But for his newest recruit, things were about to get very surreal.

Young Englishman Tony Curtis Jr., still only 15 at the time, had arrived for his first day on the estate. He was looking forward to his maiden session under the living legend from Pensacola, Florida.

The gym, as well as Jones’ own colonial-style mansion, stands on an 80-acre plot of land which is also home to a wide variety of wildlife. Curtis was expecting the chickens, but not what came next.

“He’s got a little ATV that he drives around the land on,” Curtis told The Ring. “Bear in mind it’s 80 acres, so it’s pretty big. Anyway, he’s got like a big swamp at the back. On my first time there, I’ve gone down there with him, and he pulls this big alligator out of the lake that he’d killed. I’ll never forget it.

“He had killed it the day before and he was just waiting for it to wash up on the shore. I just thought, ‘What’s going on here then? Is he serious?’ Then he takes me to this guesthouse near the gym, which has got a pool table and all the stuff from his career. But if you look up on the wall you see all stuffed animals, so I realized then, they were all real animals."

Curtis found out pretty quickly that he would not only be training under Jones, but also helping to keep all the livestock alive.

“There were only about four of us who had to do the other jobs like feeding the chickens," Curtis recalled. “He must have had thousands of them, all in different places. The big fighting ones had their own spot then the others were all dotted around. I had to feed them all and, when you’re doing it, you had to watch out for venomous snakes in the long grass. It’s a different world out there.”

For a 15-year-old, Curtis was already reasonably well traveled, considering he had grown up in Woolwich, London, trained in Kent and then moved with his family to Dubai. It was there he met Jones on an evening that would end up changing his life.

“I’ll take you right back to the start,” Curtis said. “I had just won the national championships as an amateur in England, but straight after we flew out to Dubai because my family were moving over there. A couple of months go by. We got a house and a gym, so I just started training. Then one night we get a phone call. It’s like eight o’clock at night, I’ve already trained that day already and I’ve just got out of the bath. The person on the other end tells me Roy Jones Jr. has come down for a meet-and-greet at the gym there called Round 10.”

Never one to miss an opportunity, Curtis and his father, who is a huge driving force behind his son’s career, did not need to be asked twice.

“Straight away, me and my dad was clothed, dressed, out of the house,” Curtis said. “When I got there, I went up to him and asked him about that famous, hands-behind-his-back knockdown he did. He showed me and that was that.

“Anyway, just as he’s walking out the gym at the end of the event, I decided I was going to try my luck. I asked for his number and when we moved back to the UK my dad started texting him because I didn’t have a full-time coach.”

That conversation got the ball rolling on a move which would take him to Pensacola, to the ranch and to his first encounter with a dead alligator. It is also why Jones was in the corner October 17 at London’s O2 Arena in the early stages of the card headlined by Daniel Dubois’ second-round knockout of Fabio Wardley.

Curtis, five years on from that initial meeting with his trainer, improved to 15-1 (4 KOs) by stopping Kerim Agius in the fourth of their scheduled eight. Despite ending the fight with a highlight reel left uppercut, the 20-year-old Curtis actually went viral for the fur-trimmed boots and trunks he had chosen for the clash.

But then again, “Lightning” has always liked to do things a little differently than everyone else.

“I had a few amateur bouts with Roy once I got out there,” Curtis said. “But then he said I should turn pro straight away because of my style and that got me thinking. I thought, ‘Why not become the first British kid ever to turn pro at 16?’ It was two weeks after my 16th birthday that we went to Mexico and that’s exactly what we did.”

However, things did not exactly go to plan as Curtis, weighing less than 100 pounds, joined a group of fighters including the likes of Bernard Hopkins and Henry Armstrong to lose in their debut.

“It was at this weird venue,” Curtis said of his first professional fight in September 2023. “I’d never seen anything like it. It was in the upstairs of a shopping mall. Obviously, I fought and it didn’t go my way. It says we were the same weight, but we weren’t. I was actually lighter than the official weight and my dad had to sign some sort of waiver. We didn’t care, we just wanted to fight.”

Curtis, as well as his feted head trainer, had actually thought everything had been going OK.

“As the rounds are going on I’m asking if I’m winning and Roy is saying, ‘Hell yeah, you’re winning’. If it’s close, I want to know so I can find a different gear. I thought I was landing the cleaner shots, but he had a bit more strength. But I was showboating and enjoying myself.

“Anyway, the Mexican crowd thought I’d won, but when I didn’t I was distraught. I was crying my eyes out, I was so upset. We just went straight back to Pensacola the next day. Me, my brother Stan and my dad are all crying. We didn’t speak at all on that journey back.”

Despite the heartbreak, Curtis’ 0-1 record lit a fire beneath him which he believes inspired a new level of training. What’s more, the license he received in Mexico also meant he could box in Dubai and, within four months, he was back out. He won his second fight inside two minutes, starting a winning streak which continued with that victory at O2 Arena.

“Because of the weight and everything else, I’ve actually had people say they could get that Mexico fight off my record, but I don’t want that,” Curtis said. “I just want to fight the best and become the best, that’s it.

“If I look at my career, I’ve done nothing great yet. Turning over that young was something special, but in my eyes I’m not doing this for anyone else but for me and my family. This story is for me, so I can look back on it one day and know that I’ve done something special.”

After kicking off his career at an official weight of 99 pounds, Curtis is now campaigning as a junior bantamweight. After such an eye-catching victory two weeks ago, he hopes to be back out early in what could be a big 2027 for the Londoner.

Pensacola, however, is now a distant memory as his father has constructed a purpose-built gym in Kent where Curtis and his three boxing brothers train.

“When Roy comes over, he’s got his own house where he stays so we have a proper boxing camp,” Curtis said. “I’ve been around a bit already, but I’ve always said England is my home because I got homesick anywhere else. I did even have a chicken for a while. I came home from Pensacola and felt like I needed one. So, I got one and called it ‘Lightning,’ just like me. Anyway, it ended up catching a disease because it was too cold here. It was too cold in Kent, so RIP ‘Lightning,’ the chicken.”

And RIP that alligator, too.