“It was a good shot,” he told Loew, in the most lucid tone of the whole night: “I’m all right.” Biting down on his mouthpiece, Pavlik fought grimly determined through the next, churning out more punches – 99 all told – in a concerted effort to back Taylor up. “What an assault,” broadcaster Jim Lampley cried, “and what a survival!” Surviving the next onslaught, Pavlik dragged himself through the round long enough for Taylor to grow frustrated, punches that had been taut with violence seconds earlier looking slack by the end. But once referee Steve Smoger had hauled him off, Taylor had Pavlik stumbling across the ring and trying to keep his balance like a first-time skater on ice. With his legs practically rubber, Pavlik tried swarming Taylor to the ropes.
“That’s it!” shouted Lennox Lewis on commentary. As Kelly Pavlik’s head struggled to communicate with his limbs, Taylor lashed him with combinations, crumpling his contender to the canvas with a whole minute and 40 seconds to go. Forty seconds later and Taylor dipped away again before jellying Pavlik’s legs with another huge right, this time straight on the target and delivered with vicious force. Fighting frenetic as a kerbside drunk through the opening three minutes, Taylor had collected himself between rounds, and started the second dipping elegantly from a jab to land a hard counter right. “It’s a basic f***ing fight to this kid,” Kelly’s trainer, Jack Loew, barked in the corner.īut if the first was basic, the second turned things thoroughly labyrinthine for Pavlik. With a minute to go in the opener, Pavlik was firmly in gear, throwing out his favourite jab-cross combination. Then Pavlik caught Taylor with a hard right, backing him up against the ropes while the crowd, overwhelmingly in favour of the challenger, roared in approval.
Ten seconds later and he buckled Pavlik with a left hook and shorter right – a cue for Taylor to swing for the Youngstown fighter, who dipped into mid-range and started jabbing back. Long regarded a frontrunner, “Bad Intentions” moved straight to centre ring, where he sent out a little flirt of a left hand before hurling a huge right. When the bell rang, Jermain Taylor immediately made his intentions clear. “This state is elevating, as the hurt turns into hating”: though Pavlik and Taylor hardly disliked each other, heavy metal proved an appropriate orchestra. Taylor came out second, sloping down to the ring while Lil Wayne’s Duffle Bag Boy coughed and spluttered from the speakers, but it was Kelly Pavlik’s entrance to Korn’s cacophonous Here to Stay which set the tone – brash, aggressive, implacable – for the night. Pavlik and Taylor had an epic rivalry Chris Farina/Top RankĪnd then it started. When they met again in 2007, Taylor was the middleweight champion with an exclusive deal to fight on HBO, while Pavlik, fresh from savage stoppages of Jose Luis Zertuche and Edison Miranda, was the division’s likeliest contender. Taylor went on to claim the bronze in Sydney.
#Turn off the lights lil wayne professional
Kelly Pavlik, then a gangly 17-year-old, lost narrowly, turning professional a short time after on the bottom of a card in California. Taylor and Pavlik had crossed paths some years before in the trials for the 2000 US Olympic team. Forget the business of boxing: under the electric blue of the Boardwalk Hall’s barrel chest ceiling, this had all the gorgeous severity of a bloodsport at its best. Hopkins had taken to calling Taylor the corporate champion before their second fight, but there was nothing corporate about this. And given the squalid aftermath of Taylor’s wins over Hopkins, when the then-41-year-old Hopkins went from calling his loss “a robbery” to “a rape”, Taylor’s fight with Pavlik was a necessary balm. That was a time when “the matches themselves transcended the squalor of the business side of the sport and focused only on the men who fought”, as Pete Hamill wrote in the foreword to George Kimball’s Four Kings. A little more than two years after Bernard Hopkins’ age of austerity was ended, Pavlik and Taylor turned back the clock to produce a fight straight out of the eighties. On September 29, 2007, Kelly Pavlik and Jermain Taylor played rock ‘em sock ‘em with each other’s faces in the most cartoonishly brilliant middleweight title fight in years. IT was the night Atlantic City discovered life after Arturo Gatti.
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