Boxing: Venomous Ruiz may deny Jones his place in history

After the beast, the beauty. After the anarchist street guerrilla Mike Tyson, the fast-handed dreamer Roy Jones. That, anyway, is the script boxing has, with considerable help from the hero, written for itself here as Jones, at 34 still rated by many as the best pound-for-pound performer still standing, challenges the World Boxing Association's heavyweight champion, John Ruiz, for his title – and a place in history.

There are, however, some here who say that Jones, for all the rattlesnake speed of his hands and his capacity to seize, cobra-like, a moment of lost concentration by his opponents, is altogether just a little too pleased with himself.

They also ask why, if he is such a superior representative of a sport which is becoming synonymous with moral decay, does he fill a coop with fighting cocks in his role as a patron of that barbaric game – and why isn't he prepared to travel to Europe to take on the one threat to his undisputed rule of the light-heavyweight division, the technically brilliant but less than awesomely talented German, Dariusz Michalczewski?

Jones dismisses this German question so airily he might be Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper. "Why should I go there?" he asks. "You know I'm the man." A man, indeed, who refuses to see himself as just another scuffler of the ring but a "blessed" fighter chosen to follow the journey Bob Fitzsimmons made from the middleweight to the heavyweight title 106 years ago. If he beats Ruiz, he will also be the only second light-heavyweight champion to take on the big men successfully, Michael Spinks having beaten the formidable Larry Holmes twice in the 1980s – though in the opinion of many experts the victories were achieved only on the scorecards of the Las Vegas ringside judges.

Great men whose limitations were imposed in the womb, superb light-heavies like Billy Conn, Archie Moore and Bob Foster failed to overcome the power of such heavyweights as Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, but Jones shrugs when he is told that after being hit by Joe Frazier, Foster reported, "I didn't know where I was for a day and a half."

Jones says: "That's one reason why you do what I'm doing, fighting for the heavyweight title. Everyone wants to do what hasn't been done... That's what people like me live for and that's what sport is all about. I want to do it because so many people have not been able to do it. That's why I'm trying it."

Inevitably, Jones's idea of himself as boxing's sleek redeemer is coming under considerable scrutiny by some of the harder-nosed members of the boxing cognoscenti.

They are pointing out that there are very good reasons why the outstanding light-heavies, Conn, Moore and Foster, all failed to break new ground. The main one was that after licking everyone in their own division, they were obliged to take on men not only bigger but better.

Moore, perhaps the sweetest practitioner of the left hook boxing has ever known, was broken by The Rock. Foster lost to both Ali and Frazier. Conn was outmuscled – and outboxed – by the Brown Bomber. Not even Jones, with his mind filled with the epic, is suggesting that John "Quiet Man" Ruiz is within touching distance of the quality that overwhelmed his predecessors, but nor would the 31-year-old from a Massachussets factory town have been a candidate for membership of Louis's Bum-of-the-Month club.

Ruiz may not be an outstanding heavyweight, but at between 40 and 50 pounds heavier than Jones he is good enough, and certainly, committed enough to bring real intrigue to the fight here on Saturday night which is being optimistically seen as an antidote to the attack of competitive palsy which saw Clifford Etienne ransacked by Tyson in just 49 seconds in Memphis.

Ruiz certainly escapes the charge that he is cynically exploiting Jones's desire to make boxing history. While his opponent is guaranteed $10m (£6.3m), Ruiz, who, it is easy to forget, holds the title his opponent craves, will only see a quarter of Jones's reward if the fight draws more than 400,000 pay-per-viewers. If the draw falls seriously short of that mark, as some students of public taste believe it could, Ruiz will be fighting for no more than $200,000 in training expenses

Though Jones is the favourite in the Casino sport books, Evander Holyfield suspects that Ruiz may simply have too much weight and durability for the superstar. Holyfield, who fought Ruiz three times, winning one, losing one, and drawing the other, says: "You look at the video of Ruiz and you say 'this guy is going to give you so many options, maybe as many as 20, it has to be easy work.' But then you find yourself coming back to your corner at the end of the fourth round and shaking your head and saying: "What happened to all those options?' I like Ruiz's chances."

One sobering fact for Jones, who has a record of 47-1 (the defeat coming with a disqualification against Montell Griffin six years ago) is that Ruiz, who has 27 knock-outs in his record of 38-4-1, is one of only two fighters to knock down Holyfield. The other was Riddick Bowe. It is perhaps the significance of the Holyfield knockdown which provoked a rare note of caution from Jones when he said: "When you get closer to the fight you feel a metamorphosis is taking place. I'm sure military guys feel the same thing. When they talk about going to war, they start to feel, 'Oh boy, here I go. My life may be on the line and I may have to kill. You reach a point where a whole lot doesn't matter to you anymore. The only thing that matters is what truly matters to you.

"This is new territory for me. A lot of people are saying that punching power, the weight of his punches, is going to change a lot of my thinking. It won't. For me the fight will be more about explosiveness. I didn't take a lot of light-heavyweights down with one punch, so I can't expect to go in and bang away a heavyweight. So I'll have to show everything I have. Maybe this guy can take a lot more of my punches than those other guys could. So I have to be ready to give him a lot more."

So far Las Vegas, which is expected to relent on its banishment of Tyson if the anticipated re-match is made between him and Lennox Lewis in June, appears less than enthralled by Jones-Ruiz 1. But then Vegas isn't really a fight town. It's a money town that feeds on dubious celebrity. On Saturday, though, Roy Jones may just force it to settle for a genuine piece of boxing history – and a fight of some integrity. Who knows, the concept may catch on.