By Patrick Kehoe
“I can’t believe I lost.”
His eyes blinking in wonderment, trying to reframe the world through the numbing fog of a savage ring annihilation, Jermain Taylor could barely comprehend the shifting events of ring warring that had just culminated in the loss of his middleweight championship. Few at ringside though were surprised when Youngstown, Ohio’s Kelly Pavlik finally administered the blows that left Taylor crumpled in a corner of the ring. The defending champion’s trainer Emanuel Steward summed up how fleeting opportunity can be in a prize ring: “When Jermain hurt him in the second and couldn’t finish Kelly off he used up most of his energy,” for a knockout that never materialized. Pavlik, long limbed and tortuously trained to probe and punish, found out he was also a survivor, after having reversed what seems a clear course toward defeat.
Jermain Taylor, conqueror of middleweight great Bernard Hopkins, had gone from a dynamical fighter of budding promise to a stationary target, the guy with the belts whose career had stalled at the summit. The fight itself bore out such an assessment. The entire project of Kelly Pavlik’s ascension to the championship ranks was like a secret only the now ex-champion had not been privy too.
Live on HBO, Taylor had applauded Pavlik’s knockout victory over middleweight menace Edison Miranda, May 19, 2007. Pavlik had taken up the challenge of facing off against the Columbian knockout artist – whom Team Taylor strategically avoided - desperate to make his mark as the dominant figure among the contenders at 160. Promoter Bob Arum had wisely counselled Pavlik to take the fight, an HBO date on the same card with Taylor making a defence, state his case with a knockout and use the momentum of the occasion to bring about Taylor vs. Pavlik. Pavlik’s in the ring post-fight challenge of Taylor, then warming up in his dressing room to defend his title against Cory Spinks, was a challenge Taylor would take, internalized as a direct challenge to his championship status and manhood. And thus, the die was cast, the champion cornered.
The timing proved an excruciating irony for Taylor’s promoter Lou DiBella, trainer Emanuel Steward and by necessary inclusion the champion himself. Because had Taylor taken up the challenge of fighting Edison Miranda – the golden child of the fixated moment at HBO, barer of a withering right hand and Columbian street orphan background story – he likely would have been able to bludgeon the hopelessly dried out Miranda, who was being kept artificially at the middleweight limit to be force fed to the champion, it was hoped. That’s when Team Taylor made the most natural mistake in the world; they took the easier money, in defending against blown up welterweight slash jr. middleweight champion Cory Spinks, instead of braving the calculated risk-reward tussle with the hard hitting Miranda. Safety first allowed for Pavlik to stage his own battle royal, his fight for legitimacy and trip the alarm calling for the champion’s head. And to his credit and his demise, Taylor stepped up to the plate of facing the lean and hungry Pavlik.
And here is where we must understand the nuance of what is not common report; we must attempt to understand what burdens became probability.
Taylor had already out grown middleweight; he’d been fighting at that weight limit since his pro debut January, 2001. The debate within Team Taylor was of building a legacy at 160 or following the dictates of the body and moving up to 168 and something more akin to physiological normality for a 28 year-old. And yet how could Taylor run away from a direct on-air HBO embossed challenge; what would the sporting public think? That issue became a clenched fist in the champion’s head. The famous lesson of 80s great Donald Curry fatefully staying for one more title defence, at welterweight, against a hard punching British challenger in Lloyd Honeyghan was not a sufficiently relevant historical lesson.
The lesson of struggling to make weight, for both camps, has been on the public record since the lead up to that first fight for Taylor’s belt. Enduring penal diets to barely circumvent the process of dehydrating down to artificial weight thresholds, while maintaining peak performance standards, was the real battle won by Team Pavlik. We don’t have to give full accreditation to Taylor’s confessions of skipping early morning runs last summer or that somehow the entire Taylor tem failed to take the executioner of Miranda and his paving contractor trainer Jack Loew seriously enough. Though, a sense of disrespect lingers in the acidic tones of Jack Loew on his accounting of Team Taylor. Nevertheless, the fight was held, the title changed hands and Jermain Taylor, the guy leading on the score cards, was the guy left on the floor. So much for Taylor’s undefeated status. So much for stepping up, as middleweight champion, and taking on super-middleweight legend Joe Calzaghe, in Wales, if necessary.
Team Pavlik are at once convinced of history repeating itself and careful to at least try to hide an almost smug sense of inevitability being revisited upon Taylor. “It’s going to be a dog fight. I’ve been there against Miranda and others and tasted that kind of competition. Has Taylor faced that competition? No... Once he’s in there and he gets popped and feels his legs go will see how he’s going to respond, how he’s going to react.”
One can only wonder how Pavlik discounts Bernard Hopkins – twice bested by Taylor – so tritely. Not that it matters how he assesses Taylor’s CV. Just as it doesn’t really matter now that his then 23 year-olds body was more ready for the test of dehydration than Taylor’s 27 year-old body and therein lay the dividing, divining line between the guy who survived a critical assault and the guy who didn’t. Or are we dancing upon the pinhead of revisionism?
Well, that’s what rematches are all about for the vanquished; they are about redress and redemption. The technical matters of seeing into the critical areas of fatal flaws, botched strategies and lack of proper preparation are the most obvious and necessary band-aids. Psychological post mortems only estimate the levels of toxins in the system. The clinical mind would say repair must precede reparation, healing and recovery the predicates to renewal and return. But how do you get to the point where dysfunction can be reversed and eradicated?
Some athletes build from the outside in and some from the inside out. Taylor has appeared to have found that his most natural response to wanting what he once had has been based on density. He’s moving inward, the gravitational fields layering and folding backward on themselves to produce dark matter, something impenetrable to light, swallowing all before it. Once total density has been reached it must explode, entropy of process reversing itself, so that nothing becomes everything. And Taylor has been keeping a lot in, harnessing the energies of a thousand slights and the tidal emissions of media disregard and mockery. And he intends to unload on Pavlik.
Commentators, ink and web scribes, blog babblers and promotional talking heads – that virtual coterie of punditry – will be telling us that champions who are beaten in a first fight tend to get more of the same, the second time around. We do note, at this point, Jersey Joe Walcott, Sugar Ray Leonard and Lennox Lewis as notable exceptions. And there are times when exceptions are the rule.
If the rumours of Mr. Pavlik’s social indulgences in and around the saloons of Youngstown, Ohio rise beyond the level of simple slander – and that has not been established – well, perhaps the relatively clean living Mr. Taylor has a secret advantage in this rematch after all. On that seminal maybe, almost nothing has appeared in the pre-fight narrative concerning Pavlik’s recreational excesses; now that could be a turning point, the Achilles heel of a champion. In this age of disinformation as insult, no one has been able to call Pavlik on these night live allegations. Presumably, the fight will tells us a good deal.
Yes, there is the talk; slanderous insinuation circulates as so much psychological gamesmanship. Pavlik’s a drunk and Taylor’s a bit crazy. Both are expressions of wounding gossip. Certainly, no quarter has been asked for by either camp and certainly none has been given. Pavlik’s trainer Jack Loew has gone out of his way to impugn the merits of Ozell Nelson, his opposite number on Team Taylor. Make no mistake about it, these two camps do not like one another; no doubt percolating under the surface of feigned congeniality, the real mission is ritual slaughter, under the rules of engagement. No title need be at stake for everything to be on the line. The winner takes all. Team Taylor remains acutely aware of the end game scenario facing their championship level status with this fight. They know they have to even up the count to 1 and 1.
So for Taylor, he’s bet everything on exploding back onto the scene by making a spectacle of his athleticism and commitment to winning. Perhaps, he successfully convinced himself that he’d gone AWOL from the very tenants that gave rise to his becoming a champion. Things too well known can go missing from our lives of constant stimulation in the electric cities. Maybe, Taylor forgot what he was boxing for, what compelled his dedication, beyond the money and the economic ease it fabricates.
You only feel hungry when everything’s been taken from you. Kelly Pavlik may well have been the perpetrator of Taylor’s misfortune; but, Jermain certainly left the door ajar. And that failure of professionalism has been the bee buzzing inside the conscience of Jermain Taylor. After all, he was the man who ended the Hopkins Era. He was the man who made it all the way from talented prospect to rising contender to legend in the shaping, who suddenly found himself gliding, his altitude plummeting, the surface of mediocrity coming at him head on. The messages he’s sent out from his training camp have been PR-light, absolutely expected nothings.
Frankly, Jermain Taylor isn’t much interested in words, never has been. His fans have been mainly silent too, holding off on pronouncements of ‘what he might have been’ on internet boxing chat groups. There’s a hushed sense of fearful expectation surrounding Taylor’s challenge to re-enact his struggles with Kelly Pavlik. But... he’s determined to put himself back at the scene of the crime – his criminally negligent response to the spirited challenge of a proven contender turned a king. Only now, even without belts on the line in this non-tile, catch-weight rematch of middleweight royalty, he intends to defy expectation. And in doing so Taylor’s implicitly asking: what in sport remains inevitable?
Statistical analysis won’t get us much closer to the truth awaiting him and us. If he really can marshal the necessary forces and create a critical mass explosion, might he defy reason? Or are we letting hyperbole rule us, again. Jermain Taylor knows he was close to registering a knockout the first time around. And that wasn’t even the real Jermain Taylor or so his story goes.
No one element of psychological rediscovery or physical preparedness brings a fighter back to the level of a boxing champion. Everything just needs to go according to plan. Or you can make a miracle happen before the eyes of millions. You can simply have a better night, than the other guy, with the gloves on. You can get lucky and win despite yourself. You can find a vein of purist gold in the talent pool you thought you knew completely. You can refuse to lose and carry out the near death threats anger and humiliation made you utter. You can break the will of your opponent and deny him the rhythm and power and measure of his craft. Applying patience or desperation, cunning or brutishness, you might discover the antidote to your misfortune.
Jermain Taylor will just have to get in there and find out if he has the answer to the question in his head about himself, concerning just how much it is that he still wants this world of pain and exaltation?
It might be that simple.
Patrick Kehoe may be reached at pkeho@telus.net