If it wasn’t enough for Oleksandr Usyk to beat every heavyweight around him, and then do it twice, it could be argued that his greatness lies in the lengths to which people go to create a challenge for him.
In other words, because he is winning fights too easily, and because nobody in his era can possibly match him, all we are now left with when it comes to Usyk are fantasy fights. To find a match for him, we must close our eyes and go back in time. We must imagine. We must get creative.
Forget Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, and Daniel Dubois, all of whom Usyk has beaten – twice. The real match for Usyk, according to recent discourse, is a 56-year-old from Pensacola, Florida who goes by the name Roy Jones Jnr.
Though more commonly seen in corners these days, Jones was thrown into the Usyk conversation this week in the context of a fantasy fight and for days fans argued about the outcome of said fantasy fight. Most knew it was an exercise in futility, of course, but, like any pound-for-pound debate, there was an excitement generated by virtue of there being no chance that they could ever be wrong (or right). In fact, the passion for it was palpable, infectious. In Jones, for once they had a fighter – or an image of a fighter – who could pose Usyk problems and perhaps even beat him. They no longer had to pretend that Daniel Dubois might be the man to do that on account of him being strong and “wronged”, nor did they have to listen to Tyson Fury’s desperate attempts to secure a third fight with Usyk and force themselves to think, Well, they do say third time’s a charm. Instead, by imagining Usyk in the ring with Jones, they could finally picture the Ukrainian challenged by someone of his standard and given problems. In doing so, they consigned Usyk to the realm of fantasy, accepting that he is too good for mere mortals and that essentially his work here is done.
Usyk would argue otherwise, of course. Ask him and he will tell you he still has two fights left; a belief he reiterated after stopping Dubois at Wembley Stadium a fortnight ago. The problem is, it’s all well and good wanting to fight two more times, but who is now worthy of sharing a ring with him? Of all the names mentioned, only Joseph Parker seems deserving of the opportunity, but even that, as a fight, does little for Usyk’s overall legacy. The other names offered to Usyk include Fury, Joshua and Derek Chisora, each of whom Usyk has not only beaten but beaten well enough to ensure any subsequent fight is tantamount to following a bath with a shower: a waste of water, a waste of time. It is why their names are now greeted with eye rolls or shrugs whenever mentioned alongside Usyk’s and it is why poor Moses Itauma, a 20-year-old with just 12 pro fights to his name, is being thrown at Usyk by Turki Alalshikh, a man whose impatience is dwarfed only by his power.
In short, they are running out of opponents for Usyk. He has, like Roy Jones before him, become almost too good for his own good. Now even decent fighters, like Parker or Dubois, are dismissed as pointless exercises, while major rivals, like Fury and Joshua, quickly become former champions and contenders in Usyk’s presence.
Roy Jones can probably relate, sympathise. He might even claim a similar thing happened in his own career and that it was a dearth of competition, plus a need to be challenged, that led him to heavyweight to fight John Ruiz in 2003. That jump to heavyweight was greater than Usyk’s, simply because Jones started as a middleweight and leapt from light-heavyweight, not cruiserweight, yet it was driven by the same desire to be tested and to make history. In Jones’s case, too, it came relatively late on in his career and he ultimately paid the price for going up and coming down again when, back at light-heavyweight, he was knocked out in two rounds by Antonio Tarver in 2004.
Suddenly, in his efforts to manage his superhuman ability, he had been reminded that he was human after all. He was, in the end, beaten not by Father Time, as so many are, but by his own brilliance and ambition. The brilliance made the majority of his fights mismatches, whereas Jones’s ambition never allowed him to rest or be content with what he had achieved.
In some respects that explains why Jones, with a pro record of 66-10 (47 KOs), continued fighting into his 50s and why his last fight was only two years ago (an eight-round loss against mixed martial artist Anthony Pettis). It also explains why when he discusses a boxer as great as Oleksandr Usyk he does so with the fire and intensity of old, as though unable to fathom a fighter ever eclipsing his own greatness.
“I think he’s a great as well,” Jones said in Bournemouth, England last weekend. “To be able to clean out two divisions the way he’s cleaned them out. He cleaned out the cruiserweight division; now he’s cleaned out the heavyweight division.
“I mean, how can you not say he’s one of the greatest? Undisputed cruiserweight champ, undisputed heavyweight champ, what more could you ask for? And he is still undefeated, by the way. Nobody’s beaten him.
“He’s not just going around cherry-picking. He’s fighting whoever they put in front of him, in their hometown. He’s in the UK, in Dubois’ country. So you can’t take away from Usyk what Usyk is doing.”
Though respectful of Usyk, and full of praise for him, it will never be easy for a fighter like Jones to gush about a peer, whether older than him or, in Usyk’s case, 18 years younger than him. Because while the body might soften, and so too the mind, a fighter’s muscle memory remains and their self-belief, no matter their age, refuses to leave. Even if Jones can both see and appreciate greatness, which of course he can, never will it be measured favourably against his own.
“I would have found a way to beat him,” he said of Usyk. “That’s who I was. I was not losing to nobody in my prime. I kind of know what I would have done [to win], but I’m not going to express that because that’s for them to figure out, not me.”
Regardless of how that fantasy fight would pan out – and it really doesn’t matter – the mere mention of it last weekend in Bournemouth served to do two things. One, it led to new fans of the sport being educated by older ones as to the genius of Roy Jones in his prime, and two, it cemented the greatness of Oleksandr Usyk, if only because he was now revered the same way as Jones, mentioned in the same breath as Jones, and backed by some to beat Jones in an imaginary world. It wasn’t even that it was Jones, either. It could have been anyone. All that matters is that Usyk, 24-0 (15 KOs), has reached the stage now where he has transcended what is there in front of him, and what he has already conquered, and is now being spoken about in abstract, hypothetical terms. If that isn’t a mark of both greatness and a job well done, I don’t know what is.
