TAYLOR EXPLORES THE DARK SIDE

June 14, 2006 - by Nat Gottlieb

What Darth Vader failed to do with Luke Skywalker, boxing empire builder Emanuel Steward hopes to succeed with Jermain Taylor: lure him over to his "Dark Side."

"I see a certain amount of toughness in Jermain," said Steward, who has led 27 different fighters to 40 world titles. "It was his mental toughness that interested me from the beginning. I had seen it in those two fights with (Bernard) Hopkins. Forget all of that nice, Southern-type personality. I see a real, real tough guy inside of Jermain Taylor."

Steward got the chance to explore that "tough" side in early April, when Team Taylor pulled a shocker and announced that the Hall of Fame trainer had accepted an invitation to work with Taylor (25-0, 17 KOs) for his June 17 middleweight title defense against Winky Wright (50-3, 25 KOs) in Memphis on HBO's "World Championship Boxing."

Initially, Steward was to serve only as an advisor to regular trainer Pat Burns. But after a few days Burns, the only professional trainer Taylor had ever had, decided a two-headed corner wouldn't work and stepped aside - with "no hard feelings," according to Taylor.

Needless to say, the boxing world was stunned by the trainer change. After all, Taylor was coming off back-to-back victories over one of history's greatest middleweights in Hopkins. If it ain't broke, why fix it, right?

But Ozell Nelson, Taylor's longtime advisor, had seen things in the two Hopkins fights that convinced him Jermain had beaten Bernard largely on sheer talent and heart alone. More skills would be needed against Wright, one of the world's top two fighters, who unlike Hopkins, was in his prime.

"I wanted Jermain to keep learning," said Nelson, a former bricklayer who had trained Taylor from a scrawny Little Rock kid into an Olympic silver medalist. "No disrespect to Pat Burns, because Pat Burns did an excellent job. But Jermain was becoming a stiff fighter. The lateral movement that he was going to need as he gets older and can't knock everybody out, was missing."

For Nelson, there was no wiser choice to bring out Taylor's talent than Steward, who had a track record of taking already-accomplished boxers such as Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield and Wladimir Klitschko, to name a few, and making them better.

Nelson and Steward were on the same page from get-go. Both saw talent in Taylor that wasn't being tapped. What Steward also picked up on was the one thing that enticed him the most. Behind Taylor's well-deserved image as one of boxing's nice guys, Steward sensed something much more primitive, a "dark side" if you will. The voyager in Steward felt challenged to tap into it, curious as to what would emerge.

Working against Steward, however, was time. When Steward took over training Lennox Lewis after a major upset loss to Oliver McCall in 1994, he had had eight months to get him ready for his next fight. But with Taylor, it would be less than two months. When news about Steward joining Team Taylor first reached Wright's trainer, Dan Birmingham, he shrugged it off as inconsequential because of the short time span.

"He'll tweak a few things, but you can't just change a fighter in two months," Birmingham said. "He (Taylor) could have Humpty Dumpty in the corner and it's not going to help put all the pieces back together when Winky is done with him."

Most trainers would agree with Birmingham about the time frame. But what Birmingham had not factored in was the powerful "Force" that is with you inside Steward's Evil Empire gym, the Kronk, widely acknowledged as the toughest four walls in America to train within. The Kronk, with its down and dirty, Detroit inner city code, did not just toughen a fighter, it produced champions in bunches.

Since the 1980s, the Kronk has been home for numerous belt holders, beginning with the great Tommy Hearns. It was also the "fix-it" site of choice for such reigning luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Wilfredo Benitez, Hector Camacho, Julio Caesar Chavez, Naseem Hamed, Holyfield and Lewis, to name a few.

Six weeks in Kronk Hell. Was it enough? The answer, Steward felt, lied only within Taylor himself. Was Taylor man enough to stick out boxing's equivalent of Navy Seal training - which has an 80 per cent drop out rate in the first eight weeks? Taylor gave Steward his answer right away. The champ loved the place.

"As soon as you walk in the gym, you can feel it," Taylor said. "It's a boxing atmosphere. Everybody's got their own opinion of you and nobody's scared to say anything. Every day you get up you think about boxing, you go to the gym and think about boxing, and when you come home you keep thinking about."

Taylor knew from the start he wasn't in a home-cooking, southern hospitality gym. First day he walks in, champion of the world, a top 10 pound-for-pounder, and not a single fighter who was training did more than glance his way. Nobody came over to shake hands and ask for an autograph, either. Taylor sensed there was a collective "edge" in the gym, one that he hadn't experienced since growing up on the mean streets of a Little Rock ghetto. Here, as in Little Rock, Taylor would have to prove himself before he was accepted.

Physically, the world Taylor walked into was a rickety garage compared to the high-tech, designer gyms most upper echelon boxers - including himself -- use today. Glancing around, he saw just two power bags, one speed bag and a ring.

No fancy machines, no personal trainers. At the Kronk, you put in your hard time, pushed yourself to the limit and then you went home. If the dust in the gym bothered you, if the heat was too high or anything else irritated you, you were told to go look at boxer photos on the walls to remind you of those great fighters before you who left the Kronk caked in sweaty crust.

Perhaps what would prove most important to Taylor's development was another thing missing in the Kronk: pay-by-the-day sparring partners. It is Steward's longtime policy that in the Kronk you sparred only with other hungry fighters, boxers who were not intimidated by your championship belt, or afraid to land a heavy shot for fear of being fired and losing dinner money. Every time Taylor stepped into the ring, he saw somebody across the way who wanted to take his head off to earn stature amongst his peers. In the end, that would prove to be the key that unlocked what Steward was after.

"One of my philosophies is that I've always believed in strong competition in sparring," Steward said. "I don't believe in sparring partners. That's part of my success as a trainer - I've always had competitive workouts. And Jermain loves it."

At first, though, Taylor was a bit taken aback. The Kronk style was not what he was used to back home at the "Arkansas Dixie Club," where Taylor said, "They bring in sparring partners, guys that I beat up and do what I want with." One of Taylor's first ring mates at the Kronk, middleweight prospect Andy Lee, had no intention of getting beat up -- or letting the new kid on the block do what he wanted with him.

Lee, just 2-0 and a 2004 Olympian from Ireland, is not an ordinary prospect. Steward considers him so special that the trainer was in Lee's corner for his professional debut in March. While that may sound pretty routine, consider that the last time Steward bothered to work a corner for a boxer's debut was 29 years ago, in 1977. The kid that night was named Tommy Hearns. Another measure of Steward's confidence in Lee, is that he took him to Europe to help Wladimir Klitschko improve his quickness in his winning title bout against Chris Byrd last month.

When champion Taylor and super prospect Lee first stepped in the ring, all activity stopped. Taylor figured the guys wanted to watch a champ in action. But from the first punishing blow Lee hit Taylor with, the champ knew this wasn't just a mere sparring session. Lee wanted his belt.

They went at it fast and furious, with Taylor getting as much as he gave. "It was nip and tuck," Steward said. When it was over, Taylor came over to Steward excited and enthusiastic: "Man, I'm not used to that," he said. Some champions, Steward knew, didn't like to be hit hard in sparring sessions. The mean side of Taylor, Steward sensed, got off on it.

Steward told Taylor: "You've got to realize that you were taking on the middleweight champion of this gym in Andy Lee. This is his turf right here, and even with you being the middleweight champion of the world, you've got to earn that respect here."

Taylor knew exactly how to earn respect from his "training" as a ghetto kid: toughen up and never back down. When the two middleweights hooked up again a few days later, Steward says there was "an electricity in the air like I haven't seen in many years." Although Lee gave Taylor all he could handle, Taylor gradually asserted his dominance over the less-experienced fighter. When Taylor left the ring, he knew, without being told by the other boxers, he was a Kronk fighter now.

"The Kronk has more energy than any gym I've been to in my life," Taylor said. "Everybody's got egos, even in sparring. I love that. That's how we started out in our little-bitty gym in Arkansas (as an amateur). Everyone played king of the gym. If you got beat up, you weren't king of the gym anymore."

Day by day, being tested and getting testy, Taylor felt the dark side emerging. It was rooted in the anger and hurt he felt from having a father who split when he was five. It came from having to forgo his childhood to help his working mother raise his three sisters when he preferred to be outside playing with his friends. You want a war in here, Taylor said to himself, come and get it.

As soon as he thought Taylor was ready, Steward started working on honing the champ's basic skills. In six weeks there wasn't time for an extreme makeover, so instead Steward concentrated on pumping up Taylor's natural strengths - his stinging jab, his superior hand and foot speed, and that rock-you power.

"He had been relying strictly on a jab, jab, right hand," Steward said. "Lennox Lewis did the same thing. They were relying too much on one thing and everything else wasn't being developed." This is not to say Steward ignored Taylor's superb jab, one which Nelson had created by tying his teenage fighter's right arm down with rope for six months during sparring to get him over being right-hand happy. After working to put more pop in Nelson's Taylor-made jab, Steward then taught him how to use it to set up combinations.

Steward is not one to impose his will. He likes a fighter to think and create in the ring. So he simply showed Taylor two or three key things, then the trainer would climb in the ring during sparring for a closer look as Taylor tried to use what he'd been taught. For Taylor, this was totally unlike his experience under the more rigid Burns regime, where the fighter was not encouraged to improvise and create. With Steward, Taylor felt free to explore the outer reaches of his talent.

"I felt more comfortable in the ring than ever before," Taylor said. "I was loose and relaxed."

The results were even better than Steward had expected, given the time frame he was working with. As the weeks wore on, Steward repeatedly said he was amazed at Taylor's power and hand speed. So were some of his sparring partners. Unbeaten and alphabet-ranked Sechew Powell, a junior middleweight with a 19-0 record, found two days sparring with the bigger Taylor was more than enough.

"Sechew came to me after a couple days," Steward said, and told me: 'Jermain is too strong and too fast for me.' Sechew is a tough fighter, but he didn't want to spar any more with Jermain."

But even as Steward grew more and more confident watching the 27-year-old Taylor improve by leaps and bounds, always at the back of his mind the trainer wondered whether it would be enough to beat Wright, a fighter seven years wiser with 28 more bouts. In Wright, he would be facing a fighter who had not lost in seven years, one whose only three defeats in 53 fights over a 16-year pro career came to upper tier boxers Julio Cesar Vasquez, Harry Simon, and Fernando Vargas. At the time of their bouts with Wright, those three opponents had a combined record of 83-1.

Unlike Steward, Taylor from day one never doubted he could beat Wright, and the fact that many thought he couldn't win only drove him harder.

"I always say it doesn't bother me, but that's not really true," Taylor said. “Everybody cares what other people think about them. I understand why they haven't totally accepted me. It's because the two fights with Bernard were close."

The Hopkins fights, though, are very much past history to the born-again Kronk boxer. "Everybody's looking at the fighter who fought Bernard, and that's what they're placing their bets on," Taylor said. "Nobody's at that gym peeking in and seeing the new fighter."

As to those who say Wright has an upper hand by being a crafty southpaw, Steward dismissed that as a non-issue.

"I've just come from six weeks of preparing Klitschko for one of the most difficult southpaws in boxing in Byrd, and I've trained five southpaw world champions," Steward said. "Jermain won't have a problem in that regard with Winky."

To make sure, Steward had Lee study the styles of champion southpaws on tape. Lee applied what he had seen on tape in the ring. "When Andy spars with Taylor, he is showing him what he gets hit the most with against a southpaw. I'm a big fan of Winky's, but I see a lot of little weaknesses and I've got a younger fighter with faster hands who is bigger."

Even Winky's vaunted defense, the best in the game, doesn't daunt Steward. "I told Jermain that he's the faster fighter and can put together more combinations with a lot more speed than Winky," Steward said. "I let him know that if he does everything with speed, even Winky's tight defense is not going to matter, because he can't win just by keeping his hands over his head. You don't get points for that - you have to punch sooner or later."

Steward has another incentive to help Taylor beat Wright. Watching Taylor ringside one night in his other role as HBO commentator, Steward went out on a long limb and predicted on air Taylor could beat Hopkins, who had just recently knocked out Oscar De La Hoya. "Now I have to make good on what I said," Steward said.

After watching Taylor hone his toughness, hand speed and power to levels no one had seen before, Steward has begun to think bigger than his initial prediction. "If he beats Winky, the whole field is wide open for him to dominate," Steward said.

Translated into superlatives -- which Steward by nature is not prone to say -- Taylor has the chance to become boxing's next superstar. If he does, Taylor will have fulfilled a deal he made a long time ago with Nelson.

One of the first things Nelson, a bricklayer badly in need of a new truck, told Taylor when he came to his pint-size gym was, "Here's the deal (on expenses). I'm going to take a gamble on you. If you make it, I make it. If not? What the heck, we tried. But you have a chance to make millions and I'm never going to make millions laying bricks. The truck can wait."

Taylor replied at the time: "Coach, if I make it big, I promise I'm going to buy you a truck." If Taylor beats Wright, he's going to owe Nelson a fleet.