowy future.

“Jermain did so many things wrong, but he kept his championship because he’s a determined, tough, strong guy,” Steward said after the split draw that left no one satisfied.
So, what did Taylor do wrong?

“He kept his left hand down, he doesn’t use his height, he went straight to the ropes, which, of course, is a mistake,” Steward said in reciting a laundry list of his newest project’s technical glitches. “His legs were crossed a lot.

“But even with all that, I always felt he would win. Every time it looked like he was about to start losing, he’d bite down and say, `I’m not about to let this man take my championship.’ Jermain punches with so much power and authority, even though Winky caused a lot of excitement with those little fast punches, when Jermain punched, it was so hard, that might have impressed the judges.”

Punch statistics, as always, are open to interpretation. Wright outlanded Taylor, 226 total punches to 163, but the disparity in jabs – thought to be the forte of both men – was even wider, with the St. Petersburg, Fla., southpaw connecting on 103 of 335 (31 percent) to 41 of 308 (13 percent) for Taylor.

“This was a sad night for boxing,” grumbled Gary Shaw, Wright’s promoter. “Winky gave him a boxing lesson. Winky Wright, to me, was as superb tonight as he was the night he shut out Felix Trinidad.”

DiBella, playing the part of impassioned opposing counsel, argued that close fights sometimes end in draws because they were meant to and, besides, his guy again was being held to unreasonably high expectations.

Asked who Taylor would fight next, DiBella said, “Not Bernard Hopkins or Winky Wright. I’m not putting him anywhere near Winky Wright next.

“It might be Bozo the Clown or Clarabelle. Who else has had a year like this? Bernard Hopkins twice in a row. Winky Wright. Our next fight in going to be in Little Rock. We’re going to fight somebody who comes straight ahead, knock the bleep out of him and maybe then we can talk about a rematch.

“This man (Taylor) is the real middleweight champion, the undisputed middleweight champion, and there’s a reason for that. He’s the best young fighter in the world. It would be nice if he got just a little bit of credit.”

Receiving a little bit of credit has never been Taylor’s problem; getting all of it has been. Maybe someday soon, he will have the whole bundle and the boxing universe again will be set upon its proper axis.

Until then, there’s always Roy Jones Jr. in Spudsville.