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player ready...Jermain Taylor comes into Saturday night’s middleweight title bout like a powerful new sports car, perhaps not yet tested at full speed but certainly without dents.
His opponent, Winky Wright, is more like a reliable, less-powerful sedan, road tested with plenty of mileage.
When undefeated champion Taylor, 27, faces challenger Wright, 34, in the main event at FedEx Forum, it promises to be a taut test of wills.
Wright (50-3) has strung together 11 straight victories after a controversial loss to Fernando Vargas in December 1999, a little more than a year before 2000 Olympics bronze medalist Taylor made his pro debut.
Taylor since has gone 25-0 with 17 knockouts. While he did not have the knockout touch in four of his last nine victories, they included consecutive triumphs over surefire Hall of Famer Bernard Hopkins, from whom Taylor wrested the middleweight championship.
While Taylor sped from the starting line to the winner’s circle, Wright took winding backroads to this elite level.
Between 1993 and 1998, he fought 19 of his 24 bouts on foreign soil in Argentina, England, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Monaco and South Africa. Only half of Wright’s 50 victories have been knockouts. Rather, he has used defensive skills and pinpoint jabs to frustrate opponents, none more than the highly regarded Felix Trinidad. Wright pitched a near shutout in his easy unanimous decision over ex-champion Trinidad last year.
Unlike typical prefight news conferences, Saturday’s combatants and their camps heaped praise rather than trash-talk on each other at their final meeting with the media Thursday.
“I can’t say anything bad about him,” said Wright, the 154-pound junior middleweight champion who moved up to 160 pounds to challenge Taylor. “Jermain is the champion and I want to be the champion.”
In turn, Taylor said that despite his victories over Hopkins, who then dominated Antonio Tarver last Saturday to take his light-heavyweight title, “I feel like I still have a lot to prove.”
He called Wright “a great fighter, I have to respect him.”
Indeed, Taylor and his camp were anything but complacent title-holders in preparing for this bout. He dropped his longtime trainer Pat Burns in favor of high-profile Emanuel Steward.
Insisting that “this change is not a referendum on Pat Burns,” promoter Lou DiBella said the switch was aimed at changing the fighter’s tendency to revert to old habits. This included the “bow and arrow” stance in which Taylor draws back one fist too far while jabbing with the other.
Steward generously called Wright “the best fighter pound-for-pound in the world. I’ve never seen him lose a fight. I’ve only seen decisions go against him.”
The last sentence apparently alludes to Vargas’ narrow majority decision victory.
But after praising Wright and critiquing Taylor as a “natural talent not yet fully developed” with a “little herky-jerky” motion and a volume of punches still “a little low,” Steward said he believes the champion from Little Rock, Ark., is ready to take the mantle of greatness in Saturday’s fight.
“I saw beneath his country-boy niceness a toughness,” he said.
Taylor agreed.
“I fight, and I fight with my heart,” he said.
In the closest he came to criticizing his opponent, Taylor said, “He doesn’t mind waiting for chances. I’m throwing bombs.”
When Wright was asked if he expected Taylor to be more aggressive than he was against Hopkins, he calmly replied he was ready to counter that.
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“If he’s looking forward to being hit, he may be more aggressive,” Wright said. “If he doesn’t want to get hit, he won’t be.”
The biggest obstacle to making this matchup was a salary squabble that threatened to undo negotiations. In the midst of it, Wright separated from, then rejoined his promoter, Gary Shaw, mending their relationship at least temporarily. Finally, when Wright backed down from a 50-50 split, with Taylor guaranteed $3.75 million to Wright’s $3.5 million, the deal was done.
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