Taylor’s strategy against Pavlik is to attack and attack, all 12 rounds

That plan of attack would be almost perfect for Pavlik, who is a heavy-hitter.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Jermain Taylor stepped straight into boxing’s brightest lights Wednesday and calmly revealed every bit of his plan for avenging his knockout loss to Kelly Pavlik last year.

“I’m not looking to go in there with a strategy,” Taylor said. “It’s going to be a fight, all 12 rounds. I’m going straight to him, all 12 rounds. He gets knocked out, I get knocked out, it don’t matter. I’m going straight to him.”

After his perfect career received a glaring blemish in Atlantic City 4 1/2 months ago, Taylor doesn’t care who knows his intentions in Saturday night’s rematch at the MGM Grand Garden. He claims he’s going back to the basics that once made him the undisputed middleweight champion, putting his former amateur coach back in charge of training for a fight he expects to end with one punch.

Trouble is, that strategy sounds just about perfect to Pavlik, who soared to stardom with that seventh-round knockout. Promoter Bob Arum is among those who believe the unbeaten pride of Youngstown is the biggest middleweight puncher since Thomas Hearns, and he’s more than willing to trade knockout blows with Taylor.

“He says he’s going to come out and slug, but that could all change after one big right hand,” Pavlik said. “As soon as that one punch lands, I think he might change his mind.”

Despite Taylor’s bold rhetoric, there were no overt bad feelings when the fighters met at Wednesday’s news conference. They pointedly ignored each other as they crossed paths on the way through the ballroom — and that’s about the most animosity likely to emerge from two fighters who don’t take to boxing’s usual posturing and outside-the-ring theatrics.

And perhaps unfortunately for Arum and Taylor promoter Lou DiBella, there’s no villain in this match-up. Taylor and Pavlik are genuinely likable fighters who rose to the sport’s pinnacle from unlikely circumstances: Pavlik out of the Rust Belt, and Taylor from the humblest parts of Little Rock, Ark.

“I’m no dummy. He took this fight because he wants to prove something,” Pavlik said. “He beat [Bernard] Hopkins, he beat all these great fighters, and he’s still in shock that he lost. He says he’s coming to bang and slug it out. Well, everybody knows my style.”

Taylor’s bold, brawling intentions are high in both risks and rewards. He’s enjoyed the best success of his career when he boxes patiently and uses his solid jab, yet some experts feel he’s responded to past complaints about boring fights by attempting to become a one-punch knockout artist. His undisciplined impatience in recent fights is precisely what’s prevented him from knocking out any opponent in the last three years.

Another loss to Pavlik would slide Taylor well down the list of boxing’s biggest names, but Taylor immediately exercised the rematch clause in his contract after the loss, ignoring advisers who didn’t want the former champion back in the ring with Pavlik so quickly after such a devastating knockout.

“I don’t need a tune-up fight,” Taylor said. “I believe in fighting the guy who got you.”