Quick, get slugger Kelly Pavlik in the ring with Jermain Taylor. We need a guy who won't run away from Taylor, clinch Taylor, be smaller than Taylor, cover up too much, or otherwise make Taylor look bad and make a world middleweight title fight seem like a good time to change the channel.Dan Rafael at ESPN.com dredges up fading memories of the only previous time Pavlik met Taylor, in the opening round of trials for the 2000 Olympics. Taylor was 22. Pavlik was 17. Taylor won. Neither boxer remembers anything about it. Manager Cameron Dunkin, who was looking at Pavlik at the time and seems to remember it best, tells Rafael: "I had seen Jermain knocking guys out with the right hand in the amateurs, beating guys up and bullying a lot of guys. He didn't do that with Kelly."
John Cotey in the St. Petersburg Times does a great piece comparing Taylor's recent ring action to a college football season (with a funny line about recent opponents being division I-AA). In the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Joe Maxse takes readers inside Team Pavlik with a nice little main story about Pavlik's ring skills and a big box of fun facts (hobbies: darts and golf). In Taylor's hometown paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Chris Givens has a report on Jermain from his training camp in the Poconos. Bernard Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News reports from the Poconos too. The Philadelphia Inquirer with its fancy-pants new web site has a piece (by me) about Taylor's recent lack of flash.
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