A TALL ORDER : Talk With Cowboys’ Jones May Cure Football Players Who Want to Fight Tyson

It seems to be happening all the time now--football players calling news conferences to say they want a piece of Mike Tyson.

We went through this a couple of months ago when the Michigan State hulk, Tony Mandarich, announced that he was considering going into training for Tyson, rather than sign with the Green Bay Packers.

Now we have Mark Gastineau with much the same story. At 32, the former New York Jet defensive end said last week that he has gone into training to prepare for a hoped-for fight with Tyson.

At the Dallas Cowboys’ camp in Thousand Oaks the other day, Ed (Too Tall) Jones was asked about all this. Jones, 38, is in his 15th season in the National Football League. It would be his 16th, except he took 1979 off to try to become a heavyweight contender.

He didn’t quite make it. He had a 6-0 record against unranked heavyweights, then went back to football.

Jones, a 6-foot-9 defensive end, was asked what he thought about the cases of Mandarich and Gastineau.

“Do these guys want to learn how to box, or do they want to fight Mike Tyson?” he asked. “There’s a big difference.”

Too Tall’s advice: Think this one through, guys.

“First of all, these guys ought to understand they’re dealing with a dangerous sport to begin with, and a guy who’s the greatest (fighter) in the world--a quick, strong guy who’s been boxing since he was 13,” Jones said.

“I’m talking about maybe permanent injury. Remember one thing about Tyson--he don’t give a damn about you. He’s not going to say, ‘Here’s some football player, I’ll carry him five or six rounds.’ That ain’t going to happen. He’s going to try to get you out of there immediately.”

The requirements of conditioning, timing and savvy required to be a world-class boxer--or even a mediocre boxer--are considerable, even for great athletes in other sports, he said.

Jones is a solid source on this, boxing people agree. A gifted athlete who played basketball and football in high school and college, Jones found that his great size in a boxing ring was meaningless. And so were all his football muscles.

“The general public has no idea what kind of physical shape boxers are in,” he said, sweating freely after a Cowboy workout.

“First of all, I was in the greatest shape of my life. I didn’t spar with anyone for months. I did six to eight miles of road work every morning and hours of gym work. My weight went from 279 to 235 and I wasn’t on any diet. That was from work.

“You need lean, flexible muscles to box, and Mandarich and Gastineau are body builders. They’ll have a harder time than I did working off all that bulk, because I’d never lifted weights until I got into the NFL.

“See, with all that bulk, you’re standing in there against some guy knowing what you want to do, but that bulk slows you down to the point where everything you do is late. In the meantime, you’re getting counter-punched.

“My sparring partners for that whole year were heavyweights with winning records. Not champions, not contenders--some of them were just guys. But they were boxers , you get it? There’s a difference.

“Early on, I’d get in against an average heavyweight and in one minute he would size up every weakness I had. Then he was whackin’ on me. It was very frustrating--I knew what I had to do, but couldn’t.

“I think a lot of athletes with good looking bodies get tempted by all that money they see in boxing, because the boxers they see make it look so easy. They see guys in the ring who have bad bodies, but they’re missing the point. They don’t see all the hours in the gym, all that road work.

“They’re not fighting body builders. It’s not a strength-on-strength thing. They’re fighting boxers. Larry Holmes had a sloppy looking body, but he could close your eyes with that left jab.

“Boxing isn’t jumping in there and throwing punches--it’s setting guys up, forming a strategy during a fight, relying on years of experience . . .

“And remember, I’m not talking about Mike Tyson. I’m just talking about regular guys.”

Jones wouldn’t say, however, that a late convert to boxing couldn’t reach the top.

“It’s a longshot for anyone, but it could be done,” he said.

“But they have to know going in that you gotta crawl before you walk. You gotta pay that price, and it isn’t easy. I don’t care how talented you are--and Gastineau has proven over many years he is a very talented athlete--there are no shortcuts.”

Jones was asked what his most difficult hurdles were in his one-year experiment with boxing.

“No. 1 was converting football muscles to boxing muscles,” he said. “I finally did, but it was more work than I can tell you about. Once I got rid of the bulk, I could react. From the beginning, I could deliver a hell of a punch. But I was late all the time.

“Second, developing a jab with snap in it took a long time. See, a good jab is like ball control in football. If you have a good jab, you can control a fight. Holmes is the perfect example--without that jab, he’d have been just another heavyweight, not a champion.”

Jones said he plans to return to boxing--as a manager.

“I still love boxing, and I admire boxers more than any athletes because I know what they’ve been through. I’d like to manage boxers after I leave football, I’d really enjoy that.”

Jones won’t say why he left boxing after one year, but says he still regrets it.

“I’ve never told anyone why I quit, and I won’t now, but I will tell you I regret not giving it one more year,” he said. “I was happy with my progress. So were my trainers. Boxing was something I’d always wanted to try, so I won’t ever have ‘What would have happened?’ thoughts in my old age.”

He was asked what he liked least about his boxing experience.

“Jumping rope,” he said. “I hated it. I still jump rope a little, and I still hate it.”