Anything anybody can share about him, if you do? Just rewatched Kaylor beating Bobby Watts....outside of that I don’t know anything about him outside of a cursory boxrec glance and noticed about 6 fights of his on YouTube. He seemed gritty with and edge against Watts although I thought it was a premature stoppage, Kaylor was sharp the whole fight. So anything you can tell me about him....including whether it is worth my time to check out some of his fights.
He was the guy that more or less put Buster Drayton on the map. Believe it was the undercard of Bonecrusher Smith's KO of Bruno.
Remember him well. He dropped a decision to Tony Sibson, then about a year later beat Errol Christie looking good with a KO win. It wasn't long after that he got stopped by Herol Graham. He lost his last fight by stoppage (I cannot remember the other guys name) then he went into the movies by mid '90s. He lives in America nowadays, San Francisco I think.
His career was going along just fine until he ran into Buster Drayton who demolished him. After that he was up and down.
A good fighter , who worked behind a sharp jab, tall, quick handed and ballsy.He was trained by Terry Lawless and wore the football colours of West Ham into the ring.He was domestic and Euro level imo but fell short above that. Buster Drayton only a light middle exposed him somewhat.There should be plenty of Kaylor's fights on You Tube and you won't be disappointed watching them he was a fan friendly boxer puncher. This was a good tear up, This content is protected Kaylor v Christie Kaylor v Gumbs This content is protected Kaylor v A pretty used up Bobby Watts This content is protected
Very popular fighter in the 80s, but tended to fall short when he ventured into elite level. Maybe not stylewise, but he reminded me of Charlie Magri in that you always felt watching him that he was vulnerable to getting caught and stopped. It was a tough era for British middleweights (eg Sibson, Graham), and in that era most fighters had to go through their domestic comp before they got a world title shot, which for most of the 80s would have been against Hagler. In a later fragmented alphabet era he may have been able to get hold of a title at some point. I'd put him above someone like Darren Barker for example, and there's been titlists over the last couple of decades he'd have a decent chance against.
Some good posts. He was a good, dangerous lower tier contender. Rangy, hard-hitting and offensively neat and well-schooled with a warrior mentality, but a shaky chin against other punchers and defensively open. Like a quicker but much weaker chinned version of Froch but with better offensive textbook form. He was absolutely massive at middleweight and killed himself to make the weight from quite an early stage, which didn't help his punch resistance or late rounds stamina, but he was too small to be effective at light heavy. By the time 168 was established as a semi-credible division, his best years were gone. A shame really because it would've been his ideal division. Like @Momus said, if he'd been around in more recent years I think he would've picked up a strap at 160 and possibly 168. A better fighter than the likes of Barker, Geale, Sylvester, Macklin etc. I'd have given him a decent shot at Taylor and Pavlik tbh. He reminds me of Pavlik too actually. Quicker and with better technique but probably less sturdy in a shootout. That would've been an exciting fight. I can remember Kaylor saying that he never went into a fight with a plan or thinking about trying to defend himself, he was just an angry, intense bloke who came out swinging. I think he had a punch up with Joey Frost at the Moscow Olympics in their hotel when they were both pissed too. He seems to have mellowed out though and is by all accounts a likeable guy and regrets the ugliness of the Christie rivalry and how quick-tempered he was.
It’s interesting going back over Kaylor’s fights, and how his career progressed. It wasn’t so apparent at the time (for me at least), but the sport in Britain really changed in a lot of ways between the 80s and 90s. Boxing was shunted off terrestrial tv following the Watson and McClellan injuries, the WBO offered a fast-track path of least resistance to world titles, international and inter-continental belts gave a way of legitimising even the most pointless of mismatches. Lonsdale belts became marketing tools, there was a shift towards importing European opponents rather than North and Central American, and tv broadcasts became more about selling a product rather than showing a fight people wanted to see. Kaylor benefitted in terms of popularity from fighting in the 80s, and became a high-profile tv fighter without winning a world title. However, he was matched hard all the way. World rated fighters blocked his way domestically, and even the supposed opponents were dangerous guys like Drayton who were looking to make a name rather than pick up a paycheck.
