By Michael Katz

This was supposed to be a great week. Not only was there an intriguing and terrific fight in my Vegas hometown, the rematch between Kelly Pavlik and Jermain Taylor, but with Pavlik the Ohio franchise for boxing, it would certainly bring in one of my esteemed and dear colleagues, Joe Maxse of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the closest thing the ringside press has to a standup comedian.

Maxse’s dead-on and side-splitting imitation of the late Harry Carey – “Here’s a great big Wrigley welcome, Andre Dawson is seated down the first-base line, uh-oh, he’s been hit in the head. He’s dead…..Holy Cow! There’s a giant tongue coming out of the centerfield scoreboard, you don’t see that at day games…..” – usually costs only a couple of beers, but would be cheap at any price. Now I find out that the Plain-Dealer needs Maxse in Indianapolis where Cleveland State, his basketball beat, will be playing Horizon League-leading Butler Saturday. I know this because suddenly I am the Plain-Dealer’s stringer for the biggest Ohio fight since Pavlik won the middleweight title last September from Taylor.

The Vikings of Cleveland State may be important to the Plain-Dealer, but the undefeated Pavlik is more important to all of Ohio. Since winning the title with a ferocious seventh-round knockout of Taylor after being almost out himself in the second round of the best middleweight fight in years, Youngstown’s favorite son has made the rounds. He tossed out the first ball at an Indians playoff game, flipped the coin before a Browns contest and roamed the Ohio State sidelines during the Michigan game.

As Rich Hoffer, the wonderful boxing writer from Sports Illustrated (when the magazine allows him to be a boxing writer), commented, it is not that Pavlik is from Youngstown, “he IS Youngstown.”

It was a ghost town when I was there when it was Ray (Boom Boom) Mancini’s capital, more than 20 years ago. The steel mills were silent tributes to the jobs and population that had left – almost all the jobs and maybe half the people. Now it’s the Ghost town; Pavlik’s nickname, reflecting his pale skin tone, is “Ghost.”

The rematch is intriguing, and not only because their first meeting produced such fireworks that many thought of it as the fight of the year (only the Israel Vazquez-Rafael Marquez matches could be deemed more exciting). But there is so much anti-boxing sentiment in news rooms around the land that big bouts like this don’t become bigger. I don’t mind if someone is anti-boxing – there are many times I feel that way myself – but just because you’re anti-war doesn’t mean, if you’re a newspaper or magazine, you don’t cover one. You don’t have to be pro-crime to cover murders and kidnapping.

You’ve got to love both guys here. This is a clash of white hats, two nice kids with parallel backgrounds – Pavlik, the pale white kid from Youngstown, Taylor the poor black kid from the wrong side of Little Rock. They are the products of unlikely trainers who have been with them 16 years each. Pavlik, since the age of nine, has been trained by Jack Loew, who has produced exactly zero other stars in his gym that used to be a pizza parlor. Ozell Nelson took a 13-year-old Taylor and molded him not only into a boxer, but a man, at a gym that used to be a gas station.

They are blue-collar trainers. Nelson was laying bricks right after Taylor won the title three years ago against Bernard Hopkins. Two days after Pavlik took it away, Loew was out sealing driveways.

Nelson took a step back when Taylor turned pro, first to the innovative Pat Burns from Miami, then to Emanuel Steward. But following the loss to Pavlik, it is now Taylor alone in charge. Too much, perhaps, has been made of this; at the age of 29, Taylor should know enough about the game that even Richard Simmons could train him.

Others in the Taylor camp, notably his longtime promoter, Lou DiBella, hoped the former champion would not exercise his option of an immediate rematch. It says something that the kid demanded it. Taylor was left in a crumpled heap last September in Atlantic City. Guys who suffer such devastating knockouts usually don’t rebound so quickly.

But not always. Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano took turns knocking each other out. So did Vazquez and Rafael Marquez last year, Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo, Lennox Lewis and Hasim Rahman.

“A lot of people have said why don’t you take a tune-up and get your confidence,” said Taylor the other day. “I don’t need a tune-up. I never lost my confidence. I can beat Kelly Pavlik. I  chose to do this rematch because I want to beat the guy who beat me. I don’t want to waste time with any tune-ups.”

“I don’t know how he’s going to react from that knockout,” said Pavlik. “It was a pretty wicked knockout and neurologically I don’t know mentally if he’s going to be hesitant, if he’s going to come out firing.”

But Pavlik is cognizant of Taylor’s grit. “One thing we do know is that obviously he took this fight pretty quick so he really wants to redeem himself, so we can’t take nothing lightly,” he said.

The first work day after the loss, said Nelson, Taylor showed up at the gym, ready to climb back on the horse.

“I got my butt kicked the last time,” said Taylor, “and I’m a better fighter because of that loss.”

There was a time when I would have heartily recommended sending it in on Pavlik because guys just don’t recover from the kind of knockout Taylor suffered. But I must caution against such exuberance. I still believe Pavlik will win, yet there is a nagging caveat. It’s called the second round of their 2007 contest.

The undefeated Taylor had failed to knock out Bernard Hopkins in two meetings in which he was lucky to get two decisions. He was lucky to get a draw against Winky Wright. No one knocks those guys out, but Taylor also failed to stop junior middleweights like Kassim Ouma and Cory Spinks (hell, he’s a blownup welterweight). He hasn’t scored a knockout in three years.

Yet he had Pavlik down and almost out in that second round. It makes you wonder about chins.

Taylor blamed fatigue for not being able to finish the job that round. He now says he had underestimated Pavlik, had not trained seriously enough.

“This time, when I get him in trouble, I will finish him off,” he said. “I have no excuses. I lost the fight. I give Kelly Pavlik all the credit. I took Kelly for granted. I underestimated him and I learned from that. I’m not taking anything from him, but I’m coming to get back everything he took from me.”

I’m not so sure that Pavlik’s chin was as shaky as it looked last time. Taylor landed some big right hands and Pavlik, unwisely, dropped his hands and stuck out his chin to deride the champion’s punching ability. That’s when he got seriously hurt. And yes, if the referee had stopped the contest in that round, there would not have been a major outcry. But Pavlik showed terrific recuperative powers – he won the third round on all three official cards - and though he was behind on going into the seventh round, he was taking control of the fight. When he hurt Taylor, it was quickly over, Taylor melting down against the ropes in a corner and turning into a puddle.

 

At the contractual weight of 166-pounds, Taylor won’t have to worry about making weight, but then, neither will the 6-foot-2 ½-inch Pavlik, who will return to middleweight after this bout, win or lose, as the 160-pound champion. Promoter Bob Arum already has him lined up for a gimme in June at Madison Square Garden against the popular, but outclassed, John Duddy.

Not so fast, Big Bob. There’s a history here. Pavlik and Taylor met in 2000 at the Olympic Trials. Taylor, on his way to a bronze medal in Sydney, won on points. Maybe he got some breaks from the judges, but his performances against Hopkins and Wright showed that Taylor, 27-1-1 with 17 knockouts, is of indisputable class.

And he knows another loss, especially by knockout, would leave his career in shambles. “Everything is on the line for me this fight,” he said.

BETCHA: Pavlik, 32-0 with 29 knockouts, including nine in a row, the last three against men who had never been stopped before, could be someone very special – if his chin is as good as Loew says it is. If that’s the case, he certainly is worth the play at 2-1 or even less, although I won’t mock anyone who takes the 8-5 buyback odds on Taylor. That is why, in addition to having produced one of the best middleweight fights in years, these two guys are worth the pay-per-view price of $50.

It also helps that there are two terrific betting title fights on the undercard. Martin Castillo, long a fixture at 115 pounds and now trained by Rudy Perez, Marco Antonio Barrera’s longtime guru, challenges fellow Mexican Fernando Montiel for another junior bantamweight (or super fly) belt. Montiel is minus $1.30, but I believe Castillo, at even money, is the play here in what figures to be a very close encounter.

Cristian Mijares, at minus $3.25, should hold off the talented former U.S. Olympian, Jose Navarro (plus $2.50), in an all-southpaw battle for another 115-pound belt – and may the two winners then meet.

Ah, the plethora of action. Also Saturday, from Nuremberg, Germany, a pair of former heavyweight title-holders meet. Nikolai Valuev, the 7-foot giant, is minus $2.75 against Sergei Lyakhovich (plus $2.15). The fight has been blacked out of the United States – something about good taste – but if you want to bet blindly, I’d recommend the chalk here – but not with any great conviction.

PENTHOUSE: Carlos Quintana, for making us “experts” look silly by the way he handled previously unbeaten Paul Williams. One of the great things about sports is that the script is not always followed. See David Tyree’s catch. Quintana has a chance to earn some just rewards with a defense of his alphabet title against Sugar Shane Mosley at the end of May.

OUTHOUSE: Bruce Trampler, Fernando Beltran and yes, you too, Bob Arum, for allowing Tommy Morrison to fight last Saturday in Leon, Mexico. I wasn’t going to buy the pay-per-view card, featuring Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., whom I already have decreed is not his father, but when I heard Morrison was on, I made sure I wouldn’t add to Top Rank’s coffers….Roy Jones Jr., the breeder of pit bulls and fighting chickens, has endorsed Mike Huckabee, who doesn’t believe in evolution, for President….I wish HBO would stop calling Wladimir Klitschko-Sultan Ibragimov partial unification fight as one to determine for “the first time in nine years (that) one man will be at the top of the heavyweight division.”

WELTER SKELTER: Poor Dan Goossen, advertising Paul the Punisher as the “most feared” boxer in the world and comparing him to such terrors as the late Sonny Liston. Williams should not be written off as a factor in the 147-pound division, but his punching power is more Sonny Tufts (“Sonny Tufts?” reportedly blurted Joseph Cotton when announcing the next week’s star on an old radio drama) or Sonny Bono.

Quintana, whose side-to-side movement setting up angles made Williams look like a novice, shook up the division. As HBO’s improving Max Kellerman kept reminding us, how good must Miguel Cotto be, considering Quintana’s only loss was by fifth-round steamroller to the top welterweight. Unfortunately, Cotto can’t trap Floyd Mayweather Jr. into a fight yet and Arum will keep him busy, first against Alfonso Gomez, a Contender loser, and then, instead of the winner of the Kermit Cintron-Antonio Margarito rematch, perhaps against the undeserving Ricardo Mayorga.

See where Ricky Hatton, who continues to duck countryman Junior Witter, is crying for a rematch against Mayweather, presumably this time without Joe Cortez working as the ref….Kudos, though, to Cortez and Robert Hoyle for coming to the aid of 92-year-old Vegas judge Billy Graham. He may not be always fair, but Cortez is one of the game’s good guys….Hatton, by the way, moved way up in weight according to the British press – he was almost gored by an eight-ton elephant while on a safari in South Africa’s Krueger National Park….Andre Berto showed good offensive skills against out-gunned Michael Trabant, but the ease in which he was hit does not augur well for him in the future in this well-stocked division.

STRAIGHT LINES: This is the Year of the Rat on the Chinese calendar. Should be big for boxing….The return of Floyd Mayweather Sr. to Oscar de la Hoya’s corner should be the best selling point for the rematch….Had no problem with movement by B.J. Flores against Ding-a-Ling Wilson. Wasn’t like he was imitating Kendall Holt….Alexander Povetkin is, I’m afraid, not the future of the heavyweight division….You ever notice how grimy locker rooms look on HBO and Showtime during the mock ring entrances that begin their shows? Most of the time, there’s no difference in boxers’ quarters than those of basketball and hockey teams (in fact, in many of the major arenas, they are the same) and the way to the playing fields is usually not through dank basements.…Winky Wright  has been spotted on milk containers.