Roy Jones Jr

Bio

Roy Jones Jr is, for a stretch of the 1990s, about as close as boxing has come to a man who could not be hit. Fast hands, absurd reflexes, and the confidence to fight with his hands by his waist against people who had every reason to make him pay for it — and could not.

He won world titles at middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight, and that last one is the bit people still struggle with. In 2003 he moved all the way up from 175lbs to take the WBA heavyweight title from John Ruiz, becoming the first former middleweight champion in over a century to win a version of the heavyweight crown. Then he came straight back down to light heavyweight and won there again. Nobody does that. Nobody had done it for a hundred years.

Before any of it there was Seoul in 1988, where he battered his way to the Olympic final and was handed one of the most notorious decisions in the sport's history. He left with a silver medal and a grievance, and the amateur game has been arguing about it ever since.

The tail end of his career went on longer than his admirers wanted, as these things tend to. It does not touch what came before. At his peak, between roughly 1993 and 2003, Roy Jones Jr was operating at a level the rest of the sport simply had no answer to, and there are plenty of good judges who will tell you he is the finest pound-for-pound fighter of his generation.

These days he trains fighters and talks about them, and he does both with the bluntness of a man who has nothing left to prove. When he tells you a fighter has a ceiling, it is worth listening — he has stood in with enough of them to know.