By Patrick Kehoe
Photo © Javiel Centeno/FightWireImages.com
With Celtic blue bloods, Nordic invaders, hall of fame bidding technicians and punching panthers roaming about, the middleweight division(s) looks so replete with scintillating match ups, not even boxing’s world governing bodies enabled by pathological promotional self-interest or safety first managers could mess up what must surely become a tidal wave inevitability: the return of the middleweights!
And to that thought of a reconstituted middleweight domain we remain fixed, fixating with obsessing hope.
As the entrancing featherweight contests between Erik Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera and Naseem Hamed at the beginning of this decade, this millennium, gave verifiable evidence that boxing could still market the most extreme and metaphoric forms of martial combat, so the middleweights are set to go nova, incandescent with marketable spectacles.
At least we hope the hype can become generalized, searching out beyond the hardcore boxing fans because the middleweight scene really has become a teaming, Darwinian jungle of terrorizing talents. The hyperbole here only marginally inflated. And we do not strain credulity in order to hype the potential ring product, careful to color in the combatants, narrating these fights of champions knowing that era defining encounters are coming at us at light speed. We need only indulge in modest boostersim to do justice to an amazing era emerging. With middleweight contenders Edison Miranda and Kelly Pavlik set to exchange concussing volleys on May 19 for HBO subscribers, the talk of Joe Calzaghe meeting Mikkel Kessler becomes all the more intriguing, all the more a necessary weeding out at the summit.
The idea of Calzaghe and Kessler determining the one and true king at 168 provides the logic of alternating necessity for Jermain Taylor to find his own high water mark at middleweight. Why? Because the finalizing of the middleweight universal constant – light speed measuring – would be for Jermain Taylor to have a mega-pay-per-view box off with someone other than Bernard Hopkins. Taylor, still American’s most speculative middleweight commodity, also remains central to HBO’s corperate logic of presenting domestic content within a global programming free market model.
We take one step back from our most tantalizing imaginings.
One only has to consider Calzaghe, Kessler, Taylor, Wright, Pavlik and Edison Miranda, naming only thee most conspicuous, willing and certifiably ready of those cuing to fight – what each believe – are the best of the rest; with the one who cannot be named, Lord Hopkins, not-at-all-withstanding. Bring your worst intentions, your certifiable reputations, your raving fan base, you marketable appeal and as much attitude allowed on transcontinental flights. Thus, we repeat, if boxing and HBO (or by default Showtime) can’t sell what should be a celestial event unfolding, well, then maybe boxing deserves the fate that has been, by common report, attributed to it: banishment to the marginalia of sporting interest.
Sure, we are hyperventilating here. Aren’t boxing fans allowed to, after having to endure the state of the post-Lewis-Holyfield-Tyson heavyweight division? The alchemy that could and should produce a minor boxing renaissance means the requisite gold and glory are within the production values of HBO, no matter the provincialism of certain European promotional entities. We hope; we trust! Joe Calzaghe – soon to box Peter Manfredo pro bono – will have been put back to his training paces with the performance of Mikkel Kessler tattooing Librado Andrade, that and the Dane’s post fight call to arms against the fleeting figure of the undefeated Welshman. Miranda-Pavlik, Calzaghe-Kessler as a working theory, means the alignment only needs Jermain Taylor to vulcanize Cory Spinks and prove the case he’s an authentic monarch of the middleweight ring.
We now digress, to sort out Jermain Taylor’s pending matters, as well as those issues spinning around in our brains.
TV starling Sergio Mora turns out to have been less willing and more precociously willful than advertised, as far as fighting Jermain Taylor. Senior Snake didn’t like the proposed venue for a middleweight title shot – Tennessee not demographically his kind of place. So, in comes Cory Spinks, with the logistics of setting up training camp for the IBF jr. middleweight champion to be worked out. Filling in the contenders spot for Taylor’s May 19th HBO time slot seems like a gift to the veteran and still belted Mr. Spinks and his manager slash trainer slash sage Kevin Cunningham. The suits, we suspect, are debating the various clauses to get the deal done. We shall leave them in peace – for now.
Note: Sergio Mora against Jermain Taylor was sort of planned as the parallel to Peter Manfredo vs. Joe Calzaghe. Yes, really. In the convolutions which pass for marketing logic, getting to a Jermain Taylor vs. a Calzaghe or Kessler super-fracas means guaranteeing each champion a profitable workday defense up front, at the very least. Besides, both Calzaghe and Kessler want another introduction to the North American sporting market and Team Taylor wanted a working holiday as close to Arkansas – Tennessee, as it turns out – as could be arranged. Well, these things tend to work themselves out, after a trillion phone calls, HBO blessings, monetary sweeteners, palatable good-will hunting and contractual trade-off clauses, if not blood oaths.
Outside of the fan fickle under class – a.k.a. rabid viewers of the pseudo reality show The Contender – and Team Mora and his loving family, who cares that the idiosyncratic and emaciated one will not be taking up the challenge to box, bull and brandish his feathering but covetous fists against world middleweight champion Jermain “No Terra Firma” Taylor? And what was that fight really about anyway?
The still lingering logic of 1980’s made from TV contenders fulfilling the dreams of alerted viewers with a ‘shot at the title’? Sure, television legitimizes the limited, verifies the uncertified and generally radiates the banal, but Mora vs. Taylor, Jermain Taylor, successor to Hopkins lacing them up against Sergio Mora, conqueror of Eric Regan. The mind reels, the stomach revolts.
Cash in on the ‘popularity’ of the greatest fighter ever to graduate fully formed from the Stallone fighting foundry. What else was Taylor’s promoter Lou DiBella thinking, profit trumps fallout? Clever group that Team Taylor. Of course, when your CV screams out that you have a split decision win over Ishe Smith, you don’t have to take attitude from anyone. And that apparently includes Mr. DiBella, who had the nerve to offer the east LA Mora-Man a million dollars and a shot at the throne of Ketchel, Walker, Zale, Robinson, Monzon, Hagler and Hopkins. Mora, apparently believed having been a “champion contender” meant/means he’s no longer subject to the Warhol Theorem – every-body gets 15 minutes of fame, a half-life visibility that burns like a fuse – such is Mr. Mora’s status as a momentary media darling and boxer of presumed significance.
To paraphrase Don King: “Only in boxing!”
Oh! And Mora, the guy’s recorded 4, yes 4, career knockouts/stoppages in his 19 fight career. Enough said? No wonder he’s all work rate and threats of violence. Talk about a guy who should have been happy to have dog-sledded into a ring to face Taylor after Mr. DiBella fast forwarded him into the main draw of the middleweight maelstrom. Clearly, Team Mora decided Taylor, in Tennessee or anywhere else, was a mountain too high to climb for a mere million. You don’t have to read reluctance in quotes to hear it loud and clear.
They didn’t really think they were in a position to leverage another million out of Mr. D? The air in the Chrysler Building isn’t that thin, is it Lou? Where have team Mora been boot-camping in preparation for big time boxing negotiations? Somewhere near Newfoundland?
We don’t mean to let the champion off this contentious hook, not exactly. What was Taylor thinking in considering such a fight? Relatively easy fight enabling him to plug into the ATM of Hispanic boxing fans, make a withdrawal, while pleasing his own fictional geographical base, at the same time giving trainer Manny Steward time to get Taylor’s footwork and balance problems sorted out? Yes, it was something like that and mainly the latter – the issue of Taylor’s technical issues – was thee key component, the meaty matter, buried under all those spicy toppings.
OK, champions take fights to trust fund their children’s children, to fulfill the technical requirements of being a champion designated by a world governing body, i.e. paying sanctioning fees for the right of being so designated, able to pose about the ring with a belt or two or three or to stay in shape for larger conquests to come, to pay off debts or indebtedness or avenge moments of prior mediocrity or even, sometimes, a combination of some or all of the above. But in world middleweight Jermain Taylor’s case the issue has been his boxing, his suddenly stalled, technically predictable, championship boxing style. The fear looming in the Taylor camp is that Jermain Taylor, superb athlete and potential all-rounder, isn’t improving.
Can it be that even legendary Kronk point man Manny Steward cannot instill the rudiments of balanced positioning in Taylor, in full attack mode? The middleweight champion’s tendencies to dilute his jabbing authority, seeking more punitive right hand accessing does strike one as classic Steward. Getting knockouts remains a major objective for Team Taylor, especially over his next few defenses or at least his next, pre-pay-per-view super defense.
Taylor needs to make a statement, he and Steward and DiBella know it all too well. Given their current needs, a Spinks looks like the next best move for resuscitating the notion of Jermain Taylor as a man capable of dominance.
Spinks, IBF jr. middleweight champion, has his own lingering notions of grandeur. Yet, he’s a guy who’s now classified as “not a real threat” to hurt Taylor in the counter punch department and yet a championship fighter of long standing, with a name and a style that will put Taylor through his aerobic paces. Looks like a logical and manageable move for the middleweight champ.
Naturally enough, perception dominates even in the high value resolution optics of post-modern boxing. And Taylor has to start presenting himself as a champion capable of menace, if only too keep pace with Edison Miranda and Mikkel Kessler, the bash brothers of middleweight boxing. If the future tense of his money making career is to be ensured, Taylor needs to produce dramatics, pronto.
Of course, making 160 pounds is beginning to tell on Jermain Taylor. That’s another unspoken issue, another trade secret that is being flatly denied by all concerned in and around Team Taylor, and yet the whispers persist. We rephrase; Taylor has been wondering if he might be more dangerous at super-middle after all, and so a challenge against Joe Calzaghe might well fit perfectly into his bodies’ maturation, HBO pay per view planning and Taylor’s own expressions of fighting “just the big names out there!” You can insert Kessler for Calzaghe, if you like. Few believe Mr. Taylor’s going to be fighting anywhere near as long as say, Mr. Hopkins. Not that Taylor’s looking to cash out of big time boxing; but, he’s trying to get a sense of what a reasonable semi-long term picture could look like, and yet, few around him are concerning themselves with that kind of prescriptive thinking. Or we might say everyone associated with Jermain Taylor has an opinion on the wisdom of selling short.
Makes us wonder just what Taylor has in mind for his own future; after all, since his career began he’s been a “who ever my manager and promoter get for me next” stay in line kinda fellow. One can only wonder how much longer he’s going to allow that to be standard operating procedure. Did he really think fighting Sergio Mora was a career enhancing kind of gig – fast money or not – and a fight he’d be working his hardest to prepare heart and mind and body to win? At least the prospect of fighting Cory Spinks and then a major super-somebody will have Taylor considering just what really looms out there in the darkness, beyond, creeping toward him.
With Mora out, Spinks penciled in and daunting challenges on the horizon… will that be enough of a formula for the Taylor nay sayers? Not likely. But with Mikkel Kessler looking to make a splash in the US and Miranda calling out everyone, the big bang at middleweight might well have the effect of making time start again, cosmic offerings covering as far as the eye can behold.
Kessler, now there is a guy with stars in his eyes; he’s imagining the entire middleweight world at his feet, plundered.
Calzaghe, he’s a guy that’s learned to be a patient man. He thinks anyone who sees himself as his better is a fool or just a man waiting to be given a serious reality check.
Makes you wonder what Taylor, the man who beat thee MAN, thinks about of all this commotion, the plotting, the decrees for war and gatherings of ruthless adversaries.
