Happens far too often in boxing.
Money comes in fast, but a lot of people are in your pockets and when you start losing those purses get smaller and smaller.
When Taylor was beating Bernard Hopkins he was running with a 20-30 deep entourage while making millions per fight and in the last fight I saw him in there was only one person with him, his trainer and made $10k.
Since his career went downhill, so did his life.
Representatives for Jermain Taylor, a former Olympian and world champion boxer, informed Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza on Thursday that Taylor was in Florida, with no money and no intention of making his afternoon hearing in Little Rock.
Taylor was scheduled to be in Piazza’s court regarding a lawsuit filed against him by two family members after a 2014 shooting left his cousin Tyrone DaWayne Hinton in critical condition.
In 2015, Taylor, now 38, bonded out of jail and was allowed by Judge Leon Johnson to move to Ocala, Fla., so he could get back into boxing shape. Several months after the move, Taylor pleaded guilty to nine felony charges, including those related to the 2014 shooting of Hinton, and is now serving a six-year suspended sentence.
“[Taylor’s] representative said he’s in Florida and didn’t have any money, didn’t have an attorney and wasn’t going to be here today,” Piazza said as the brief hearing got started.
Earlier this year, Taylor’s attorneys, Hubert Alexander and Allison Allred, filed a motion to be relieved from the case as Taylor’s counsel.
“The attorney-client relationship has reached an impasse in that [we] have had very little or no contact with the Defendant since December 1, 2015,” the attorneys wrote in their motion. “And Defendant has not paid the agreed upon retainer for services.”
Months after the shooting of Hinton, Taylor was arrested after he had threatened a family of five with a pistol and fired two rounds into the air during Little Rock’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in January 2015.
Taylor pleaded guilty to charges related to the incident at the same time he pleaded guilty to the shooting of Hinton in 2015. However the civil suit filed by the family asks for damages for the “extreme fear and severe emotional pain and emotional distress” Taylor’s actions caused, their suit reads.
In a video that Taylor posted online after the incident, which featured footage of him while taking a bath, Taylor addressed his behavior during the King Day parade.
That civil suit, filed in 2016 in Judge Alice Gray’s courtroom, is ongoing, as is another case stemming from a second-degree battery charge for a skull-fracturing punch that Taylor delivered to Jason Isaac Condon while the two were in a rehabilitation program together in 2015, according to reports.
Should be a cautionary tale for every athlete in all sports.