By Patrick Kehoe

Former world middleweight champion Jermain Taylor awaits his next opponent, knowing a loss lays him bare onto the icy slab marked: STEPPING STONE. Who will believe “Bad Intentions” has anything meaningful left to offer, in the championship boxing ring, if he cannot defeat a straight ahead, reactive tough guy like Arthur Abraham, flexing his undefeated record or not? Taylor knows exactly where his mercurial boxing career has landed him, fighting for his professional life – respectability all but vanquished – on the road in Berlin, the proverbial underdog – to a danger man riding the winds of confident assuredness – coming off a last round knockout loss, in a title fight he was winning, against the determined, but, ultra pedantic Carl Froch, in April.

How does Taylor keep losing to men of such inferior talent, fighters unabashedly floating championship careers on mostly grit and gumption?

Taylor knows the answer, attempting to lift off again for greener pastures his burden born, as does his ever faithful trainer Ozell Nelson. When the end comes, the looming gloom of oblivion envelops the cast off bodies of defeated men. Finding a way to expire in the last round against Froch, had Taylor already succumb to something akin to inevitability, the parallax of damning fate? Or does Taylor really, earnestly believe he’s still one fight from redemption? How deeply does the marrow of coursing pride run in Taylor? Does the Holyfield phoenix live within him?

Many in boxing wonder what Jermain Taylor is doing in the prize ring, since more and more he cuts the figure of a diminished man, never quite committed enough or smart enough to realize the full measure of his gifted boxing. Some point out his extra-curricular social activities, dalliances we read as proclivities painted blonde or brunette. And then there is the matter of his stubbornness and we remind ourselves, still waters do indeed run deep. Not to mention Jermain Taylor has NEVER shown us the one essential quality of a great fighter: the reflex to do the right thing, at precisely the most opportune time.

Taylor as middleweight champion was almost invisible, his ‘coming’ greatness recessing, lost, within each complicated title defence shortcoming. Why wouldn’t he just get off the ropes against Winky Wright? Where was the finishing fire power against Kassim Ouma and Cory Spinks? Perhaps there is no stylized self portrait, not much there, there! Taylor’s more a still life, an arrested development, the compromised guy without the fundamental urges of a need to dominate. Occasional brilliance and periodic focus are not nearly enough. Likely, that’s what Bernard Hopkins’ street smart radar sensed immediately about “the kid” Taylor, moving Hopkins, in 2005, to comment, “We aren’t playin’ here... This is a master’s class!” How prophetic Hopkins was; Taylor never did find the character to dominate, to find himself, let alone make his professionalism a constant sacrifice to the objectifying needs of mega-elite athleticism.

He’s become the shadow to budding excellence, the promise of Jermain Taylor, boxing champion, now the back story of a particular tale of personal abandonment and inexplicable loss. Unsustainable greatness of being, was that Jermain Taylor’s perfect role? Yes, one can over load the fatalism, highlighting Taylor’s career dissolve.

Still, another country, another champion and another chance, if a last chance, to almost make good on what was once Taylor’s golden future. And always, with Jermain Taylor you find yourself taking him at his word, the southern gentleman, man-child, white eyed with earnestness, his pent-up frustration – seemingly quelled by good manners – for never having become everything he should have been. Breathy, half-whispered mutterings he means to translate as prefight confidence – words always difficult for him to order – seldom come at you with the authority of fact, as if the heart must ultimately dominate the mind of this man.

“This was the perfect fight for me. I couldn't wait to get in camp and start training for this match. I'm excited again like I was when I started my career. I have a purpose, I'm fighting for a title, something lost and I want it back."

No, this is not the Jermain Taylor, Little Rock, Arkansas native, launching himself head long into the Showtime six masked men super-middleweight tournament, beginning with Taylor’s Berlin title fray against temporary IBF middleweight belt holder “King” Arthur Abraham, Saturday, October 17, 2009. This was Jermain Taylor about to match wits and wilds – he promised – with lanky WBC super-middleweight belt custodian from England, the aforementioned Carl Froch, in April.

We happily excuse Taylor for never really learning the shock talk “I’m-Da-Man” rhythms of self-aggrandizement, which fills in for on-the-record sporting filler, annoying perfected in our time by James Toney, Antonio Tarver and Roy Jones Jr. We are used to Jermain Taylor understating the obvious; even his bragging comes out as something his camp has reminded him to say once the hand held, outreaching electronics are shoved in his face. We note in passing, Taylor has the distinction as the only man to twice turn back middleweight legend Bernard Hopkins. And we need to repeat, he was also unable to carve out his own dynastic run at middleweight or best his successor and slayer Kelly Pavlik – though Hopkins did – just as he failed, over four title defences, to prove himself a boxing champion of distinction. And yet the circle of a not quite resolved career must ever bend, completing itself demarking allotted spacing, in time, an act of imagination and returning. Perhaps, the promise that Jermain Taylor’s upset of the great Hopkins, in July 2005, the evidence his boxing proved then, has become the tolling bell for what, by common expectation, was to define this decade... and perhaps not.

Can there be ‘a greater good’ yet for Taylor or are we now indulging in too romantic a flight of fancy? What else could Team Taylor hope to believe coming off of three loses in four fights? Just what manner of man has Jermain Taylor decided himself to be? Especially nearer the end than the beginning and can he know the honest answer to that most determinative of questions before he’s in the “O2 World Arena” ring against Abraham, baring down, surging to test him?

Can we ignore that Taylor succumb to Froch, ahead on the score cards, which equates the former champion to a blind man walking, unable to see himself as a champion, surrounded by a corner which sent him into the desperate cliché of ‘finishing up strong’ and thus the lion’s mouth of Froch’s fleeting desperation. Certainly, no such misperception can occur in Berlin. Just how clear sighted in the crucible of competitive determinism and, for that matter, how creatively minded is the fatherly Ozell Nelson? Detroit boxing guru Emanuel Steward saw the flaws of Jermain Taylor, yet, only Pat Burns, Taylor’s mentoring trainer of old, saw through the contradictions that made up the paradox that was and is Taylor.

He’s always been more of an athlete turned boxer than boxer with great athleticism. The essential Jermain Taylor was a jabbing machine against champions William Joppy and Bernard Hopkins, with an uneven guard, problematic balance issues, and surprisingly good inside instincts, a powerful though telegraphed right hand and a sneaky inside upper cut, which bracketed a respectable left hook, good to the body or the head. Counselling Taylor, Kronk Gym main man Steward, primarily, obsessed over Taylor’s pacing of punches, i.e. work rate, and his woeful lack of balance. Ozell Nelson has tried, in vain, to fully maximize Taylor’s array of punching options, addressing his reluctance to use his full arsenal, at vital junctures in his fights, to avoid Taylor falling into predictable patterns and a form of diffident despondency mid-fight. Where both trainers tried and valiantly failed was in solving Taylor’s problem of suspect high end cardio fitness, as more than punch economy gone awry or lack of discipline.

And to this day, heading into the Abraham fight, Taylor still trains under the conventional ethic of simple periodization, crash the weight dietetically and the ‘sharpen the tool kit’ methodology of traditional boxing. Had he looked to Hopkins, the man always maintaining his maximum body weight-cardio fitness ratio, he would have learned an invaluable lesson about post-modern training being continuous maintenance and not periodic rigor. It’s as if Taylor has never committed to the obligation of leading an athlete’s life, not just a boxer’s. Certainly, Nelson has not been inspirational enough in his mentorship of Taylor. When Taylor goes to camp to train for fights and condition his body for savagery, he’s lost before he steps into the ring.

For those not naturally resilient to the physicality of prizefighting as punishment endured, one must grasp you then have to be about the business of physically enhancing the upper limits of cardio fitness and producing motor explosiveness all the time, in between camps, training camps themselves being more for tactical preparedness and adaptive strategies, not boot camps. If Taylor isn’t agile, mobile on offense, while producing defensive spacing, dictated from the jab, he’s finished, fodder for simple pressurizing power hitting, ala the robotic Kelly Pavlik.

Beating Hopkins failed to signal to Team Taylor the specific needs of Taylor as an elite figure in boxing. The champion becomes not just the hunted, but his style becomes the template for the division, the standard to be deconstructed, analysed, copied and reformulated. At the elite of boxing practice you are either improving via adaptation – Ray Leonard – or setting a course for enduring over time with predatory wrath – Rocky Marciano.  Team Taylor thought replacing Pat Burns with Manny Steward could only enhance an already proven product, Taylor’s promise. Instead, Taylor regressed, first physically, then tactically, followed by technical blackouts and emotional withdrawal.

Now Taylor’s labour is to complete the re-cycling of promise interrupted, in the dangerous present tense, in Germany, where no one thinks he’s the better man, the tougher warrior, the physical presence of menace and malice. Arthur Abraham makes his living riding out storming flurries of punches, tank-like, to unload a siege of blanketing return fire. In fact, “King” Abraham seems to like challenging opponents to try and match him physically, just so he can get in for the kill shot.

Taylor knows he has to be the quicker fighter; he has to evade and find counter measures from the first round to the last, to have any hope of surviving to win.

"I'm ready to do battle and win by any means necessary. Every fighter has to be ready to do battle and go to war. I'm expecting a war and I'm prepared for it," Taylor is saying, with earnest pre-fight bravado. And would be, for Jermain Taylor, the worst possible outcome; Taylor contesting a tactical boxing match gives him possibilities. Taylor in a pitched battle... well, we already know the outcome. So does Taylor, he’s lived through the pain of it before.

Will Taylor be smart enough, brave enough, to box his best fight, for as long as it takes?

At this point, in a career of what might have been, with expectation waning, nothing else matters for Jermain Taylor.

Patrick Kehoe may be reached at pkehoe@telus.net