A number of people – who clearly have never successfully absorbed the wisdom of the old folk expression beginning “Be careful what you wish for…” – have asked my opinion on the 122 seconds of lickety-split sporting history that comprised the entire Danny Green-Roy Jones Jr fight from last week.

Since I’m now getting nearly as nauseous hearing myself repeating the same thing over and over again as I do watching bank commercials on television, I’ve decided to commit the whole screed to electrophonic print, so I can now simply point to it and say “Lookie over thar” rather than repeatedly running through the exact same, none-too-gripping, ten act operetta until the Earth falls screaming into the Sun.

Being of sharp mind and sound analytical faculties compared to the average zoo baboon, one thing I noticed when people asked me my opinion about the fight, was that it was basically, at very least in part, an excuse to offer theirs.

I’m bound by honour, and a comprehensive inability to keep my trap shut, to say that I thought some of the reaction was slightly bizarre, to, say circus sideshow levels, what with people running around with their arms waving in the air like streamers, hollering about the fight being a bunch of crap, or “fixed”, if not an unholy amalgam of the two.

On that point, I was just saying to a mate recently, that I think in certain cases of big fights, particularly when an Australian is involved, you get a lot of people watching that don’t exactly have anything you’d confuse with an extensive history of following the sport of boxing.

For a fight - big or otherwise - to finish this quickly is not exactly an unprecedented circumstance. That’s the risk you take when you pay for a fight. It’s how boxing goes, sometimes.

Re “fixed”, this is what some folks automatically bellow anytime an event doesn’t go the way they thought it would. It’s just an inevitable and natural reaction for them. I don’t know whether you ought to pay a lot of credence to all that stuff. When a person’s leg kicks out sharply because a doctor has struck them on their knee with a hammer, you don’t immediately assume that person is planning to enter a career in tap-dancing.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND IN THE FOREGROUND

Anyway, here’s what I thought. Jones looked great in his last fight - probably better than he has done for years, and the guy (former world super-middleweight champ, Jeff Lacy) wasn’t a complete bum. But the reality is, it’s been quite a while since Jones was so dominant at light-heavyweight, he basically single-handedly killed the division, and also his chances of big paydays within it.

(Something that took him up to heavyweight, for one fight, where he won a version of the title from John Ruiz, even though Jones at 193-odd pounds wasn’t even at the minimum heavyweight limit. And later took him into the fight with Calzaghe, where he got beat. And the Green fight, for that matter.)

His career slide started around five years ago, when he was KO’d by Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson at light-heavyweight - guys who were ok, but basically couldn’t have held his jock in his heyday at that weight. (The only fight he’d lost before those was on a DQ, and he later avenged that, from memory, with a 1st round KO of the same guy.)

So his jaw wasn’t the same with age, and probably not his speed and movement either. Green always had a puncher’s chance in the fight, which generally isn’t much of a chance, but it’s there, and perhaps moreso in this case for a few reasons.

If Jones was super-serious about winning this, I think he was ill-advised to come in at as low a weight as he did. He weighed a quarter-pound more than Green on the scales, but Green is a naturally bigger guy, and whatever rehydration and solid work at the lasagne buffet Green had put in in the day and a bit since the weigh-in seemed to count, as he looked a fair bit bigger than Jones in the ring.

Jones’s people should have, and I presume would have, known all this. If Jones could get up to a career high 193lb for the Ruiz fight, and the cruiserweight limit is 200 these days, I think he should have been setting himself for at least 185 if not 190, rather than 179-and-change. (If there was an agreement between the two camps that neither would weigh in over 180, I’m unaware of it. This would change things, but then, in theory it shouldn’t have been an official cruiserweight title fight if the upper limit wasn’t 90kg/200lb, and it was for the IBO cruiserweight title, for whatever that’s worth.)

I’m thinking he needed that kind of size and the extra power and punch absorption ability that goes with it, to best deal with Green.

Either he didn’t want to do the kind of weight work and cardio to get that kind of size and stay in shape at his age, or he underestimated Green, and thought he could win based on his skills edge standing on his ear, regardless of the size he came in at. (Or he just didn’t care, is the third possibility.)


ANALYSIS MANY TIMES LONGER THAN THE FIGHT ITSELF

Of the fight itself, I thought in the first 30 seconds that Green looked better prepared than I expected, and looked effectively aggressive, and seemed to be doing better. The punch he caught Jones with hit him high up on the left side of the head, with power, and knocked him silly, which was the knockdown. Some people thought this looked suspicious, or odd, that a punch in that area would have that effect. I’ve seen enough fights to suggest to me that punches that land with power to the temple or the side of the head, if anything, have better KO potential than the ones that land right on the jaw-button, contrary to popular wisdom. This was one of those and it landed pretty good.

From there, after the mandatory eight count, Green attacked, and Jones had his hands up covering his head, but wasn’t throwing anything. After a ref break, Jones, in going back to the ropes, clearly staggered for a moment. I think the ref saw this and didn’t like the looks of it much. Green moved in and continued the barrage. Again, Jones had his gloves up covering his head and face. The ref stopped it.

I thought it wasn’t a horribly early stoppage, but it was just a little early. I think there would have been less controversy and the crowd/viewers would have “got it” better if the ref had allowed another 20 to 30 seconds for Jones to either prove he was gone, or that he had got his head back together somewhat and was capable of continuing for at least a while.

I’m not one to make a big deal out of knocking a slightly early stoppage when the call is made reasonably, and for the right reasons. I’m all for protecting the fighters, and the idea of “Live to fight another day”. That said, I think this was just a little early, but nothing to make a federal case out of.

I think the probability was that Jones had had his bell rung, and wasn’t coming back from it. Green was trying to finish, and if Jones threw a punch after the knockdown, I can’t remember it.

What people forget is, as great as Jones once was, past a certain age and point in their careers, fighters can age very rapidly, and Jones as a fighter had been showing his age for half a decade before this. (The actual age this happens at varies per individual fighter, but generally once you’re in your 40s, you’re pretty much on borrowed time, if not before that point. Bernard Hopkins with a mixture of guile, psychology, experience, and just being a freak in general has been able to fight creditably into his mid-40s, but those guys are certainly the exception rather than the rule. And, even there, Calzaghe beat Hopkins too.)

Green was too big, too young, too strong, and Jones isn’t what he was. If people feel they got “taken in” by the pre-fight hype, well, that’s exactly what pre-fight hype is designed to do in a sense. It’s there to make you want to buy the fight.

WILDLY WAFTY WAFFLY WHIFFLE-BALL SPECULATION

I guess the question mark is how seriously Jones took the fight. Did he think he had it in the bag, and all he had to do was show up vaguely in shape? Did he see this purely as his “gold watch” retirement fight, and only showed up for the money? (And I believe the money would have been pretty good.) Was it something more “sinister” than that?

I have no idea which of these, if any, is correct, and nor does anyone who doesn’t personally know Jones or have some sort of in with one, if not both, fighters’ camps, no matter what various loudmouth self-appointed sharpsters think they know.

I have very little doubt from viewing the fight a couple of times, that Green had serious intentions of winning, and had come to fight. If Jones wasn’t 100% committed to the fight, Green didn’t seem to have any inkling of it.

I don’t buy that it was any sort of “fix”, or to put the same thing slightly differently, I don’t agree that anyone could infer that from the fight footage with any conclusiveness whatsoever.

Whether or not Jones saw this as a big payout last fight, I’ve got no way of knowing. He sure looked like he got clouted a good one though.

OTHER THAN DOWNHILL, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

All I can say beyond that is that Green as a cruiserweight is something of a bizarre concept. I’m not familiar with the idea of the champion of a division weighing in at 9kg under that division’s upper limit. The cruiserweight division is not now, or traditionally, a talent-studded weight class. But there are other guys in it, who probably have a good bump in experience, if not skill-set as well, over Danny Green, and who are really what used to be called “small heavyweights”. (Whether they’ve got Green’s heart and will is another matter, but if they’re 9kg heavier and can punch and take a punch, there’s only so far that heart and will can take you. Green’s a better boxer than he used to be, but Floyd Mayweather Jr he’s not.)

Green’s not a small heavyweight. He weighed in at 179-and-change, which is basically four pounds over the light-heavy limit. He’s a light-heavyweight who apparently just doesn’t want to have to think about cutting weight.

I guess this will only be a problem if he wants to mount some sort of campaign at cruiserweight. All the above makes me think he doesn’t. I think Green and his camp are probably after whatever bigger money fights they can squeeze in before he finally calls it quits, which at his age, can’t be a lot more than three or four years away, tops.

They’d want the Bernard Hopkins fight, which may work out the same way for Danny as the Jones fight - he gets another legend on his record - or may be a poisoned chalice. Hopkins is devilishly tricky, has an enormous experience edge on Green in every way (and I’m not just talking about age or rounds fought - his knowledge edge and smarts in using it has bamboozled and demoralised guys a lot more talented and achieved than D. Green), and will do anything that works, legal, borderline or dirty, to get in his opponent’s head and suck the fight out of them.

I don’t seriously believe that Hopkins would accept this fight at cruiserweight. Although he’s fought comfortably and strongly at light-heavyweight, he’s basically a great former middleweight champion who, at his age, can’t be bothered about thinking about cutting the weight, and doesn’t have to cut it to come in fit.

I think he’ll make Green fight him at 175lb, tops, and he’ll have the whip hand in the negotiations to do it, because Green needs Hopkins a lot more than Hopkins needs him. That takes the size factor, and to an extent the strength factor out of it. Not to mention it would get in Green’s head (being the guy who fights at a weight class he’s essentially too small for, because he doesn’t want to cut a few pounds to light-heavy), which is perfectly in line with the usual Hopkins modus operandi.

Then the question mark on Hopkins is the age thing. So far, it really hasn’t been a factor in his “Twilight Years/Zone” fights, (although he would have had a better chance with Calzaghe a few years earlier) but, as I mentioned before at this kind of age, generally when fighters do start to show the effects of age, it marches in at double-quick time. This is purely in the “who knows?” category. When/if he fights Green it may be the proverbial “one fight too many”, but there’s no way of saying for sure.

The other big money fight available for Green is obviously Anthony Mundine. Apparently Mundine’s now got this conceptual comedy skit going where, in order to avoid anyone dangerous at a given weight class, he keeps running to lighter and lighter divisions. For the purposes of his next fight, he’s a junior-middleweight, apparently. If he keeps this up, in a few years’ time, he’s going to have to fight under an electron microscope for people to see it.

Although “The Man” mouthed off about fighting Green in the aftermath of the Jones fight, it must be generally accepted by now that this means nothing, as Mundine regularly, and for quite some time, has mouthed off about a variety of big name guys, none of whom he’s actually got around to fighting.

Obviously Mundine must be aware that Green-Mundine II is a very big money fight - depending on what slips happen between cup and lip, it could be promoted into a bigger money fight than their first one, which coined it in - but it has to be admitted that preparing to fight a guy who campaigns at cruiserweight by moving from super-middleweight to middleweight to junior-middleweight is, at best, a little bit odd, and seems to be the kind of career path that Wrongway Feldman would have come up with.

I don’t think there’s any way Green would take this fight at super-middleweight again. (Forget anything lower than that.) He would hold the whip hand in negotiations in this case. The best Mundine might be able to get out of him is a catchweight just over the light-heavyweight limit, say around 178 or 179. If Green won’t cut to 175 right now, I can’t see any way he’ll do it for Mundine’s convenience. A weight like that takes young Anthony way out of his comfort zone.

Green’s a better and more experienced fighter now than he was when he fought Mundine (and he’d want to be.) Mundine now, as opposed to then, well it’s pure guesswork, given the level of opposition he’s fought. I can’t say from what I’ve seen of him that he’s significantly declined, (you can’t really tell, against bums and shoeshine punchers) and there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume he’s significantly improved.

Some folks are saying he’s slipped. Well, he got hit a lot against Daniel Geale. I don’t know what that tells anyone exactly. Every appearance suggested that he wasn’t running or covering up against Geale because he knew that Daniel Geale didn’t have anything to throw that could actually hurt him. Team Mundine wouldn’t have taken that fight if they’d thought Daniel Geale was holding anything to hurt him. Anyone who thinks Mundine would fight the same way as the Geale fight against Danny Green in a rematch must think boxing is exclusively what the gift-wrap counter people do at Myer prior to the holiday season.

But, if the Green guys think that the weight limit could be a significant influence in changing things around from the first fight, I think they’re probably on the right track. The higher that Green can come in, short of him coming in with a beer-gut the size of Unca Leapster’s, the better for him. Mundine is realistically a super-middleweight at his heaviest effective fighting weight. That’s really as high as we’ve seen him fight at. Beyond that limit, I think he’s just putting on weight for no demonstrable advantage.

[The case with Roy Jones was different. He was able to fight effectively against a limited but larger opponent at 193 pounds. Mundine has never fought a significant fight over 168, and has instead cut back to 160 (and now apparently to 154) since then. Incidentally, I can’t see how all this ping-ponging around in weight can possibly be helpful to an athlete of Mundine’s age. Let alone to try and blow back up to, say 180 pounds or that vicinity, for a Green rematch. That sounds like a recipe for ageing as a boxer at a tremendous rate.]

Whether an edge in size and power, plus the improvement in skill-set and experience since the first fight, would be enough for Green to cover the gulf in speed and effectiveness revealed between the two in Mundine-Green I is up for grabs. It’s the question that you sell the fight on really, apart from the personalities involved. But you’d have to at least note and acknowledge the possibility now.

Mundine’s apparent flakiness in career-path, and his steadfast determination to avoid serious major opposition must make people at least consider the possibility that Green has a better chance the second time.

Whether the fight will ever happen is at least as much a matter for speculation, I guess. I can’t see how either can ultimately ignore the money this fight would generate, but Mundine has been avoiding serious money-making fights with name opposition for years. However, at some point, I’ve always felt that when Team Mundine feel they’ve worked the “Bum of the Month” club mine down to the last seam of pocket change, they were always going to have to take at least one “dangerous” fight as Anthony’s last-shot “gold watch” fight. It wouldn’t shock me if Danny Green turned out to be the one. But, as with any consideration of Mundine being involved with the prospect of an even vaguely competitive opponent in a fight, it pays to take an “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach.

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