By Don Caputo

The clucking and crowing fill the morning air on the ranch. We’re in Pensacola, Florida, and the pale glow of the freshly risen sun has brought out in the grass and trees every imaginable shade of green. Light, dark, emerald, verdant, moss, they all jump out at you and, as though painted by a Cézanne or a Monet, the richness of the colours create a scene of stunning beauty and blissful tranquillity.

It’s feeding time. Dressed neck to ankle in a shiny, stylish looking black and white tracksuit, a well built man gripping a large white bucket in one hand and methodically flinging food to the ground with the other, is moving gently around the spread inhabited by his army of fighting cocks. He looks at home…he looks at peace.

This is where on January 16, thirty-six years ago, arguably the most talented boxer of the 90’s was born. This is where parents Roy and Carol raised him and his younger brothers and sisters. This is where, at the tender age of six, he was taught not only how to fight, but to win. The man looking after the roosters is Roy Jones Jr.

As a child, Roy Jr would sometimes watch a bird he loved fight to a vicious death in local cock fighting tournaments that he and his father, Roy Sr, regularly partook in. Tough love they call it, as the young Jones was slapped in the face with the first of many harsh, perhaps even cruel lessons that ultimately shaped him for greatness. No bird, no man, should ever enter a fight without total commitment.

Mr. Invincible, Mr. Unstoppable, Mr. Unknockoutable, is lying flat on his back and looking up at the ceiling lights through a thick fog of confusion. Like a large, weighty apple plummeting to the earth from its branch, his head and body slam violently into the blue canvas after the ‘real bad lick’ his premonition had told him was coming crashed into his unprotected chin.

Crack…eyes immediately glazed, he hits the deck with an almighty thud. The echo of the fall is simultaneously met with a stunned silence in the crowd accompanied by a few scattered gasps – it’s odd how a silence can sometimes be deafening. Roy Jr gallantly hauls his wrecked body up at the count of nine, but, unable to reclaim his scrambled senses, the ultimate price is paid for entering into battle without the unwavering commitment that he himself had always expected...no...demanded from his beloved roosters.

The lesson that should have been indelibly etched into his memory, after fifteen years of nigh perfection in the ring, had been forgotten.

Those fifteen years, it has to be said, couldn’t have gone much better for the man oft-referred to as the Michael Jordan of boxing. In fact, had he walked away from the sport just a year earlier, mutterings of him belonging alongside such immortal figures as Henry Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson as one of the best to ever lace ‘em up would indubitably have grown louder and louder with each turn of the globe.

Such recognition, however, was never something that Roy Jr. sought with any great urgency or, indeed, even particularly craved. Casting a somewhat critical eye over his career, there is only sporadic evidence that the fighter blessed with such superlative physical gifts had any desire whatsoever to test himself in the way a true great should in order to stand apart from his peers.

But hey, it’s his life on the line, right? If, like thousands of others, buying a new brand of aftershave is the biggest risk you take in your life, how can you then in turn criticize a man for not daring to be great when, by the very nature of his profession, he runs the very real risk of humiliation, serious injury, and yes, even demise each and every time he steps between the ropes? Come to think about it, what do most of us actually know about taking risks?

Roy Jr. is, and always has been, acutely aware of the darker realities of prize fighting. In fact, many are so close to him he can occasionally feel the chilling warmth of their breath pressing against his skin. He understood from the very beginning that it’s a lottery and on any given night his numbers could come up. He understood that, in order to survive in boxing’s treacherous waters, he had to be smart. And above all else, he understood that the ‘sweet science’ is a business.

Remember, in 1995 he looked on as close friend and rival, Gerald McClellan, was unmercifully ravaged by the very ring in which he ply’s his trade. We’ve since wondered why he was rarely in a competitive match up, why so many of his title defences looked like glorified sparing sessions, and, as a champion of such incomparable abilities, why he habitually chose to follow the paths of least resistance. Well, it is plausible to surmise that the tragedy of what happened to his friend a decade ago is, to some extent, at the root of why his became a career characterized by reluctance and caution.

If presented with the opportunity to make millions fighting postman, policeman, and a bin man, why should you decline? After all, for a man whose talents as a fighter are only matched by his shrewdness as a businessman, not cashing in would be incredibly stupid. Especially when you consider that what’s happened to him in two of his last three outings could have happened at any point.

Success, if you’re not careful, can breed complacency. Roy Jr sat at the peak of Mount Olympus for so long that, in retrospect, it was almost inevitable one of the countless reaching hands desperate to take his throne would eventually get a strong enough hold of his leg to pull him tumbling back down to earth. As soon as he achieved all of his goals and the passion he had for the sport began to dilute, they pounced from the shadows to knock him from his perch. They were there…waiting.

The final hour has come, and Roy Jr is no longer playing it safe. He is looking to go out in a blaze of glory, and if he can muster enough of his old self to beat the great Bernard Hopkins for a second time next year, his vision may just become a reality.