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Jermain Taylor: not quick to do what everyone else tells him!
By William Dettloff
As I write this, there is some controversy around the identity of Jermain Taylor’s next opponent. Some say Kassim Ouma, others Winky Wright, and it’ll all be cleared up shortly, but in the meantime, it says something about Taylor that these are the two guys in the running.
Ouma is among the three or four best junior middleweights on the planet. For my money, he’s the best. Wright, of course, gave Taylor all kinds of trouble when they met for the world middleweight title in June. Plenty of people thought he won. (I did not.)
This is a hard business where guys get in, try to make as much money as they can as fast as they can, and then, with luck, get the hell out before they end up broken and useless. It isn’t basketball. The smart ones make some money then go home to their living rooms and live a nice life, and the record books and fans be damned. You can’t blame them for it.
That’s not Taylor.
Wright or Ouma. These are the guys he has picked. He didn’t have to go with either of them. We could right now be waiting for him to sign against Jose Luis Zertuche or Amin Asikainen or Daniel Santos. And who could have complained? The guy fought Bernard Hopkins twice, then Wright, and if you think that’s standard for the way new champions act, you haven’t been paying attention.
Most new champions, even the great ones, get a “gimme” in their first defense or two. Not Taylor. He’s one of those rare fighters who mean it when they say they want to face only the best and toughest guys out there. It makes you wonder why he was coddled and matched so carefully on the way up.
You remember how it was then: Alex Rios, Alex Bunema, Raul Marquez for cripes’ sake, a completely shot William Joppy. There were other young, strong middleweights he could have faced, and the closest he came was Daniel Edouard. If you didn’t know better, and most of us didn’t, you’d have thought they were hiding something about him.
Turns out they weren’t.
After Edouard came the close win over Hopkins in a fight everyone knew could have gone either way and none of us would have been surprised if Taylor had taken the win and gone on his way. He didn’t. He limped by with another squeaker over Hopkins, and if you’ve been around this business for any length of time, you knew the next one would be against a landscaper from Phoenix. Wrong again. It was Wright, one of the most respected prizefighters in the business. Poor Lou DiBella.
Now it’s Wright or Ouma. And Ouma, by the way, is considered the step-down fight. The easier one. Ask Sechew Powell or, better yet, Verno Phillips how easy Ouma is. I know he’s smaller than Taylor is and not a puncher. Makes no difference. He doesn’t have to hurt Taylor to beat him. He just has to outpunch him.
Taylor hasn’t won a fight outright since stopping Edouard. That was three fights ago. And he still refuses a gimme. Still wants the best guys out there. Still wants to prove himself. No soft touches. You have to respect him for that, especially in this business.
Some miscellaneous observations from the past week:
For what it’s worth, Shannon Briggs-Sergei Liakhovich is a hell of a lot more interesting than Shannon Briggs-Wladimir Klitschko. And so is Calvin Brock against Klitschko.
I don’t know of many guys in the heavyweight division more capable than Fres Oquendo of making Evander Holyfield look every second of his 44 years. Not that Oquendo’s anything great—he isn’t. But I see him giving Evander fits.
Geezer Alert: Those of you who fell in love with boxing during the Mike Tyson era (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and don’t care much for what came before may want to skip the next couple of paragraphs.
For everyone else, OLN’s broadcast of the second Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight as part of its Legends Of The Ring series, which is hosted pretty capably by Michael Buffer, by the way, was wonderful right off the bat for its inclusion of a beloved and lost tradition: the roll call of champions.
This is who was introduced and gathered in the ring before Ali-Frazier II: Floyd Patterson, Joey Giardello, Willie Pastrano, Rocky Graziano, Willie Pep, Sandy Saddler, Ken Norton, Emile Griffith, and George Foreman (who was the reigning heavyweight champion). What a moment. Pure magic. It seemed Patterson received the loudest ovation, followed by Graziano. The most boos? Foreman. My, how things have changed.
I hadn’t seen Ali-Frazier II, a hell of a good fight, in years. I scored it 6-5-1 in rounds for Ali. Sorry, Joe.
Speaking of things old and beloved, what the hell has happened to ESPN Classic? When did Juan Diaz vs. Billy Irwin become a “classic”? When did Cory Spinks-Larry Marks turn into Robinson-LaMotta? If the problem is that ESPN has exhausted its library, I have a suggestion: Go out and buy more fights. Turning on ESPN Classic and seeing Lawrence Clay-Bey against Charles Shufford, as I did last week, is just wrong.
My apologies to Fred Kesch, manger of Oleg Maskaev, whose name I got completely wrong in my piece on Maskaev’s win over Hasim Rahman, which appears here and in the December 2006 Ring Extra that goes on sale October 3.
Speaking of Maskaev, I’m not terribly surprised to see Kesch and Dennis Rappaport taking the easy road. Maskaev will face one Peter Okhello in Moscow, probably in December. Okhello has lost to Kali Meehan and Imamu Mayfield, among others, if you’re wondering. Reportedly, the plan is for Maskaev and Holyfield to cash in together down the road. ringmagazine.com
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Originally Posted by p4pking
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