Pavlik’s Right Is All Wrong for Taylor

Pavlik’s Right Is All Wrong for Taylor

By Bart Barry

It’s time to feel sympathy for Jermain Taylor. The Middleweight Champion of the World is no longer liked by his former advocates at HBO. Taylor’s other promoter, Lou DiBella, was enraged with him last weekend. Emanuel Steward, Taylor’s trainer, hasn’t improved Taylor’s boxing at all. And in the United States, Jermain Taylor can’t draw more than a tenth the crowd Joe Calzaghe draws in Wales.

This drawing-power comparison – Taylor to Calzaghe – is relevant because, according to gate receipts, it now makes it illogical to put a talked-about Taylor-Calzaghe fight in the United States. And without a favorable crowd to influence favorable judges, Jermain Taylor has no chance. Against Calzaghe, Taylor would be a junior Jeff Lacy without a left hook.

Worse still, Jermain Taylor doesn’t have much of a right hook either. More about that shortly. But first and foremost, Taylor and his co-promoters need to be disabused of ideas about making a Taylor-Calzaghe fight.

Now let’s discuss right hooks, and right crosses. Right hands, in fact, were the whole attraction last Saturday night in Memphis, Tennessee, when Jermain Taylor decisioned little Cory Spinks. Taylor didn’t land one meaningful right hand. But before that, in the co-main event, Kelly Pavlik ruined Edison Miranda with right crosses.

There’s a technique for throwing a right cross. Pavlik has mastered it, and Taylor has not. It begins with the right hip. To throw the cross properly, the inside of the right hip should face the target before the right fist does. In this respect, the lower body movement of a prizefighter must resemble that of a PGA golfer. Jermain Taylor, conversely, throws his right cross like an MLB pitcher.

That’s why Taylor routinely drapes himself over ducking opponents, hitting their lower backs. And because he begins the cross by sliding his left foot past opponents, Taylor’s right cross is championship prizefighting’s most telegraphed punch.

Still, this amateurish trait served Taylor well before he fought Bernard Hopkins, and well-enough when he fought Hopkins. There was no way Taylor was going to land a consequential right cross on Hopkins, but Taylor’s commitment to the right hand was enough to keep Hopkins ducking rather than punching.

That is, Taylor’s desire to throw the right hand was enough to overcome his frustration with the punch never landing. Taylor missed 40 punches a round. Hopkins landed six punches a round. And the judges favored Taylor’s activity.

But Jermain Taylor’s desire to throw the right hand is gone. Maybe Taylor’s getting older. Or maybe it’s his trainer. Since hiring Emanuel Steward three fights ago, Jermain Taylor has only become gentler. He’s gone from a fighter who threw the right hand imperfectly but intensely to a guy who won’t throw the right hand unless perfectly.

If Emanuel Steward was not prepared to make Taylor watch five or six daily hours of Wladimir Klitschko throwing right crosses, Steward shouldn’t have tampered with Taylor’s boxing at all. To Mr. Steward’s profane displeasure, Jermain Taylor’s recent training has confused the middleweight champ. And such confusion has robbed Taylor of his ferociousness, which made him champ in the first place.

This development is most alarming because of what the world saw from middleweight contender Kelly Pavlik, last Saturday. Fighting Edison Miranda – whose style approaches Taylor’s, though more intense and less polished – Pavlik outclassed and outworked his opponent. And also proved he has a world-class chin.

The first two rounds of Pavlik-Miranda may be remembered as the middleweight division’s finest of 2007. Before the fight, Kelly Pavlik asked, Is Edison Miranda threatening when he moves backwards? To his great credit, Pavlik then asked that question in the ring. And answered it with a definitive no. Throwing many more punches than Miranda was accustomed to seeing, Pavlik had Miranda spent by their fight’s 10th minute.

Once Edison Miranda’s fatigue subverted his intensity, Miranda was no more than a target for Pavlik’s right hand. Despite his ability to throw uppercuts and left hooks, Kelly Pavlik proved his most effective combination remains the classic One-Two: left jab, right cross. Simple stuff, but also devastating to a flawed offensive force like Edison Miranda – or Jermain Taylor.

After he hurt Miranda badly at the end of the sixth round, Pavlik made concise and brutal work of finishing Miranda in Round 7. Most telling was the fact that Pavlik had less trouble with Miranda than he did in his preceding fight with Jose Luis Zertuche. Kelly Pavlik is improving disproportionately faster than his quality of opposition.

After the fight, Pavlik would say to HBO, “The media created Miranda.” That Pavlik noted this, believed it and then proved it, raises some questions about what Pavlik might opine of Jermain Taylor – who’s promoted by a former media executive.

Well Kelly, even the “media” is now wondering about Jermain Taylor. HBO was all too happy to replace Bernard Hopkins with a gregarious, handsome action fighter like Taylor. But since then, though Taylor has become Arkansas’ favorite son, even those who bleed Razorback red and white would have trouble saying Taylor is fulfilling his promise as middleweight champion.

And now he finds himself stuck between Kelly Pavlik and Joe Calzaghe. Taylor has a better chance of beating Pavlik, for less money at middleweight, than he has of beating Calzaghe, for more money at super-middleweight. But whichever way Taylor chooses, Kelly Pavlik will likely be the WBC middleweight champion by the end of Taylor’s next fight.

Is it too early, then, to write a tribute to Taylor’s time as middleweight champion?

Jermain Taylor was a good old boy with a lot of heart and athletic ability, initially mistaken for more, and now likely to be remembered as a bridge from Bernard Hopkins to the next great champion. So far, there’s no proof that can’t be Kelly Pavlik