-Jerry and Lani Taylor (1968)-

I started fighting in '82 and my dad was my shadow.  He came to all the fights and got his license to keep time at the shows.  (Remember, 1982, we're talking the hammer and bell here!)  My old man was a "Mr. Fixit" around the house and he thought that he could do something better for boxing by way of keeping time.  He expressed aspirations to build a better boxing time clock. 

From scratch, my dad broke out his tool box, saws & glue, spray paint; he went to the lumber yard for wood, bought some horns and technical gadgets, and he slowly pieced together a clock.  What looked like a wooden box with two  horns protruding from the top of it - for lack of anymore excess imagination - he called it the Taylor Timer.  He brought the first one to my old gym, Gulfport Boxing Club, and started working out the kinks through the endless rounds of sparring.  Soon he was bringing this "box" to local amateur shows, then tournaments, before getting calls to time the back-alley pro fights which were inundating the Mississippi gulf coast in the early 80's.  In no time he whipped out maybe 10 or 20 of these timers and began selling them for $200 a pop; and along with some much needed and hard to come by funds in the "dirty south," he was beginning to get plenty of notoriety on the gulf coast.  National tournaments soon followed, as did professional fight cards and numerous requests for television appearances from excited suits that wanted to know more about the new "gadget" in such an old-fashioned, traditional sport. 

Keep in mind that my dad was a country farmer who didn't graduate from high-school and was light-years away from a money-making land shark mentality.  He was an entertainer by trade who played guitar and told jokes on stage; he also happened to be a techie who dearly loved to build things.  Yet, the business side of taking care of "business" was my dad's weakness and it wasn't long after his clocks hit boxing's mainstream that the sharks set their eyes on him.  The legalities behind trademarks and copyright agreements were completely alien to my dad's way of thinking; and the extent of his business dealings didn't go much further than a handshake.
 
I remember sitting in front of the television one day when my dad asked me how I thought it would work out if he added a different sound on the timer when there were :30 left in the round.  Even as I concurred that it would be a pretty neat idea, before I could even finish telling him so, he was already off and running with it.  With his mind still spinning, he added light to his brainstorm and within a few minutes had drawn up a revised version of the Taylor Timer - this one composed entirely of aluminum, screen-printing, buttons and flashing lights. 

My dad enlisted me, my mom and some friends from the gym to produce one-hundred of these new timers which were then shipped off to Ringside Products & Everlast for mass distribution.  After that shipment was eaten up in a few weeks, my dad joined hands with another production company in Oklahoma City, (Quickcharge, Inc.), to produce and distribute yet another shipment.
 
That was plenty of hands in the pot; and with no legal protection overshadowing his invention..... well, you can guess the rest of the story.
 
So, twenty-six years after my first fight, I bask daily in a streaming current of "what if's" and "what could have been's," in an ocean full of past glories - as schools of sharks with their bellies full of Taylor Timers swim by.  It's funny to think this - but every now and again if I look closely - I sometimes feel as if they are clamoring towards me, grinning at me with their huge, razor-sharp teeth, wanting to shake my hand...

2-5-2008