THE NEW YORK CITY PRESS CONFERENCE

Outspoken Republican Don King was on his high horse at today's New York City press conference, touting the upcoming Felix Trinidad/Roy Jones, Jr. battle of the "TITANS."  King rambled at the podium for a good twenty  minutes while Jones and Trinidad tapped their fingers on the table waiting to speak.  For nearly half an hour Don King made reference (and played videos) about  everything from his efforts in supporting Breast Cancer awareness to TITAN truck commercial negotiations, and from his aspiration to surpass PPV records all the way down to his yearning to aid our troops in Iraq.  King invested about half of his time on the mic sending praise and encouragement to the troops.
 
Evidently both King's and RJ's position in the political spectrum worked their way into Tito's mindset as he also decided to take part in open workouts for the combatant forces overseas.  It seems that each fighter is doing his part along those lines.  Yet for the most part, the handlers of each camp seemed to be extremely interested in surpassing the Hoya/Mayweather numbers with this match up. 
 
Evidently this fight was supposed to have happened some time ago.  Yet, with the slight stumbles that these fighters  have come upon in their careers in the past five years, they won't cross paths until January 19, 2008.
 
As King rambled at the podium about every monetary value on the planet, Roy sat relaxed and at ease with the media snapping pictures of him.  RJ's cool confident ambience even seemed a little cocky as he retaliated Tito's threats to "end the fight within 4 rounds."

"This is going to be a historic match up between two legends of the ring.  January 19th is not going to be an affair with one fighter having a strong knockout punch.  Oh no - I've been known to knock people out with either hand at any  time.  And I ain't stupid, I know what Felix is bringing to the table so you've got a fight here with four strong arms from two very talented fighters.  It's gonna be me, however, who's going to walking away the winner."
 
Tito wasn't impressed by Roy's confidence.  He sat dispassionately listening to promoters and managers as well as King and Jones talk aimlessly before finally being given the mic.  After mentioning the fact that Roy was robbed in the Olympics, Trinidad made it very clear that he does quite well when facing gold medalists from the USA.  "I've already beat Whittaker, "Chicken" De La Hoya and David Reid and Roy, you're going to be my fourth.  I've been a fighter with a very long career, 44 fights with only 2 defeats and 35 of them were knockouts!  You, Mr. Jones, will be number 36"!

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MY THOUGHTS

On paper this match up looks like an absolute masterpiece; two future Hall of Famers, Jones at 51 and 4 with 38 knockouts vs Felix's 42 and 2 with 35 KO's, have left a staggering list of victims in their wake in the past 15 years.  It's only when you start lifting up the veil that you begin to see the cracks in the contest.  Although "Lil Sugar" (Roy, as we called him in the Gulf Coast amateur days) won his last two fights quite convincingly, he'd been on the losing end of things in his previous three battles - two of them in devastating fashion. 
 
Tito has had slightly better outings as of late by losing only two out of his last four fights but the two he lost were well beyond lopsided.  Hopkins surprised most experts, and exposed Tito's inability to shift gears as a complete boxer and change his game plan midstream, while Winky practically raped him every round.  
 
The big speculative question for Trinidad's supporters is whether or not he has anything left after such a disastrous outing in his last fight.  It's been over two years since then so maybe they've gotten amnesia.  All the while Jones' camp may still be shell-shocked by Tarver's overhand left, which sent them hurling back to earth from the stratosphere they'd occupied for the last decade.
 
I kind of like Vernon Forrest's analysis, "each guy is zeroing in on the end of their careers - but I think Roy's got a little more left in his tank."
 
I think so too.
 
We'll see January 19th!

~Check out Ricky Ray Taylor's Photo Gallery here ~

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The Trinidad vs. Jones domestic pay-per-view telecast will begin at 9 pm ET/6 pm PT and is being produced and distributed by HBO Pay-Per-View, available in more than 61 million pay-per-view homes.

This domestic telecast will be available in HDTV for those viewers who can receive HD. HBO Pay-Per-View is the leading supplier of event programming to the pay-per-view industry. For your Trinidad vs. Jones fight week updates, log on to www.hbo.com.

The event is being promoted by Don King Productions in association with Madison Square Garden.