No fountain of youth in boxing

There is no language spoken on the face of the earth in which you can be kind when you tell a man he is old and should stop pretending he is young … Old fighters, who go beyond the limits of their age, resent it when you tell them they’re through … what he had is gone. The pride isn’t. The gameness isn’t. The insolent faith in himself is still there … but the pride and the gameness and that insolent faith get in the way … He was marvelous, but he isn’t anymore. -- Jimmy Cannon

The incomparable Sugar Ray Robinson was 34, in the early stages of a comeback many had advised him not to launch, one day removed from a one-sided loss to Ralph “Tiger” Jones, when Cannon authored those words for a column that appeared in the Jan. 20, 1955, editions of the New York Journal American.

Robinson held the middleweight championship of the world five times, three of his title reigns coming after Cannon advised him in print that he was through. So Robinson had the last laugh, right? Well, not quite. The greatest boxer, pound for pound, ever to grace his brutal sport was a shadow of his former self in the latter stages of a 25-year, 202-bout career that ended in 1965, fighting in tank towns for short money and losing to journeymen who in another time would have deemed themselves fortunate to tote Sugar Ray’s spit bucket.

There are more than a few boxing writers and columnists who look at Roy Jones Jr. and Felix Trinidad, Saturday night opponents in Madison Square Garden, and see a couple of old men, in boxing terms, pretending to be young. Like Cannon, they have written that Jones and Trinidad, two future Hall of Famers, should face the future by acknowledging the harsh reality of the present. Better to leave their many fans with warm memories of a glorious past than the chilling sight of prodigious talents gone to ruin.

But Jones, who turned 39 on Wednesday, and Trinidad, who blew out 35 candles on his birthday cake on Jan. 10, are insistent that the natural laws of diminishing returns do not apply to them. You say that Jones (51-4, 38 KOs), perhaps the most physically gifted boxer since Robinson wowed our daddies and grandfathers with his stunning mix of grace and power, is only 2-3 in his last five bouts, and that two of those losses were emphatic knockouts? That his modest two-fight winning streak came against second-tier opponents (Prince Badi Ajamu and Anthony Hanshaw) on the not-so-brightly-lit stages of Boise, Idaho, and Biloxi, Miss.?

“I am Superman,” Jones said with the Robinsonesque insolence we all recall. “I can get a title shot any time I want. I know I can beat 110 percent of the champions out there right now. I just have to be motivated.”

And what of Trinidad (42-2, 35 KOs), whose inactivity suggests he will enter the ring rustier than the sunken hull of the Titanic? “Tito” has logged only four fights in the last 6½ years, and he is 2-2 in those, beaten upon like a kettle drum by Bernard Hopkins and Winky Wright. He hasn’t thrown a punch for pay since Wright jabbed him silly in winning a one-sided, unanimous decision on May 14, 2005. How can he possibly reach back in time to grab some of his lost magic?

“I want to be remembered as a great champion,” Trinidad said of his decision to come back. “I still have my power. I want to fight and I am ready to fight.”

From a purely business standpoint, of course, it really doesn’t matter whether Jones and Trinidad are blowing more smoke than the corroded exhaust pipe of a 1958 Edsel. Madison Square Garden executives Charles and James Dolan, the same geniuses who concluded that Isiah Thomas is doing a great job of directing the New York Knicks and that Anucha Browne Sanders is a lying, scheming hussy, have convinced themselves that nostalgia-loving patrons will pack the seats like they would for, say, a reunion concert featuring Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Bobby Rydell.

If there is anything that defies logic about this matchup of golden oldies, which is taking place at least six years past its natural expiration date, it’s that the Dolans have slapped a $15,000 price tag on premium ringside seats. And, no, that’s not a scalpers’ markup; it’s the face value of tickets reserved for the obscenely rich and the incredibly gullible.

That some of those seats actually have been sold says more about the vagaries of human nature than the shared belief by Jones and Trinidad that the recent past is not prologue, and that they can dial up past glories as easily as they claim they can.

It is my belief that aging fighters continue to lace up the gloves for one of three reasons, or some combination thereof. It might be because they don’t know how to do anything else, or because they need the money, or because they miss the adulation.

Given the copious amounts of money Jones and Trinidad have earned with their fists over the course of their careers, it may be presumed that paying next month’s utility bill is not a paramount consideration for either man. But for those who have scaled the mountain, who have been fawned and fussed over like the athletic royalty they once were, being a used-to-be must be grating to their oversized egos.

Of Evander Holyfield, another over-the-hill ex-champion still chasing an impossible dream despite all evidence to the contrary, I noted that his persistence in pressing on owed not so much to his belief he again can become undisputed heavyweight champion as to the costs attached to maintaining his massive Fairburn, Ga., mansion and supporting his nine children, five of them born out of wedlock to four women.

A particularly ardent Holyfield fan – and, I must admit, I too am one of those – emailed me with the message that I should “stop being a hater.” He also wondered what, exactly, I have accomplished in my life that remotely approaches the success that Commander Vander has achieved in his.

Few of us, myself included, can even imagine what it must have been like to be Evander Holyfield in his prime, a giant straddling his sport like the Colossus of Rhodes. But acknowledging the futility of Holyfield’s present circumstances does not make me a hater so much as a realist. Time waits for no man, not even the great and the gifted, and its march is inexorable.

I thought of that diehard Holyfield supporter last week, when I received a telephone call from one Tommy Smalls. Smalls wanted a contact number for Holyfield because, he said, he could deliver Riddick Bowe.

“What kind of business do you think I could do for a fourth fight between Bowe and Holyfield?” he asked.

“I think some people would pay to see it,” I told him. “And a lot more people would criticize you and them for even considering it.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Smalls, who apparently was only interested in the first part of my reply. “Now, do you think I should charge $29.95 (for a pay-per-view subscription) or $24.95?”

Smalls, not putting all his eggs in the same basket, also would consider staging some sort of Brownsville round-robin involving the faded remains of Bowe, Mike Tyson and Shannon Briggs. He didn’t say anything about attempting to make George Foreman-Larry Holmes, but I wouldn’t put it past him. It is human nature to hold on tight to what we know, to loosen our grasp on the familiar only when it becomes absolutely necessary.

What that says about athletes who think they can defy the aging process, or about fans willing to pay big bucks to extend their memories of what once was and hopefully can be again, could keep a platoon of psychologists occupied indefinitely.

I recently finished reading “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium,” a compelling self-analysis by former LSU football player-turned-author John Ed Bradley. Bradley describes what it is like to run through the tunnel of college football’s most raucous venue on a Saturday night, to soak in the applause and the love, and what it is like for those when the cheering stops and the rest of their lives begin.

For many, the natural instinct is to forever remain frozen in time, a hard-bodied 20-year-old star admired by men and sought after by beautiful women. But Bradley never wanted to stay rooted in that place even as the years took him further and further from it, which is why he made a conscious decision to live in the present and look to the future instead of constantly looking back, wistfully. For decades he avoided his old teammates and coaches because he knew that remaining in contact would keep him a prisoner of a period that is never anyone’s to retain indefinitely. But even for Bradley, now pushing 50, the pull of the past proved too irresistible to ignore.

Most of us cannot comprehend what it must be like for athletic prodigies who are forced to accept the fact that the best parts of themselves have too short a shelf life. For all the perks and the privileges of their temporary station, they are widely thought to be ancient, washed-up and irrelevant by their mid-30s, at a time when many other professionals, whose income is not tied to how fast they run, how high they jump or how hard they hit, are just entering their most productive years.

Was it the despair of knowing he could never again be what he had been that drove Diego Corrales to drive his motorcycle at terrifying speeds down that lonely stretch of highway? Can early death, suicide by recklessness if not by actual intent, be preferable to a premier athlete’s facing the irrevocable loss of his skills and identity?

As for Saturday’s fight, who wins and who doesn’t is not so much what interests me as the motivation that obliged Jones and Trinidad to re-enter the arena. My feeling is that Jones would have beaten Trinidad then, he beats him now and he’d beat him when both are getting around with the use of walkers.

Trinidad’s rationale for returning is easier to understand. He is a Puerto Rican national hero, placed upon the sort of pedestal that only those who go through life draped in a flag can comprehend. And there is the added incentive of erasing the taint of that embarrassing, ineffectual performance against Wright.

“The fans have driven me to be back in boxing,” Trinidad said of the clamor he hears from his worshipping countrymen whenever he goes out in public. They are always telling me to fight. Everywhere I went people were screaming for me to come back. So I am back.”

For Jones, there is more to it. At his best, he was an enigma wrapped in a riddle, a preening peacock who might even have been nearly as good as he claimed to be, although his career decisions suggested that on the inside he cultivated at least a seed of doubt.

Last April, when Jones seemingly was undecided whether he wanted to continue fighting, former HBO Sports president Seth Abraham recalled Jones’ struggle to come to grips with the burden of his talent.

“His drive was to do things that were of interest to him, but not necessarily to fight the very best middleweights, super middleweights and light heavyweights who were out there,” Abraham said. “I think Roy’s legacy in the sport absolutely will suffer because he chose not to do everything he could to make himself as great as he might have been.”

Now that Jones’ window of opportunity to fulfill his vast potential has been lowered to a narrow slit, he seems eager to make up to lost time. The same guy who refused to go to Europe to fight Dariusz Michalczewski, who he easily would have beaten, now claims to be willing to volunteer for any and every dangerous assignment.

“I would fight Glen Johnson, Antonio Tarver, Chad Dawson – I don’t care,” Jones declared. “My probation period is over. Line them up and I’ll go to them. I don’t care where it’s at. If we have to go to London to fight Joe (Calzaghe), if we have to go to Tampa to fight Tarver, or if we have to go to Miami, to fight Glen, I don’t care. My name is Roy Jones Jr.”

If only he had come to that recognition when it truly mattered, when he stood at the intersection of destiny and opportunity, Jones might have gone well beyond that which he already has accomplished. He might have become boxing’s answer to Michael Jordan, or Babe Ruth, or Pele. He might already be standing on the plateau where only the ghost of Sugar Ray Robinson resides.

Which is not to say that fighters who have gone around the bend are incapable of delivering thrills. Ricardo Mayorga and Fernando Vargas put on a pretty good show recently, proving, if nothing else, that a competitive bout can be staged if both combatants have receded at more or less the same rate.

Perhaps that will happen again on Saturday night. But for fans who cling to the belief that Jones and Trinidad are all that they ever were, there’s probably a Frankie Avalon CD collecting dust in the discount bin of the music store in their neighborhood mall. Some people always are going to see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear.

Hey, Venus, make our wish come true …