Tyson Would Quickly End Jones’ Boredom

Roy Jones Jr., the sweetest current practitioner of this often-awkward sport, is alone and bored these days in the super-middleweight division.

He has no peers, no rivals and no immediate reason to get up in the morning and head to the gym. At half-speed and without any particular motivation, Jones figures, he can beat practically anybody else in the division.

A triple left hook here, a four-punch combination there, and another foe is finished. Vinny Pazienza, Tony Thornton, Merqui Sosa. . . . Next, on June 15, televised from Jacksonville, Fla., by HBO, Eric Lucas will be one more name tagged onto the list.

Jones has had to invent some excitement for this one. Only hours before the bout, Jones will play an afternoon game for his Continental Basketball Assn. team, the Jacksonville Barracudas, for whom he is the starting point guard.

Then, after playing at the University of North Florida, he will head over for the 10 p.m. EDT fight at the Jacksonville Coliseum.

A stunt? Not at all, Jones says swiftly. This is about the only way he can get himself excited about boxing these days.

Already tiring of boxing’s limited array of opponents, but facing the possibility of ridicule, Jones joined the CBA last fall. After some early turnover problems, he has won a regular spot in the Barracuda rotation.

Jones is making about $1.5 million for the fight--and earns $270 a week playing for the Barracudas.

Now, the doubleheader.

“This is making this fight interesting to me,” Jones said from his hotel room in Connecticut, a stop on his CBA team’s recent trip. “Other than doing something like this, there’s nothing interesting out there for me right now.

“I used to get excited about defending my title. But this is getting old. I’m a two-time champion, and I know what it feels like. I need more challenges.

“If something doesn’t challenge me, I don’t care about it. And slowly but surely, I’m starting to find them. Basketball is a big challenge for me--that’s why I’m in it.”

One boxing figure not too certain about Jones’ basketball dalliance is Sugar Ray Leonard, who years ago pegged Jones as a potential successor to his superstar mantle.

Leonard points to the arthroscopic surgery performed in April on Jones’ right knee--probably caused by basketball wear and tear--as a sign that maybe Jones should stay strictly with boxing.

“If he thinks he can make more money in basketball than he can in boxing right now, I’m going to give Roy a calculator,” Leonard said. “I see guys try to do things a la Michael Jordan, a la Deion Sanders in the multiple sports. . . . There’s only a few of those guys around.

“But Roy’s still young. Those guys always lose focus and they have a lot of things on their minds, but thank God Roy’s at an age, and he’s so talented, that it might not bother him.”

What’s out there in boxing that might keep Jones’ motor running? The 168-pound super-middleweight division is so barren that Jones almost certainly has to move up in class or two.

Some possibilities:

--Ancient Thomas Hearns has been muttering about another comeback, at light-heavyweight, to face Jones. “I don’t think I want to do that,” Jones said. “If I fight Tommy Hearns, I’d feel as bad as I did after I beat Pazienza. I thought I really had hurt him bad, and I don’t like that feeling.”

--A rematch with James Toney, also at light-heavyweight. But Jones has shown almost no interest in matching up with someone he so easily took apart.

--World Boxing Assn. light-heavyweight champion Virgil Hill is angling for a shot at Jones, and it might happen later this year. But Hill is nothing close to a marquee fighter, and this would hardly count as a mega-bout. “It’d be a good payday for him,” Jones said.

--Which leads to the weird, but intriguing, possibility of Roy Jones vs. Mike Tyson. Jones’ handlers have been talking up this fight for more than a year--they’re about the same height, and Jones hits the scales at close to 200 when he’s not in training.

“That would be a challenge,” Jones said. “But is it really too high to reach? Tyson is a considerable amount bigger than I am. I’m not sure I want to be taking any silly chances. I want to go to a Tyson fight and see how Tyson fights in person, up close.

“I want to see the way he delivers his punches, the speed, the power. If I fought him, could I see his punches? I don’t want to go out of this game messed up by Mike Tyson. He’s one of the hardest punchers who have ever passed through boxing, so I can’t take it as a joke. Will I be able to keep myself away from him, will I be able to hit him as much as I have to?”

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Jones was sanguine about a new book, “The New Lords of the Rings,” by Andrew Jennings, who says he found documents proving that fights in the 1988 Seoul Olympics were fixed in favor of Koreans, almost certainly including Jones’ egregious decision loss to a Korean in the gold-medal bout.

“I kind of had that idea they were fixed, anyway,” Jones said. “But if there’s legal documentation, that should give the Amateur Boxing Federation ground to appeal the decision, maybe get me my gold medal. It was obvious I should have won--I was the main one messed up.”

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There is one reason Jones says he thinks Oscar De La Hoya will defeat Julio Cesar Chavez in their June 7 bout at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas--De La Hoya reminds Jones of himself.

“I see him learning from me, throwing some of the same identical combinations after he’s watched me do it,” Jones said, referring to some of the double-left hooks and five- and six-punch combinations De La Hoya has displayed recently.

“In his last fight [against Darryl Tyson], he threw a couple of combinations nobody throws but me. Just like me, I’ve noticed he’s shortened up all his punches, made them a lot quicker and sharper. That’s why one day he will be one of the best fighters on the planet.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Calendar

* Monday: Jorge Eliecer Julio vs. Luis Roman Rolon, bantamweights; Alfred Ankamah vs. Oscar Checa, junior-middleweights; Pond of Anaheim, 7:15 p.m.