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Roy Jones Jr. wants to fight on despite injury

Fighters Network
09
Sep

Roy Jones Jr. suggested he might finally retire following a decision win against journeyman Rodney Moore last month in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida in which he suffered a torn right bicep.

But Jones has long rebuffed any suggestions he might retire, including apparently his own words of advice to himself, and he recently told TMZ he is no longer uncertain about the future and wants to continue fighting “as early as December” and “possibly January.”

That contrasted with his remarks to the Pensacola News Journal following the win against Moore, when he sounded as though he was ready to embark on a new chapter. “It may have been the last one,” Jones told the paper. “And I’m not mad if it is because I had a great time. All my kids got to see daddy fight one more time. Everybody in Pensacola got to see Roy fight one more time. I knew it might be close to the end.”

He later acknowledged that sustaining a bicep injury in the manner he did was a sign that it was time to soon move on. But Jones made it clear in the dressing room that night that he will decide when it’s time to walk away. “Nobody around me is going to tell me when to stop fighting,” he said. “Nobody told me to start but God. Nobody is going to tell me to stop.”



Jones (64-9, 46 knockouts) was photographed for the TMZ story atop a fishing boat with a bulky brace on his right arm. He was smiling and in good spirits. But Jones has been relegated to the fringes of the sport ever since he lost three straight fights to Danny Green, Bernard Hopkins and Denis Lebedev, two by knockout from 2009-2011.

The 47-year-old fought MMA fighter Vyron Phillips in March in a bizarre fan-contest that masqueraded as a boxing match, stopping him in a two rounds of a scheduled six-round fight. That came three months after he was viciously knocked out by former cruiserweight titleholder Enzo Maccarinelli in the fourth round in December of 2015.

All of these results make it easy to forget that Jones was once the best fighter on the planet, an athletic marvel who won titles at middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight and was voted by the BWAA the “Fighter of the Decade” for the 1990s.

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