It was kinda a win/win for me. I'm glad Pavlik won it, really I am . I just thought that with the level of competition that the two have faced then Taylor was much more prepared for victory. Looks like I wasn't alone in underestimating Pavlik's heart and desire not to mention talent . Like I said , I will be rooting for the Kid from now on although in truth I have seen him before and was interested but being the Ohio sporst fan I am I always prepare myself for failure. Glad to be proven wrong.
You can not only jump on, I will be glad to give you a hand stepping up Kelly was 100 percent convinced that he was going to win this fight, and the kid is really sharp when it comes boxing. He was pointing out little weakness's and flaws in fighters a few years ago when I watched the fights in WV with him, that I would have never noticed.
You know I really don't know why Pavlik was the "underdog". Dude was un-defeated, 31wins with 28 by way of knockout before this fight. I personally thought he was going to knock him out quicker than he did.
What a great fight. I could tell by the look his eyes before the fight he was going to win. Even in his corner after he got knocked down he had the look of a winner.
The reason he was the underdog was because he was not the Champ and the level of competition the two has faced was vastly different with that edge going to Taylor who as it turns out was not hungry enough . Maybe this is the wake up that Taylor needed or maybe it shows that Pavlik is just the better fighter . The last couple Taylor fights he was unimpressive and wresting on his laurels . I am almost convinced he didn't take this fight seriously until he got smacked in the mouth and realized ...uh oh . More is the shame because Manny Stewart usually has his fighters prepared for action and even he took Pavlik lightly which is never a good thing as indicated by the result of the fight.
All of that takes nothing away from Pavlik who showed heart and determination and rightfully took the belt. A rematch will be interesting to watch between the two so long as Pavlik doesn't give in and fight another good fighter and risk losing before getting the big payday on a rematch. Here's to a Buckeye Boxer bringing some love to Ohio .
I understand that but no matter who he fought 28 k.o's out of 31 fights can't be ignored. I just don't think he was as big of an underdog leading up to this fight as some made him out to be.
Quote: What a great fight. I could tell by the look his eyes before the fight he was going to win. Even in his corner after he got knocked down he had the look of a winner.
Congrats to Kelly!
I was pretty damned worried in the second when Taylor knocked his ass out on his feet; he was lucky to have survived the count.
New champ Pavlik leaves check behind at hotel By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports October 2, 2007
New middleweight boxing champion Kelly Pavlik did everything he expected to do last week in Atlantic City, N.J.
He knocked out Jermain Taylor to win the WBC and WBO titles. He charmed the national media with his easy-going nature. And he made himself must-see television by putting on one of the best fights of the year.
"Pretty much everything went the way we planned it," Pavlik said Tuesday after a golf outing in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, where he was mobbed as if he were a rock star.
All of it went the way he planned, except for one fairly significant detail: Pavlik and his father, Mike Pavlik Sr., left Atlantic City without their paychecks.
Pavlik earned a gross purse of $1.05 million Saturday. After the fight, the New Jersey Athletic Board of Control presented Pavlik with a check for $666,750, which represented his share of the earnings after his managers, trainers and all fees were paid.
Pavlik's father, who along with Cameron Dunkin serves as his co-manager, received $105,000 for his services.
As the co-manager, the elder Pavlik took his check and his son's on Saturday night after the title-winning effort over Taylor.
The Pavliks had checked out of the Bally's Hotel in Atlantic City on Sunday morning and were halfway to Philadelphia for their flight to Pittsburgh when Mike Pavlik was suddenly stricken.
"It's about an hour from Atlantic City to Philadelphia and we were literally halfway there when out of nowhere, it just hit me," Mike Pavlik said. "My heart stopped and I just knew I had made a big mistake."
That mistake was leaving checks totally more than three-quarters of a million dollars on a countertop leaning against the coffee pot in their hotel room. In his excitement to get home, Mike Pavlik forgot to pick up the checks.
"I think I gave that maid probably the best tip she ever got," he said, forcing a laugh. The new champion took the news as he takes pretty much everything else: Calmly and without a lot of excitement.
He rarely gets nervous or upset, even with some of boxing's hardest punchers coming after him, and he didn't seem particularly bothered that the largest payday of his seven-year pro career had been misplaced.
"A check that big, it was going to be pretty difficult for someone to be able to cash it," he said. "I figured that somehow or other, we'd manage to either get it back or get a new one. My Dad might have been a little worried, but I wasn't too upset."
Dunkin reached Top Rank publicist Lee Samuels, who was on a private jet flying to Las Vegas along with Top Rank chairman Bob Arum and president Todd duBoef, via cellular telephone. When Samuels explained the problem, Arum agreed to stop payment on the check and issue another, though it wasn't entirely a new situation to the 75-year-old Hall of Fame promoter.
"I have never had a guy leave it in the room before, so Kelly wins a prize for that, but I've had guys lose them," Arum said. "Julio Cesar Chavez used to go out and party after fights and I can remember a lot of times he'd call me and tell me he couldn't find his check. But at least Kelly got the money he deserved."
The lost check was only part of Pavlik's adventure on his way home. Once the SUV Pavlik was riding in hit the Ohio border, he was met by a phalanx of police cars and fire trucks that gave him an official escort home to Youngstown.
Pavlik's SUV dropped into the middle of that sea of what he estimated were 30 police cars and fire trucks and made a triumphant return home.
"The support I get from the people here has always been great," Kelly Pavlik said. "But this was pretty incredible. It was nice to have those guys there for me and it made the win a little bit more special."
Mike Pavlik would like to tell people that the police were there to help protect him as he carried the large check home.
But he knows he's going to get a bad time from members of Team Pavlik for a long time to come.
"This isn't the last time this is going to come up, I'm pretty certain," Mike Pavlik said.
"We went there like it was just another fight. We did our thing the way we always do, but this one turned out to be a little more memorable in more ways than one."
Yeah, I watched this fight for a 2nd time last night. Pavlik was really connecting with his jab pretty much the entire night. The enormous welt on Taylor as seen in the dressing room is testament to it. I had Taylor up by one point going into the 7th. I don't know how the judges had it so lopsided.
Anyway, I pretty much agreed with IRE going into the fight. The level of competition differed greatly and I really didn't think Pavlik's defense would hold up against Taylor. When he got knocked down in the 2nd, it was pretty much what I expected. What I DIDN'T expect was the amount of guts and determination he showed to get back up and survive Taylor's barrage (making him punch himself out). Then he just kept peppering him with that jab followed by the occasional right. Also, he put in a lot more body shots than I was used to seeing from him. Anyway, he made me damn proud to be an Ohioan.
My two young (35-ish) buddies watching the fight with me thought I was nuts,....of course I'm 53 and acting like a kid in a candy store -- with no big wins in my pocket since 1964,... --- so, finally something to feel good about,...
Anyway, the way the Taylor camp treated this fight prior to, i.e. NO respect, I am in the NO REMATCH camp now.
LAS VEGAS – Meet Ozell Nelson, chief trainer, surrogate father and now, primary Ghostbuster for ex-middleweight champion Jermain Taylor.
Nelson is the guy with the unenviable task of replacing Emanuel Steward as Taylor's trainer on the eve of the most crucial fight in the boxer's career. He'll be Phil Bengston to Steward's Vince Lombardi or, in the best possible scenario, Gene Bartow to Steward's John Wooden.
Saturday on HBO Pay-Per-View, Taylor will fight Kelly Pavlik, the man who violently snatched the title from him with a dramatic seventh-round knockout in Atlantic City, N.J., in a rematch at the MGM Grand Garden.
Taylor says he plans to do some Ghostbusting on Saturday, a play not only on the hit 1984 movie but also on Pavlik's nickname of "The Ghost." Taylor is so serious about exacting revenge that he's thinking of walking to the ring to Ray Parker Jr.'s theme song.
He'll do so without the guy considered one of the best strategists in the history of the game on his side. Instead, he'll take instructions from a man whom he regards as a father but who freely admits he wasn't qualified for the job when Taylor turned pro after the 2000 Olympics.
"I didn't know the pro game anywhere near well enough to do that," Nelson said Friday, conceding that he mulled the idea of training Taylor in the pros himself from the start. "There was too much at stake, and I didn't want to make a mistake."
Instead, Taylor hired former Olympic coach Pat Burns, one of the game's most respected voices, to train him. Nelson would be at his side all the way, but admits he was learning as quickly as Taylor was.
Under Burns' tutelage, Taylor quickly became one of the game's bright young stars. But after guiding Taylor to the title and back-to-back victories over longtime middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins, Burns was summarily dismissed.
Taylor chafed at Burns' authoritarian manner, which largely went unnoticed but was indicative of a growing problem. As Taylor racked up wins, piled up money and became a fixture on HBO, he became enamored with being a star.
And the small-town country boy from Arkansas, who at one time would, without complaint, do whatever his trainers asked him to do, started to think on his own.
Steward was brought in to replace Burns, but instead of showing a dramatic improvement, Taylor regressed dramatically. He was lucky to get a draw against Winky Wright, a bout most ringside media believed Wright deserved to win by a wide margin.
He was lackluster in wins over Kassim Ouma and Cory Spinks before Pavlik knocked him out in September.
Steward got the boot after the loss to Pavlik, but the problem was Taylor. Nelson knew it, though he wouldn't say it in so many words.
Taylor wasn't in shape and didn't train with the passion he did when he was largely unknown and eager to prove a point.
"Jermain just didn't have the gas in the tank to do the job," Nelson said of the fight with Pavlik. "If Jermain had been in the kind of shape he should have been in, when Kelly went down (in the second round) it would have been all over, and you and I wouldn't be having this conversation. But Jermain was running on fumes."
It's Nelson's job to reverse that trend, and so far, he has said all of the requisite things. Taylor, he said, never has worked harder or looked better.
He has done everything he has been asked because he is embarrassed by what happened in New Jersey.
"Jermain's not running halfway; he's running like it's the last run of his life," Nelson said. "Everything has been top rung. He's training like he used to. He's going harder than I can remember him going in a long time, maybe ever. He's so hungry right now because he knows he can win this fight if he's simply in the kind of shape he needs to be in."
There are many around the fight game who question whether Taylor has gotten it. One veteran boxing man with no ties to either fighter was in the cramped old Tocco's Ringside Gym in Las Vegas one day recently as Taylor was preparing for a training session when he saw something that nearly floored him.
One of Taylor's assistants ran over and tied Taylor's shoes for him, said the man who has been around the fight game for years.
Nelson denies it and suggested that the man saw someone putting tape around Taylor's shoes after Taylor already had his gloves on. If the story is true, however, and Nelson is just covering for Taylor, it's indicative of the fact that Taylor hasn't rid himself of the star syndrome that resulted in a series of increasingly lackluster performances.
And this time, if things go right, there will be no one to fire. Nelson knows that by accepting the job, he put himself in a nearly untenable situation.
If Taylor wins, he'll get all the credit for picking himself up and turning things around. If Taylor loses, Nelson is bound to get the blame, not only for jettisoning Steward but also for making mistakes himself.
"I'm comfortable with whatever happens because I know I've done the right thing for Jermain all along," Nelson said. "I could have had this job (in 2000), but I wasn't ready for it then. I didn't know the ins and the outs of the business. But I've been around Pat Burns and Emanuel and I learned, and I know Jermain better than anyone. Jermain is my only concern, and he always has been.
"You have to understand that Jermain didn't get from Point A to Point Z by magic. He didn't happen overnight. This was a kid I saw that I thought had some talent. We went from the beginning days together to the top amateurs to the Olympics and into the pros.
"I'm a construction worker. I used to be a bricklayer, and I know how to read a blueprint. I can see how a job is supposed to go and take it from start to finish. With Jermain, I saw how this was supposed to go, and I think we've done great together getting from the beginnings in Arkansas when nobody ever knew either of us to where we are now."
Nelson has such a devotion to Taylor, you sometimes get the sense he's like a Secret Service agent and would dive in front of a bullet to save him.
He knows the scrutiny will be intense should Taylor lose again, but he's convinced that it won't happen.
"If something bad happens to Jermain, I'll deal with whatever comes," Nelson said. "But I can tell you this: It's been a long time since I've seen Jermain with the kind of attitude he has now. If he had this attitude all the time, I don't think anybody would beat him. To tell you the truth, I don't think anybody would really come close."
Joe Thomas made Justin Timberlake change his name. He didn't want wusses to have the same initials...
I'm looking forward to actually going out and watching this. I don't get out much like I used to, so I'm going to go out with my sister's boyfriend and support Youngstown's champ.
Yeah I am excited to watch the rematch tomorrow. I am surprised this thread is not getting much action with the fight being just a little over a day away.
This rematch has me hopefull of a win. The first fight left me with NO doubt leading up to the fight that Kelly would win. IF Kelly still has the same hunger that he did, then he wins this fight hands down. IF however he has let up on his desire to win (I'm not talking tanking it, but maybe only working at 90 percent of the level he did before) He could be in trouble. This fight has all the signs of a stumbling Block for Kelly. The Title's not on the line, rematch with a guy he has beaten before, Kelly's hunger and Drive MAY have slipped just a notch?
While I still think Kelly will pull out a win tonight, I am just not 110 percent sure like I was for the first fight. *Raising my glass* Here is to you staying as hungry as a fat starving man, on his first trip through a buffet line Kelly. Good luck tonight.
I agree. I was almost surprised Taylor didn't win since judges never seem to see things like I do... I can't believe one judge had it 117-111.... Good job Kelly!
Kelly was 100 percent convinced that he was going to win this fight, and the kid is really sharp when it comes boxing. He was pointing out little weakness's and flaws in fighters a few years ago when I watched the fights in WV with him, that I would have never noticed.
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