Boxing: Jones' virtuosity forges victory of the century

Light-heavyweight defies history as first former middleweight champion to take heavyweight title for 106 years

It was supposed to be the moment of maximum pressure for Roy Jones Jnr in his assault on boxing history. He had to leave the dressing-room and break down a natural-born heavyweight champion, a feat beyond some of the greatest men who ever stepped inside the ropes.

The way he handled sport's ultimate moment of truth said everything about the nature of his superb victory over John Ruiz in the Thomas and Mack Center here in the small hours of yesterday morning. He turned to his entourage and said: "Let's go – I'm going to kill him."

Short of having Ruiz's lifeless body carried from the ring, that's pretty much what Jones did. He killed off Ruiz as a serious player in the top league of boxing, ridiculed the big man's idea that he could exploit his superior reach and weight – 33 pounds of it – and grow strong at the expense of a fighter generally considered to be the best pound-for-pound performer of his generation. Ruiz might just as well have tried to catch a gust of wind or a fork of lightning.

History will now record that the 34-year-old from the Florida Panhandle became the first former middleweight champion to take the heavyweight prize – the 31-year-old Ruiz was separated from the World Boxing Association segment of the title by a unanimous decision that became an absolute formality at the sound of the last bell – since Bob Fitzsimmons beat "Gentleman" Jim Corbett up the desert road from here in Carson City 106 years ago. But history also has a duty to irrigate those dry facts with the style and the spirit of the achievement. It was simply breath-taking.

Long before the end of the 12 rounds Ruiz was a bloodied, tragic figure utterly unable to support the belief of those of us who said that, for all his technical limitations, his strength of muscle and punch would inevitably wear down a much smaller man.

Jones, we argued, would go the way of Billy Conn against Joe Louis, Archie Moore against Rocky Marciano and Bob Foster at the hands of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Jones danced and sneered, jabbed and jiggled at the notion, threw at it astonishing right leads and hooks that exploded at improbable angles – and afterwards he said: "When he cracked me, I said: 'Is that all you've got?' When I cracked him, his face said: 'Wow, is that what you've got?'

"I came here tonight to make history and a lot of you doubted me. To be honest, when I first looked at the video of him, and saw how big and strong and awkward he looked, I asked myself: 'How are you are going to beat this guy?' But by the first week in training camp I knew how I was was going to do it. I was going to fight my fight.

"Michael Jordan gave me some important advice. He called me and said: 'Roy, you can have your place in history, it's yours – but only if you do everything within your means. Do what you know you can do. Box him. Don't do anything that caters to his strengths. Take them away from him.' My corner said the same thing as the fight wore on. They said: 'Don't try to knock him out – don't give him a chance to land a big punch. Just keep boxing him."

While Jones' corner was saying that, Ruiz's manager, Norman Stone, was yelling and pleading. "Fight, fight, fight," he urged, but the capacity had been taken from the man who fought three bruising battles with Evander Holyfield. Jones had invaded Ruiz's body and his mind.

Later, and before going to hospital for a check-up and treatment for a broken nose which had become the central target for a stream of audacious blows, Ruiz said: "The referee should be investigated. He didn't let me fight my fight. He followed Jones's instructions." In fact, the official, Jay Nady, had enough to do trying to keep up with the pace and the volume of attacks that sometimes appeared to be conjured from thin air.

The watching Lennox Lewis, who says that he will give Mike Tyson's people no more than two weeks to table proposals for a re-match scheduled for June, joined in a chorus of praise for the work of his new co-champion. "Roy Jones did a great job – he made history, and I'm sure there are other heavyweights out there he could fight now – including Evander Holyfield and Chris Byrd, but he wouldn't want to fight me. It would be a good fight, though." Jones had a stock answer for all questions about possible fights with smaller heavyweights like Tyson and Holyfield. "It would cost a lot of money," he said.

"This was a one-shot at history, something I figured out after all these years of people saying I didn't have enough tough fights. I thought this was my chance to give boxing a real big fight – and a chance to define my achievements. This is what I've done and it means whatever I do, whoever I fight or whether I just retire, I have delivered my legacy. I won the heavyweight title after winning at three lower weights. It was more than 100 years since Bob Fitzsimmons did it. I just decided it was time for someone to do it again."

Jones, it has to be said, is not the most likeable of sporting icons. His arrogance always seems to be a half-step away, and there were times here when his taunting of Ruiz was cruel to the point of sadism. But then one of his great recreational pleasures is to see fighting cocks tear each other apart, and it may also be true that retiring natures do not shape boxing achievement of this order.

The judges, Duane Ford, Jerry Roth and Stan Christodoulou, gave Jones the fight by margins of, respectively, 116-112, 117-111 and 118-10, but such markings scarcely brushed the scale of the victory. There were just two points in the fight when Ruiz's decision to allow Jones a vastly superior share of the purse – $10m (£6.25m) plus profits against his own $200,000 training expenses and a possible share of pay-per-view profits with the promoter Don King – began to make any kind of sense. They came in the first round and the 10th.

In the first round Ruiz did produce what his backers imagined would be a standard tactic – a bull-like rush at the smaller man which pinned him against the ropes and, it had to be assumed, announced 12 rounds of attrition. But Jones refused to let it happen. He drove Ruiz away with a stream of beautifully delivered punches, jabs which sailed through his opponent's guard, hooks which came from nowhere and one long right to the jaw which brought a bloody nose and a distinct wobble. In the 10th round Ruiz dredged up the last of his spirit, forced Jones into the ropes and delivered the punch that was supposed to disable this man who said he would turn upside down the forces of nature. It was an uppercut that shook Jones but to no greater effect than merely concentrating his mind.

That was the worst thing that could have happened to Ruiz's hopes of walking in the footsteps of the great Louis, who, after being outboxed for 12 rounds by Conn, found the power to level his tormentor. Ruiz's chances of building on the uppercut were simply swept away on a tide of extraordinary virtuosity.

Ruiz said he was going away to think through some personal issues and decide whether or not to hang up his gloves. It was the measure of Jones' achievement. He had not only beaten a man but made him reconsider his own worth as a professional fighter.

In the wake of the dazzling triumph one local sports book made Jones a 2-1 favourite if he ever fought Mike Tyson – and in the post-fight conference Antonio Tarver, the International Boxing Federation's No 1 contender, yelled above a chorus of hisses that Jones should stop running from him. "You haven't proved anything to me, son," shouted Tarver. Jones' response was to say that before he retired he would get round to fighting Tarver. Then he pointed to his challenger and told an adoring crowd: "His ass is mine."

It was, you had to believe, one of the least of his possessions on the night he had produced such daring and fine skill. He had made both history and hope. It was hope that boxing could indeed reproduce some of the best of its past.

When Fitzsimmons beat Corbett, the gunfighters Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were in attendance. This weekend the chief celebrities were the actor Denzil Washington and the basketball giant Shaquille O'Neal. Gunfighters are out of fashion, of course, which on this occasion was a pity. What Roy Jones Jnr did was, surely, something to be best appreciated by men who lived and died by the strength of their nerve.