She had a smile as big as the east Arkansas plains and as Jermain Taylor stepped out of his corner for the biggest fight of his life, her smile was all that was on his mind.

Before he punched Daneil Edouard into submission in the third round -- Edouard's post-fight remarks could've been summed up in a sound byte familiar to the tornado-alley native Taylor, "It sounded like a train coming, then the tornado hit – Taylor's mind raced lovingly about his biggest fan and his most ardent supporter, his grandmother.

She was murdered six years ago.

That he remains unfailingly polite and upbeat is a testament that in life, just like in the ring, Taylor doesn't know 'quit'; he's been to hell and back and he could draw you a roadmap.

Don't waste your time looking for fear when the undefeated 26-year old boxer they call "Bad Intentions" steps into the ring with Bernard Hopkins, the most dominant middleweight boxing has ever known, just because it's a big fight.

Fight is all Jermain Taylor knows.

"I'm a strong guy," Taylor says, his voice clear and straight like a stiff jab. "I had to be a man before my time and now I know I can take anything. I'm not afraid of Bernard Hopkins or anybody."

The toughest fights are the ones you don't know you're in until it's too late.

Jermain Taylor could write the gospel on that.

Even if he had never boxed, Gussie Robertson would've doted on her grandson Jermain, the only boy among Carlois Reynolds' four children. In the hard-knock streets of Little Rock, there are more wrong turns to take in life than there are right ones and as long as Jermain stayed on the straight-and-narrow, she beamed.

"Our relationship was amazing," Taylor says now. "I could go to her for anything and so could my cousin or anybody. If anybody ever needed anything, they could go to my grandmother. She was an amazing woman."

She never required him to be star, though she probably always knew he would be.

"I remember her always saying that if you want to do something, do it," says Taylor, repeating a piece of advice he still lives by. "I remember her coming to my fights. She was a big supporter. I don't ever remember her saying anything negative. As long as we were doing something positive, she was happy."

Taylor's rise to prominence was as rapid as it was successful. By the time he was 20 he had won the fight of his career to make it from the boxing backwater of Arkansas to earning a medal in the Goodwill Games, but what happened next would prove to be the fight of his life.

Shortly after returning from the Goodwill Games, he was headed through the Arkansas summer heat to his grandmother's house with a cousin. They arrive to find a throng of people in front of her house. Members of the family came running out, delivering the news like a thunderous cross to the temple. His grandmother had been murdered.

What he found out next made that revelation seem like a tap on the arm.

"When I asked what had happened," Taylor says, "they said my uncle did it. That was an even bigger shock. It was a downtime for the whole family." On the day of the funeral, he carried his medal with him and when it came time, he put the medal in the coffin with her.

He thought of her words. "If you want to do something, do it." When the coffin was lowered in the ground he knew the fight had only just begun.

Continued...