Interview - Roy Jones Jr

On Saturday night in Las Vegas, one of the last great fighters will step into the ring again. Alongside a fake tropical oasis and a surreal 15-acre indoor beach at the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino, it will feel as if Roy Jones Jr, probably facing the penultimate fight of his dominant career, is also hustling boxing a little closer towards its chaotic end-game.

If he again beats Antonio Tarver, the American who became the first man to badly hurt him while forcing him to the very brink of defeat in their WBC light-heavyweight title bout last November, Jones stresses there is only "one more big fight left for me and boxing" - a heavyweight clash against either Mike Tyson or the giant Ukrainian, Vitali Klitschko.

"I'm gonna take care of Tarver," Jones drawls, "and then it's Tyson or Klitschko. I want one of them monsters. Klitschko's gotta bring his [WBC heavyweight] title if he wants to fight me. But with Tyson it don't matter if there's no title. Tyson is a legend. I never dreamed I'd fight for the heavyweight championship but I went out and won it and, now, to fight Tyson on top of that? C'mon, that's the ending to beat all endings."

In November 2002, Jones became the first former middleweight for more than a century to win a version of the world heavyweight title when he outclassed the WBA champion, John Ruiz, with a masterful display which shocked all those who had predicted his ruin against a much heavier man. "I always had a fetish for fighting big people," he insists. "My dad put me in the ring with much bigger guys. In my first fight I gave the guy a 14-pound advantage."

Jones once showed me the wasteland in Pensacola, Florida, where his father used to make him fight boys at least five years older than him. "Whenever I made a mistake or got dog-tired, he'd whup me with a plastic pipe. Other times, he'd take a water-hose to me - sometimes a belt . . . he'd make me get up, telling me to fight back, always asking, 'Well, boy, you a kingpin or a participant?' I always said the same: 'Kingpin . . . kingpin . . .'"

The kingpin is now terribly weary. "I been fighting since I was 10," Jones sighs. "That's 25 years. It's time to walk away. I started talking about retiring in 1997. This is a brutal game and 25 years of it ain't good for your health. After I get past Tarver on Saturday, give me Klitschko or Tyson. Otherwise I'm outta here."

When Jones made his professional debut in May 1989, as a 20-year-old junior-middleweight already lauded as the world's most naturally gifted boxer since Sugar Ray Leonard's emergence in 1976, boxing was entranced by Tyson. As the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, Tyson would march alone to the ring in black trunks and shoes. He didn't bother with socks or screaming cheerleaders for, with his naked fury, Tyson was meant to destroy anyone who crossed his path.

Jones was different. He was a cool mystery. Calm and remote in person, he changed just before a fight. Jones did not so much walk to the ring as prance with a lechery which was almost depraved. He once told me he liked to rub himself up against the ropes "like a sleek cat on heat".

Above his shimmering trunks he often wore a white shirt-front, a bow-tie and a tuxedo jacket. All he needed was a baton to complete the illusion of a genius conductor arriving for his latest recital. And when the bell rang he threw blurring punches from a baffling variety of angles. His defence was a spectacle in itself. He did not attempt to block or deflect punches. Jones simply wove out of the way as if it was one of the easiest things in the world to dodge a blow hurled by a man just inches away.

The intimidating heavyweight and the brilliant middleweight underlined the enduring power of boxing. Tyson represented the raw present, Jones the unknowable future. Yet now, in one of the sport's last desperate spins at the table, they may yet share a ring. It hardly seems to matter that, over the past 15 years, Tyson, who turns 39 in June, has been jailed twice, in between being knocked out by Buster Douglas, shamed by Evander Holyfield and crushed by Lennox Lewis. He is now, inexplicably, on the verge of making yet another multimillion-dollar return as the man charged with cleaning up a division left divided and hopeless by the retirement of Lewis.

Last month there were four mediocre heavyweight title fights. In the WBC version, Vitali Klitschko's defeat of the South African journeyman Corrie Sanders followed his brother Vladimir's surprise loss to the limited Lamon Brewster for the WBO bauble - with the beaten Ukrainian claiming that the fight was fixed and he was drugged. Less disturbingly if more tediously, Ruiz regained the WBA belt Jones had voluntarily relinquished while the IBF trinket was retained by the uncharismatic Chris Byrd.

Jones's disdain is obvious. "I ain't seen nobody who could whip me," he shrugs. Vitali might be the best of an abysmal bunch but Jones is convinced he could beat a hulking man who, at almost 18st and 6ft 7in, would dwarf him. "People would love that fight because of the size difference - little old me taking on a giant. But I can whip him. Tyson would also knock out Klitschko. I gotta say Tyson is the only one with half a chance of beating me - because he's got such good punching power."

Jones claims he would even be prepared to meet Lewis should the current rumours of an ill-advised return for the old champion be fulfilled. "I told you a long time ago I would fight Lewis," Jones scolds me in a rare moment of anger. "Why not?"

It's my turn to laugh. Apart from being the best boxer on the planet, Jones is also the smartest. He has never risked himself in a fight he thought he could lose. He is too intelligent to ignore the fact that even a creaking Lewis is the one big man with the skill and power to complement his size. "I dunno," Jones grumbles. "Lewis whupped Tyson so maybe . . ." His voice trails away, for that would be one mighty challenge too far.

Jones, who celebrated his 35th birthday in January, has only lost one fight in 50, when he was disqualified while in the midst of knocking out Montell Griffin in 1997. He avenged that "defeat" with a first-round KO in an immediate rematch. Yet Jones usually refrained from knocking out the men reeling in front of him - except, as against Griffin, when it really mattered.

Ever since he saw his middleweight contemporary, Gerald McClellan, battered into senseless blindness by Nigel Benn in 1995, Jones had been haunted by boxing. And so he chose to carry fighters in one-sided exhibitions, and to avoid any overt risk himself. He was a boxing genius but, in a Jones fight, there was never any raging ebb or flow, no defining crisis for him to overcome. Jones was simply so good that his fights were devoid of drama - until he triumphed against Ruiz in a weight division three tiers above his own 12-stone peak.

And then, in his very next bout, against Tarver, Jones hit trouble. Forced to shed the 30lb of muscle he had gained to fight Ruiz, Jones looked sick at the weigh-in against Tarver. "I was in a bad way," Jones confirms. "I was expecting to fight Tyson but had to get down to 175 [lb] for Tarver. I didn't take no supplements, no iron, no potassium, no nothing. I just ran to get the weight off - and I starved. I wanted to get it over with."

For Tarver, a gifted southpaw who had always campaigned at light-heavyweight, fighting Jones was deeply personal. They both came from Florida and had been junior contemporaries. Jones took all the glory for the 20 years they had known each other. "I'm going to destroy him," Tarver promised. "They'll have to give him an IV drip."

For the first three rounds Jones, being hit like he had never been hit before, looked stunned. Although he rallied, Tarver shellacked him again in round eight. Jones's normally grinning face was swollen. His left eye was shut.

"I had to dig into my heart," Jones remembers, "and say 'You ain't goin' down no matter how much it hurts. You get off your ass and win this fight.' I closed the show like a champion."

Although the fight had been grippingly close, the verdict was clear. Jones had reached inside his exhausted shell to outwork Tarver in the last three rounds and snatch the decision. "I got more credit from that fight than any other - people said 'Man, you always had it so easy. I never knew you had a heart like that.'"

Tarver has since become even more belligerent. "I'm sending his ass to the guillotine," he said last week.

Jones laughs. "How can you hate the dude? He wants to beat me because he admires all I done. How can you be mad at someone lookin' up to you? This was a problem last time. It felt like it was gonna be the teacher beating up the pupil. How's the teacher gonna get excited? This time it's exciting because he'll get the real Roy."

The real Roy, whom Jones hails in conversation as if talking about his coolest friend rather than himself, may have gone forever. "I had more energy at 25 and did more jiving around. People got to understand that when you're not so interested in something, you're not gonna do it to the best of your ability. I used to get excited working the crowd but no more. And now I'm gonna perform for maybe the last time."

With his many millions, and a lucrative contract to replace George Foreman as HBO's boxing analyst, Jones has lost his appetite for fighting. It had already been blunted by the ferocious training his father made him endure as a boy, and tarnished by his bitter disappointment at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul - where he knocked down and dominated his opponent in the final so utterly that it was the scandal of the games when the gold medal was awarded to the local Korean boxer. Jones has never quite shaken free from the memory.

"When I had that problem in South Korea," he says, choosing to introduce the 16-year-old subject himself, "I went with an interpreter to face the guy I fought. I asked him 'Did you win that fight?' He shook his head and said 'No'. And then I was cool with it. If you tell me the truth, I'm cool." Another truth emerges: the lack of credible opposition in his own division, beyond Tarver, and the enduring misery of the heavyweights has soured further any romantic interest he once held in both the history and salvation of boxing.

The ring will seem even more desolate after his departure. It is hard, especially in America where boxing has been so marginalised, to imagine the rise of another young fighter we can mythologise as "the next Mike Tyson" or "the next Roy Jones".

"I don't care," says the man who wishes he had been Michael Jordan rather than the greatest fighter of the 1990s. "I don't care about no boxing legacy. I don't care where they put me on the list of all-time greats - let them put me at the bottom."

It would be ludicrous to claim that Jones, having been tested so rarely, is a fighter as great as Sugar Ray Leonard, let alone Sugar Ray Robinson or Muhammad Ali. Yet, winding down on a strangely reluctant career, Jones remains at the very top of a crumbling pile. A fight between him and the shambling Klitschko or, especially, the raging but hopelessly broken Tyson, would be perversely irresistible and the richest clash in history. It would also be a telling indictment of a once compelling sport.

"I don't care," Jones says again. "I want that one and then that's it. There'll be nothing bitter-sweet for me. I'll be glad it's over."