Taylor:Getting your butt kicked does something to you

LAS VEGAS — There isn’t any glitter or neon here. The casinos and showgirls of the Las Vegas Strip are fairly close and, in fact, you can see the neon glow at night, but this isn’t a part of town most people want to be in at night. Johnny Tocco’s Gym, a squat, one-story red brick-andcinder block building, stands at the intersection of Charleston and Main, near the heart of downtown Las Vegas. It shares a parking lot with a 24-hour tire repair center, and across the street are a used-car lot and an abandoned carpet store. A broken bottle litters the sidewalk in front of the wrought-iron, triple-deadbolted front door, just below the painted sign that reads “Home of World Champions.” Little Rock’s Jermain Taylor thinks it’s perfect for his latest training camp. Taylor’s camp is as unglamorous as the gym hosting it, and his approach to his rematch with Kelly Pavlik on Feb. 16 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena fits the workmanlike image of Tocco’s, and this part of town, perfectly as well. But if this area of downtown Las Vegas seems many, many miles away from the glitz of the Strip, then Taylor’s training camp at Tocco’s Gym is light years from his last camp, which took place at a luxury resort nestled in the rolling foothills the Poconos Mountains in Pennsylvania. “This is a work gym, just like the gym at home. This isn’t the Poconos,” Taylor said, glancing around at the old, tattered fight posters that hang on whitewashed brick under bare light bulbs inside the gym. “No one’s uppity here. Everyone here is equal now. I lost, so we’re all equals here. But I’m working to get mine back. You better believe that.” It’s easy to believe Taylor after watching a recent workout in the cramped three-room gym that he is calling home for the time being. ‘Home of Champions’ Johnny Tocco, who died in 1997, was one of Sonny Liston’s trainers. Tocco opened his gym in 1950, and it is Las Vegas’ oldest continuously-working boxing gym. In addition to being Liston’s primary training facility, Mike Tyson trained for several fights in the prime of his career in the same ring as Taylor. Tocco, who once famously called Liston “a killing machine” in the ring, was notorious for working his boxers hard. Taylor appears ready to try to live up to the gym’s old-school, hard-nosed reputation. For two hours, Taylor never smiled, seldom talked and never joked around, even during down time, as he has in past camps. Of course, there wasn’t much down time. Never has Taylor worked harder, he and everyone in his camp said. Never has he been more focused or intense. And never has he wanted to win this badly. “Getting your butt kicked, it does something to you,” Taylor said. “Especially if you haven’t had it kicked in a while. A whole lot of things have changed with me. Me and my wife have gotten a lot closer; I haven’t been partying as much as I used to. “ Mainly, I just got my hunger back. I’m going to beat this guy. I don’t give a damn about the belts, about the money. I want to beat this guy.” Taylor said he knows why he didn’t beat Pavlik the first time they met in the ring, in Atlantic City, N. J., on Sept. 29. After getting knocked out in the seventh round for his first career loss, Taylor had to take a hard look at himself. Sitting on a stool, towel around his neck, for a candid interview after a recent workout, Taylor said that during his last training camp he didn’t prepare the way a champion needs to for a title fight. “I felt good, and everyone was telling me I was looking good,” Taylor said. “You get so used to hearing that, that it becomes easy to think, ‘You know, I don’t need to run today.’ Then it’s ‘I don’t need to run tomorrow.’ Then, before you know it, you haven’t run in a couple days. I should have done a lot more work. I underestimated him, and I paid for it. I was cheating myself, and I got comfortable. I’m not comfortable anymore. Kelly woke me up, and I appreciate him for that.” Taylor said at this camp he gets up at 6 a.m. to run five miles a day, every day except Sundays. He swears this time he hasn’t skipped one day. It’s just one change in a camp that was undergone a whole makeover. Back to basics Ozell Nelson is now the lead trainer, replacing Emanuel Steward, and he brought in longtime professional trainer and longtime friend Dicky Woods to assist him. The two have instilled a whole new training program for Taylor, or at least new to the professional Taylor. Many of the things Taylor does in the gym now are things he and Nelson worked on as amateurs, and that’s by design. “What I’ve brought is stuff we used to do as an amateur,” said Nelson, who was Taylor’s first trainer when the future middleweight champion was 13. “I feel like he’s learning to do things like he used to do. I ain’t seen Jermain this focused and this much want and drive, ever. He’s focused.” Taylor’s gym training on this day was split into 14 three-minute segments, with one minute of rest between, to simulate a fight. Shadow boxing took up the first few segments, with a twist. As Taylor boxed, Nelson threw tennis balls at his head. Taylor continued to stick and move as he slipped around the balls coming at him. There was another twist for the next few segments. Woods strapped on a body mitt, which is a large pad that wraps around his entire front torso similar to a catcher’s chest protector, and stepped into a ring. Then Tiger Castanos, who has been with Nelson and Taylor for much of Taylor’s pro career, strung a yellow rope about 5 feet off the ground so it cut the ring in half diagonally. Woods stood in the middle of the ring, and Taylor went to work, slugging Woods in the ribs, stomach and chest as he ducked up and around the yellow rope to simulate slipping punches. He landed body shot after body shot, yelling with each one. “The intensity he’s shown, I can’t even explain it,” Woods said. “He’s going to refuse to lose this fight.” Next it was on to the heavy bag, but this also wasn’t like a typical bag session for Taylor. Taylor banged away with big shots for 20 seconds, then Nuk Owens, his camp manager, yelled out “Popcorn.” It was the signal for Taylor to start hitting the bag with left and right jabs, rapid fire as fast as he could, for another 20 seconds. When the three minutes of “bag burnout” were over, Taylor had thrown 477 punches, or 2. 65 a second for 180 seconds. It was exhausting, but Taylor said one thought made it easy to keep going throughout the session. Taylor knocked down Pavlik in the second round of their first fight, but took himself out of the match in the process. Taylor said the energy he expended to throw the punches it took to get Pavlik down sapped his strength so much that he was gassed from the second round on. Taylor said there’s no way he will get tired from throwing a lot of punches this time. “That thought’s been there the whole time,” he said. “As I’m hitting the bag, over and over, I’m thinking, ‘If I did this the last time, when I threw those punches , I wouldn’t have gotten tired afterward. I would have taken him out.’ “ I get him hurt this time, I’m throwing everything at him. And I’m not going to get tired, because I’ve got it in me to keep going.” Taylor had one final segment to finish after his mitt and bag work, which was one last change from his previous camps. Nelson and Woods went outside and rolled in a giant tractor tire, shoving it through the ropes into the ring. For three minutes, Taylor repeatedly raised a 10-pound sledgehammer over his head and pounded the tire without taking a break in between, 90 swings in all. It is a drill that Woods has been using for years, as it develops tremendous upper-body strength while making a boxer use all parts of his body. It appears to work, as well. The muscles in Taylor’s chest and arms are as defined as they have been in his pro career, a direct result of the extra strength work and the fact that Taylor does not have to diet and dehydrate himself to get down to 160 pounds, as this fight is at a catchweight of 166 pounds. There might be another reason Taylor likes the tire, however. Pavlik trained with a tractor tire before the first fight, flipping it up a hill, as shown on HBO. Taylor said he didn’t want Pavlik to have all the fun. “A little bit, a little bit,” Taylor said when asked if the reason he was using a tire was because Pavlik used one. “I figure he got a tire, I got a tire, too, damn it. But it does work everything, all my muscles, and in the morning, I feel it.” Ready this time Taylor nearly smiled after talking about Pavlik and his tire, the closest he came to letting his guard down. “He’s real focused,” Nelson said. “I’ve actually been trying to get him to lighten up a bit, because you don’t want to take this emotion all the way through camp.” Nelson said Taylor has been using plenty of emotion when it comes to sparring. Nelson has had Taylor sparring every other day. He has been getting in a lot of rounds with big, heavy, strong partners, and is already up to 10-round sessions.