Boxing: Jones' arrogance ready to confront weight of history

The names of icons of modern sport trip off Roy Jones Jnr's lips so lightly it as though he is calling the roll of his family and those few friends who have survived his increasing isolation out on the ranch land in Florida he gives over to killer dogs and roosters who could mutilate a man.

Names like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and the Williams tennis sisters. He says they are his kind of people. They do not just beat their opponents. They make them feel small. They push them into corners which allow just the one option to quit. No, they do not merely beat their opponents. They hollow them out.

His eyes shine when he talks about such performers. He chooses to call them The Intimidators, and long ago he elected himself to their company. He has a fair point.

Jones does his work like a surgeon, a showy one with a touch of De Sade. It shows as he goes into tonight's potentially historic fight with the World Boxing Association's heavyweight champion, John Ruiz, with a late, blazing effort to intellectualise the arrogance which makes him believe that he can do something that was last achieved 106 years ago when Bob Fitzsimmons, a former middleweight champion, beat Jim Corbett for the heavyweight title.

He says that the sheer range of his talent will melt down the physical advantage announced at this week's official weigh-in when Jones, the reigning undisputed light-heavyweight champion, came in at 13st 11lbs – 33lb lighter than Ruiz. Jones suggests he will make the difference look like a butter mountain exposed to the sun.

Says Jones: "I will fight Ruiz as I see him, round by round. I don't need any great strategy to overcome the weight problem. All I need is to do what I do, what I've trained myself to do. In the first round he will probably try to take me down right there. But I'm cool to deal with that. I'll see what happens and see what I can find to beat him. I'll work it out as a I go along, picking the moments to attack him in a way which strips him down. If I need to attack all out, I'll do it. Or maybe I'll need to box at certain points, to show my skill, to intimidate with that speed and skill. Whatever I need to do, I'll do it."

His eyes race as he speaks with staccato, machine-gun delivery. He is edgy no doubt, because even self-declared genius cannot totally ignore history and he has analysed all the times superb fighters like Billy Conn and Archie Moore and Bob Foster have attempted to ensnare heavyweight champions with their skill. The consensus within the trade, one shaped most tellingly by Foster who says that the weight of each of the punches thrown against him by Joe Frazier (ko 2nd round), Muhammad Ali (ko 8th round), Doug Jones (ko 8th), and Ernie Terrell (ko 7th) arrived as a new shock to his body and his mind.

Jones insists that something vital is being overlooked. There was never a light-heavyweight who moved so fast and hit so hard as Roy Jones Jnr. It is also true that John Ruiz is not Smokin' Joe or The Greatest – and maybe not even Doug Jones or Ernie Terrell.

"Really," Jones says, "the historic background of this fight is the only thing I think about. Because I know the rest. I know John Ruiz, I've seen him fight and I know myself. I respect John for both his size and who he is. He came from a tough situation. He was really put in as someone who was supposed to be beat upon. But he's been winning – and winning for a reason. You watch him box and he's always in your face and he's a very strong puncher. He's got knock-out power with both hands. What more could I ask for when I looked around for a new challenge. I'm 34 years old and I was bored with winning the old way. It was too easy. So I had to make something more difficult, while all the time knowing I would still win."

There is no doubt genuine intrigue surrounding tonight's fight at the Thomas and Mack Center, and even Jones recognises that overcoming the greatest weight divide between a heavyweight and a light-heavyweight challenger since Primo Carnera, the Ambling Alp, outscaled Tommy Loughran by 86 pounds, is going to take an awful lot of movement and hand-speed and nerve.

The extent of the challenge facing Jones is underlined maybe most dramatically by the experience of Michael Spinks – the one light-heavyweight champion to close the gap when he twice beat the formidable Larry Holmes in the mid-80s for the big men's title. Spinks, who once admitted to curling up on a couch and crying in fear of what might happen when a big heavyweight landed a blow on a head supported by such a "skinny neck", now says that indeed Jones is good enough, fast enough and strong enough to carry off Ruiz's title.

"Roy should exploit his speed from the word go. I boxed a lot of heavyweights in the gym when I was a light-heavyweight and I came to like it. Basically, my hands were faster than theirs and I'm talking about Tony Tubbs, and Tim Witherspoon, who would be champions, and I even boxed with Ali. You use the speed first and then turn on the power. You don't take a punch flush or go punch-for-punch with those big guys. You try to take as little of the punch as you can by rolling with it.

"You can't take too much from a heavyweight. You can't try to block it all and take in on the arms, either. But you can use reflexes and speed to offset the strength."

Spinks was no doubt an outstanding champion, a man of subtle ring instincts who toyed with the towering white hope Gerry Cooney before putting him away with quite brutal force. But Cooney wasn't a great one and he lacked the resilience and dourness of spirit of a Ruiz. There was also another night for Spinks in that same ring in Atlantic City. It was when Mike Tyson was at his most venomous – and Spinks lasted just 91 seconds, his eyes wide with apprehension before Tyson landed the first clubbing blow.

So if the Spinks file provides the most hopeful support for Jones' attack on history, how significantly can it weighed. Not hugely. If you delve a little further into the file you see that many are still convinced that Holmes won both his fights against Spinks, and that the ringside judges might have agreed if he had not called the Nevada Athletic Commission "a bunch of drunks." Nor did it help that he claimed the legendary Rocky Marciano was not fit to wear Larry Holmes' jockstrap.

Ruiz may, though, have just played a little too dangerously with fate when he appeared at Thursday's weigh-in dressed in the velvet hat and platform shoes of a caricature pimp by way of following up his claim that Jones was a "whore" who was threatening to run away with the money.

Jones was as disdainful as his trainer, Alton Merkerson, whose response to claims that his camp had tampered with the gloves by removing some of the padding was to lead an attack on Ruiz's manager, Norman Stone, with a right hand to his head. Stone was taken to hospital with a cut lip, a broken finger and the need for a check on his heart. Marc Ratner, chief executive of the commission, said that film of the incident would be studied before any punishment was imposed. Ratner was also at pains to say that the chances were good that Mike Tyson would have his licence returned in good time for a staging here of his planned re-match with Lennox Lewis.

All in all, this little burst of activity was much more in keeping with the current image of the sport Jones seeks to lift on to another plane. Whatever the purity, or otherwise, of his motives it is certainly hard to restrain a cheer for the intense and quirkishly driven man who gives boxing something that it needs maybe as never before: a fight that seems guaranteed to draw from each man, for different reasons, everything that he has.

Unfortunately, however, the instinct here is that the cheer will die in the desert air when the strong and honest John Ruiz inflicts the weight of natural forces. He may not be a name to list in Jones' pantheon of the great winners, but he does bring more than a little intimidatory power of his own – all 33 pounds of it. It means that Jones is pitting his extraordinary talent against the work of the womb. Though he may find it hard to believe, the challenge has been beyond better men.

It is the unbudgeable reason to believe that Ruiz, absorbing the fast but relatively light blows, cutting down the ring not quickly, but faithfully, is likely to be declared the winner somewhere around the 10th round.