Putting Injuries Behind Him, Jermain Taylor Fights On SAN ANTONIO - It was about 4 p.m. at a cavernous Alamodome that, in only a few hours, would hold 11,000 screaming boxing fans. But at this moment, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in December with the sun still shining and the television cameras turned off, Jermain Taylor entered the ring for a bout for the first time in 14 months. If the approximately 200 fans who had filtered into the arena by that point recognized Taylor from his past, they did not act like it. When Taylor knocked out the journeyman J. C. Candelo in the seventh round of their fight on Dec. 14 the buzz in the arena was nearly nonexistent. Taylor's was the second fight on a big card, and his bout - a fight, mind you, that in Taylor involved a former undisputed middleweight champion who had twice beaten Bernard Hopkins - was not seen on television. Taylor won the fight. He celebrated. He left the ring. And almost immediately afterward, the boxing world focused on something else. This is where Taylor finds himself these days. This is what happens when a 35-year-old - who was knocked out twice in terrifying fashion by world-class super middleweights in a six-month stretch, who sustained a brain bleed that should have made him consider hanging up his boxing gloves forever - makes a comeback against long odds. He is placed in the second row of the news conference dais, next to the boxers who are just beginning their careers and behind the big stars of the fight card. His quotations from that news conference are not distributed to the news media, because he is not fighting on TV. He becomes nearly as irrelevant as his competition, Candelo, the handpicked opponent that Taylor was fighting. Why do it, then? Why subject yourself to more head blows, more punches to the face, the indignity of the back row? By all accounts, Taylor does not need the money. Why is he bothering? Man, what else am I supposed to do? Taylor said a few minutes after dispatching Candelo. A shrug of the shoulders. "That's what I'm saying," he said. I have nothing else to do. I've been doing this job since I was 12. This is my life. When I took those years off, I sat back and thought about it: "What am I supposed to do?" " That was not the only question Taylor needed to answer as he began his journey back to relevancy. Taylor, a 2000 Olympic bronze medalist, also had to prove he was healthy enough to resume what had been an impressive career that included holding all four major middleweight belts at the same time. But by 2009, he was coming off two losses to Kelly Pavlik - including one by knockout - and Taylor moved from the 160-pound middleweight class to the 168-pound super middleweight limit to challenge for Carl Froch's world title. Although Taylor was ahead on two of the three judges" scorecards, Froch knocked out Taylor with 14 seconds left in the 12th round. Six months later, Arthur Abraham brutalized Taylor in the final round with one punch that felled Taylor as if he had just stepped off a cliff. Only six seconds remained in that bout when it was stopped. After the fight, Taylor asked his wife, Erica, and his promoter, Lou DiBella, in what round he had been stopped. He asked again a few minutes later. And again a few minutes after that. That was when Taylor's team knew something was wrong, and soon after, Taylor, who had a brain bleed and a concussion, temporarily stepped away from the sport. His health, he knew, was at stake. "I've seen a guy who I was with at the Olympics training camp, and he can't even talk now," Taylor said. His brain swelled up, and his speech was slurred. I don't want to be like that. But he chose his sport. I chose this sport. And I love it. It was in part for that reason that he wanted to return to boxing. That and because he does not want his children to see those brutal defeats mark the end of his career. So he called his former trainer Pat Burns, who was fired during Taylor's original middleweight title run, to see if they could work together again.