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Roy Jones Jr.’s Long Goodbye

thelab.bleacherreport.com · 813 words · saved by 1 readers

Back in 1996, when Muhammad Ali went down to Pensacola, Florida, for an event with Roy Jones Jr. and spoke to thousands of schoolchildren bused in from around the county, Ali asked to go where Jones Jr. trained so they could playfully spar a few rounds. Even on good days, Ali’s speech was pretty limited, but he was still strong enough to move around and exercise back then. After Ali and Jones Jr. had circled one another in the ring and only really feigned jabs, at one point Ali smiled and gestured at Jones Jr. that he’d spotted a weakness. Ali imitated and exaggerated the flaw he’d discovered in Jones Jr.’s jab and left them both in fits of laughter at his shrewdness. Jones Jr. nodded after he’d caught his breath and confessed, “Yeah, you found it. But I’m so fast I can get away with it.” And then, one day some years later, he wasn’t, and he couldn’t. “Old fighters don’t fade away,” the late Budd Schulberg wrote. “They just slowly die in front of our eyes.” Jones Jr., whom Schulberg de

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