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Taylor fits easy as champ Thursday, Nov 17, 2005 By Harry King MEMPHIS - With two words, Pat Burns sucked the silliness out of the room. "Work time," said Jermain Taylor's trainer. The workout that followed was staged with photo ops in mind, but Burns made certain that it was more than a dog and pony show. Before it began, Taylor sat in a chair, his right hand propped on the metal folding chair in front of him. Burns talked and taped, his face close to Taylor's, and there were no smiles until Burns addressed an earlier Taylor moment with Elvis with, "When a fighter is coming up, you always try to put him with a dead man." His man broke a sweat with an almost soundless jump rope routine and the minutes he spent pop-pop-popping the padded mitts of a partner were about footwork, tactics and style. Thinking about the rematch with Bernard Hopkins, Burns was the puppeteer for the punch catcher with the large red mitts. When the man missed the two-finger, one-finger signal, Burns blurted, "Two-one." For Taylor, "Good," surrounded "Don't walk in shuffling, cut him off." Only four months after winning the middleweight title, Taylor is at ease with the chores of a champion. Whether he's sparring with an Elvis who can't make the middleweight limit of 160 sans white jumpsuit and bad hair or updating a Canadian interviewer about a glitch with the cameraman in Memphis, his maturity smacks you like one of his left jabs. The distractions, he said, come with the territory. "You just have to know how to roll with it," he said. The time with Taylor was a blatant promotion, but that's part of the fight game, particularly when tickets are $100 to $800 and the Arkansas contingent is certain to be smaller than in July when Taylor vs. Hopkins was a novelty and Vegas was a bonus. HBO, which just happens to have the Dec. 3 rematch with Hopkins for $49.95, was around and scurrying to make a 12:15 p.m. window with the Elvis stuff. The backdrop for Taylor's TV interviews was a black canvas with a white-lettered promo for the fight repeated 25 times so that any camera angle was sure to be a good one. The lone fight-promoting poster in the one-story concrete building was moved a couple of times - once to make sure nobody swiped it and once so it would be smack behind Taylor working on a small punching bag. Near the end of the first Hopkins fight, Taylor was almost out of gas. Some second-guessed Burns, saying too much sparring during a nine-week training camp had drained the Little Rock native. Burns had no choice but to schedule an extended training camp in Miami because Taylor was somewhere on the wrong side of 180 pounds. A quick learner, Taylor watched his calories and was barely past 170 so Burns reduced this training camp to six weeks. Both Burns and Taylor know the first fight was very close and that it could easily have been a draw. "Right now, he has a lot of people thinking he got lucky and won that fight," Burns said. "He managed to win, but he was not sharp and he knows it." Taylor can do a lot better, Burns said, "and if he does, then he'll start to be considered as one of the great fighters." Taylor said he was a bit anxious in the first fight - understandable when you consider that he was suddenly confronted by hundreds of media and that his opponent was supposed to be the best thing going for more than 10 years - and he understands the sentiments of the naysayers. He says he chased Hopkins too much and threw too many unnecessary punches. "In this training camp, there is a different mindset," Taylor said. "I fought this guy before and I beat him. I know his strengths, I know his weaknesses, I know everything about him." ----- Harry King is sports columnist for Stephens Media Group's Arkansas News Bureau. His e-mail address is hking@arkansasnews.com. |
