By Ron Borges

Emanuel Steward kept reiterating one point in the days leading up to last Saturday night's showdown between undisputed middleweight champion Jermain Taylor and the Ozzie Smith of defensive fighting, Winky Wright, at Memphis' FedEx Forum. He kept cautioning people not to expect too many changes in Taylor just because he was now training the young champion.

Emanuel Steward didn't know how right he would be.

After two razor-thin victories over Bernard Hopkins lifted Taylor's record to an unblemished 25-0 and left him the undisputed middleweight champion of the world, Ozell Nelson, Taylor's amateur trainer and surrogate father, urged him to drop Pat Burns, the only professional trainer he'd known, in favor of Steward. Nelson and Burns clashed often but he argued it was more than a personality problem between them. He convinced Taylor that he was no longer progressing as a fighter and needed the Hall of Fame trainer from Detroit in his corner to come up with fight strategy and to iron out the obvious defensive lapses he still suffered from.

Taylor balked at first but ultimately agreed and Burns remained home in Miami while Taylor went to Detroit to work with Steward in the basement of the legendary Kronk Gym. When he emerged Saturday night in Memphis, Taylor was confident he was an improved fighter now capable, as he put it, of taking the jab away from the best jabber in the division and cracking open the defenses of the Fort Knox of boxing, Winky Wright.

"Everything will work off the jab,'' Taylor said before the fight. "I think I have one of the best jabs in boxing and with Emanuel teaching I have learned how to use it more effectively. I'll be busy all night with my jab.

"I'm not worried about his defense or his jab. I'm going to be very aggressive and dictate this fight with my own jab. I have a couple of new moves to counter his jab that I learned from Emanuel. I'm going to be using a lot of my skills in this fight, something I kind of got away from. It won't be all about strength.''

     

In contrast, Wright's trainer, Dan Birmingham, said Taylor's confidence would begin to wane after a few rounds of "being hit every five to 10 seconds. He's never seen a jab like Winky's. Nobody takes the jab from Winky Wright. After he starts getting hit, he'll go back to fighting the way he always fought.''

Steward feared the same thing and, in essence, that's what happened and it nearly cost Taylor his title less than a year after first winning it. Steward had cautioned that Wright was far from the ideal opponent to face when you've been with a new trainer for only two months and he made clear that he hadn't tried to change Taylor much, just tinker a bit at this early stage of their relationship and hope to get by.

The way things turned out, Jermain Taylor was wrong about his jab and wrong about how important his strength would be and Emanuel Steward was right. Therein lies the background to a fight that ended in a controversial draw that allowed Taylor to retain his belts but not the mythical title of undisputed champion. He may still own the RING magazine belt symblomatic of being the undisputed champion but there were nothing but disputes over the three judges' cards that allowed Taylor to retain his titles by the thinnest margin possible.

Chuck Giampa gave the last round to Taylor and hence the fight, 115-113. Melvina Lathon also gave the last round to the champion, thus calling the fight a 114-114 draw. Ray Hawkins, conversely, gave the last round to Wright and also the fight, 115-113. The card in this corner, and many others at ringside, saw Wright the winner by virtue of not only his dominating jab and the fact that by the end of the night Taylor's left eye was nearly completely closed but because Taylor was unable to carry through on the pleadings of his trainer to stay in the center of the ring.

     

In a closely contested contest in which no one goes down or is badly hurt the outcome often turns on who controls the flow of the action. Who determines how the real estate inside the ring will be covered? In this case, it was clearly Wright all night long.

After the opening rounds Wright established the clear superiority of his jab and that allowed him to control the way the fight would be contested. It prevented Taylor from scoring with his own jab and he was unable to shoot his right hand counters in behind Wright's jab because he would get caught with a flurry first far too often. So Taylor began to retreat, although not solely of his own volition.

Wright continually backed Taylor up, forcing him to the ropes and the turnbuckles despite Steward's insistence he stay in the center of the ring. Steward was right because when Taylor was off the ropes and moving he fared far better but his decision to retreat so often was one being forced upon him by Wright's jab and fast flurries behind it. In a territorial battle of this nature the man in command of the flow of the action should also have been in command of the scorecards but fighting in someone's hometown comes with its own difficulties, as Wright should have anticipated.

Wright spent five years fighting mostly abroad, an odyssey that took him to England, France, Luxembourg, Germany, South Africa, Monaco and Argentina. He understood the power of hostile crowds like the one he was facing in Memphis, a small Southern city only an hour's drive from Taylor's Little Rock, Ark. roots. Somehow that knowledge seemed to elude Wright late in the fight however and he paid for the slippage.

Convinced he was winning easily, Wright all but took the final round off, ignoring the advice of his owner trainer to use his legs but also "get in and get out.'' He chose mostly to get out and, fairly or unfairly depending on your perspective and zip code, it cost him dearly.

It cost the 34-year-old Wright the middleweight title and the kind of negotiating leverage he's never had and it cost him a brilliant victory to add to the ones he'd already put up against Felix Trinidad and twice against Shane Mosley. Now the best he can hope for is that the winner of the Mosley-Fernando Vargas junior middleweight fight next month decides Wright is the man to turn to to make the most money with if Oscar De La Hoya isn't interested.

As for Taylor, he dodged a bullet when Wright took 40 winks one round early but seemed to understand the closeness of the decision and that perhaps at 27 he'd been given an early Father's Day gift, although not one he was all that proud of.

     

"I'm sorry it was so close,'' the soft-spoken and genial Taylor (25-0-1) said after the decision was announced by ring voice Michael Buffer and then denounced by Wright. "I give it up to Winky. He threw his punches in bunches. He had a great jab. It surprised me how fast it was.

     

"I don't know what he was thinking in the 12th round. He was winning with his flurries. He should have kept fighting. If he wanted the title so bad, he should have fought all 12 rounds. This is boxing. You have to fight all 12 rounds.''

Not if you feel you have the kind of lead Wright (50-3-1) felt he'd established by both outjabbing and outflurrying his bigger opponent. According to CompuBox's punch count, Wright landed 59 more blows than Taylor and totally took his jab away from him, outlanding him by over 60 jabs while connecting on 31 percent of the 335 he threw to Taylor's 13 percent connect rate. As his frustration grew, Taylor finally abandoned the jab all together once his left eye began to close from the combination of an inadvertent clashing of heads and the constant slapping of Wright's right fist against it and began to rely on what had gotten him this far - his strength.

     

When it was over and Taylor's hand was half raised, Steward breathed a heavy sigh of relief and then softly scolded his fighter for a performance in which he felt "he did so many things wrong and still kept his championship.''

Although Steward quietly felt Wright was past his prime and had begun to show the ravages of over 50 professional fights in his previous two matches, his young charge was unable to capitalize on that if it's true. Steward had expected Taylor's jab to be a far more potent weapon than it turned out to be and it was that failing, as well as Taylor's still uncorrected balance problems, that made it impossible for the champion to do as Steward kept pleading.

"Stay in the middle of the ring,'' Steward told him many times between rounds. "When he pops the jab, throw the right.''

Taylor did at times but not often enough to please anyone but a crowd willing to cheer his every move. What he did best was what he's always done best, which was to return fire when in trouble with hard punches. Too often trapped along the ropes or pinned in the corners, Taylor would rally back after Wright landed in flurries. Although much of the time the champion's punches were being blocked by Wright's long arms and quick hands, some got through and more importantly Taylor appeared to be doing more than he was actually doing because Wright's upper body would rock back from the force of the blows he was smothering, thus giving the illusion he might be getting hit.

Birmingham had warned of that earlier in the week when he said Taylor's vast amateur experience had to be dealt with because "Those guys know how to steal rounds.'' Taylor managed to do that judging by the decision and with it steal not quite a victory but at least a reprieve.

     

"He kept it because he's a strong, determined guy,'' Steward said of Taylor (25-0-1). "Jermain punches so hard that even when he hit Winky's gloves he knocked him back. A lot of judges are impressed by that. Jermain is one of the toughest guys I've met. Whenever it looked like he'd lose it he bit down and fought back. After seven or eight rounds I told him he was losing and he picked it up.''

That was faint praise to be sure but Steward had wisely already laid the ground work for a potentially tightly contested match by saying all week that this was a difficult fight for Taylor because Wright's defense was the soundest in boxing and his offense was better than he got credit for. As things turned out, Steward was much more accurate with his public comments than he would have liked.

"When you have two guys at the top of their game you're going to have close competition,'' Steward said. "It's like in (NBA) basketball. A lot of these playoff games end up 106-104. It's close but you still got to have a winner and a loser. I was prepared to accept a loss but it was a close fight either way and we won.''

Not exactly. Jermain Taylor didn't win anything. He survived. Sometimes, against an opponent as difficult to mix with as Wright, that's the best you can hope for. If you're Winky Wright, however, it was not salvation. It was a reminder of what he claims has been the hard-luck story of his career, one built around opponents who wouldn't fight him and close decisions he didn't get, like the one against Vargas that so retarded his earning power and progress.

The odd thing is if he truly believed that was the case he should have listened more to Birmingham and less to the growing entourage of sycophants he has surrounded himself with, guys who have convinced him his power in the boxing world is far greater than it is. Instead of arguing his case and the merits of a rematch face-to-face with Taylor at the post-fight press conference, he chose to surround himself with cheerleaders and silently walk out of the arena as if his work had spoken for itself. It had not and he followed up that shortcoming with a choice former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis thought unwise.

"I should have gone in the locker room and told him, 'Bro, go out there and tell them how you won," said Lewis, who worked the HBO broadcast in place of Steward and who felt Wright had won the bout fairly handily.

"You don't get points for punching the gloves,'' Lewis said frankly of the decision to call the fight a draw.

Perhaps not normally but you do if you're fighting an hour from Jermain Taylor's hometown and that can lead to problems, especially if his opponent decides at the worst of times to leave work early. Had Winky Wright won the last round convincingly, which considering the superiority of his jab and the trouble Taylor was having seeing out of his left eye should have been easily accomplished, he would have also won the fight because Lathon's card would have then become 115-113 for the challenger and Giampa's would have been a draw.

In the end, nobody got what they wanted but in an odd way perhaps they both got what they deserved. Jermain Taylor got a boxing lesson and Winky Wright got a reminder that working a full shift is still the smartest thing a man can do in life.