Roy Jones Jr Knocks Out 'Fan' in Pay-Per-View Bout

Long before our ancient forebears started to commit stories to paper, in a time when only the oral tradition kept our collective mythology alive, people were telling stories of man's hubris – morality tales at the heart of which was a fundamental truth: pride comes before a fall.

Now, even in an age when we've transcended writing stuff down on paper and prefer to blurt our profoundest thoughts onto the internet via social media, that unalterable truth still remains. For those who refuse to recognise the power of hubris, only the remorseless violence of the cosmos awaits.

Just ask Vyron Phillips. He knows this all too well.

A fairly average MMA fighter and former basketball player, Vyron recently entered a competition on Facebook for the chance to take on Roy Jones Jr. and potentially win $100,000 prize money. Roy is of course a former world champion in the middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight divisions, and widely considered to be one of the greatest boxers of all time.

But he's 47 and a bit out of shape, so it's all good – right?

That must have been a factor in Phillips' thinking, anyway. A big fan of Jones himself, he should probably have known better than to take on the former champ. In the second round, rather inevitably, he was knocked out with a thunderous punch to the jaw that sent him slumping to the canvas.

Because Roy Jones Jr. can still punch. Obviously.

Nevertheless, there is no real winner here. It's far from a great sporting spectacle to see a former great like Jones knock out a fan in an online pay-per-view bout, with the word "sideshow" used by many commentators. This is a man once regarded as the best pound-for-pound fighter on the planet, making it an unedifying sight that does nothing for his legacy.

After the fight, Jones made a comparison between himself and another sporting legend that suggests he still rates his own skills highly: "I wouldn't challenge Michael Jordan in one-on-one [basketball] for $100K," remarked the 47-year-old.

What was that about hubris?