Roy Jones Jr. Stinks Out the House with Pay-Per-View Mismatch

Anyone who paid the 40 bucks for Saturday night's one-sided mismatch between light heavyweight champion Roy Jones Jr. and brave, but inept challenger Julio Gonzales deserved to get beat.

First of all, no fight is worth more than $20 on pay-per-view, not even King Kong versus Godzilla, or even Rodan. Twenty years back, fights like Jones Jr. versus Gonzales were on Saturday afternoon's Wild World of Sports. The really big fights were featured on HBO. And exceptional fights, like Ali-Frazier were on closed circuit television in various movie houses and restaurants around the country. In days of old, it was the boy's night out, where fight fans left wifey home while they and their buddies bonded by having a few brews in the company of other manic fight fanatics. I still remember the thrill of sitting in the upper deck of Madison Square Garden with my father and two friends as Muhammad Ali rope-a-doped George Foreman onto his plump posterior on the big screen in a bout that emanated from Zaire.

Then along came those insidious little black boxes set over your home TVs that allowed the greedy promoters to suck the blood money out of the average fight fan's wallets. Creeps like Bob Arum (Saturday night's promoter) and Don King got rich by giving you the luxury of staying home, sitting on your butt and paying through the nose, for any fight they felt could make them a buck.

At least in the beginnings of pay-per-view, you got terrific fights for your entertainment dollar. Not garbage like Jones Jr. playing with Gonzales, like a big bad cat toying with a tiny whittle mouse. But at lease the cat's ultimate intention was giving a poor mouse a final resting place where angels sing and archangels play a melodious tune on big brass harps.

Despite the fact that Jones dropped Gonzales three times, once in the first round, in the fifth round and again in the 12th and final round, he never once attempted to put the finishing touches on the painfully-to-watch (more- so for Gonzales) bout.

Ultimately, the live crowd booed Jones Jr. from the fifth round on, and the decisions of the three judges were hardly in doubt. The only question was would anyone give Gonzales a single round. The big surprise was that one judge actually gave Gonzales two rounds. Judges Robert Byrd and Peter Trematerra had it 119-106 for Jones. And Larry Rozadilla had it a very-generous-for-Gonzales -- 118-107, also in favor of Jones Jr. This scribe had it 119-106 for Jones Jr. Gonzales deserved one round for standing up until the final bell, if for nothing else.

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