LAS VEGAS – When referee Thomas Taylor stepped into the boxing ring at 70,000-seat Allegiant Stadium with Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford to witness the raucous NFL venue glowing in flashing lights, he recalled the years-ago advice of a mentor.
“When you get in there tonight, it’s going to be packed. People are going to be cheering. Everything’s going to be nuts. Just take a look around. Soak it all in. Realize just how lucky we are to be doing what we’re doing.”
At 55, Southern California’s Taylor stands at the pinnacle of his career, having worked 65 world-championship fights, 122 title bouts and 830 fights total since his 2010 debut.
The Wisconsin-raised Taylor becomes the third man in the ring for another pay-per-view main event Saturday night at MGM Grand, when he referees the WBC junior-middleweight title fight between champion Sebastian Fundora, 23-1-1 (15 KOs), and Keith Thurman, 31-1 (23 KOs).
Taylor’s rise has been particularly meteoric since he landed the 2023 main event pitting Gervonta “Tank” Davis versus Ryan Garcia in Las Vegas.
The event not only marked his debut for the Nevada Athletic Commission, but it opened doors that led him to assignments in New York, Saudi Arabia, and even next month’s upcoming Amazon Prime Video reboot of “American Gladiators.”
Over the past 18 months, Taylor has worked the undisputed light-heavyweight title bout between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol, a light-heavyweight bout between unbeatens David Benavidez and David Morrell, Manny Pacquiao-Mario Barrios, Crawford-Alvarez and last month’s Ryan Garcia welterweight title victory over Barrios.
“I looked at that list recently and thought, ‘This could’ve been one guy’s career.’ I’m so lucky, so blessed,” Taylor said. “I worked Garcia’s first amateur title. He comes up to me and says, ‘My name is Ryan Garcia and you should remember me.’
“You talk about full circle.”
Taylor, who maintains a full-time career as a private lender’s loan officer, deeply embraces that “full-circle” mentality of refereeing.
The next event he worked after Crawford-Canelo was a series of four-round fights at a 250-seat high-school gym.
One night, he’s watching Crawford emotionally dropping to his knees as the victorious scorecards are read, telling the five-division champion in a powerful photographed moment, “Take your time, thank Him for everything He’s given you, and when you’re ready, let’s get you up and get your hand raised,” in what’s likely Crawford’s final bout.
The next, he’s at that local gym.
“The four-round fight was just as big to that kid as Canelo-Crawford was to those guys,” Taylor said.
Before Saturday’s card, Taylor spent last weekend working a club show at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, followed by a “Team Boxing” competition of 24 one-round bouts.
Taylor has even staffed men’s and women’s pillow fights.
His willingness to work anything has made him everything.
His penchant to converse about boxing daily with a network of veteran officials including Jack Reiss and Pat Russell while adhering to routines that prompt him to kiddingly label himself “sick,” have led him here through fateful steps.
The first was a childhood friend’s invitation to go swimming at an indoor pool at the Wisconsin Athletic Club. Taylor, then 9, entered the premises and stumbled upon a club boxing show that was transpiring at the venue. He was affixed, leading the son among eight siblings to watch boxing on television religiously.
While the other kids were drawn to Pac-Man and Centipede at the local arcade, Taylor played the lightly used boxing video game.
At 23, Taylor moved to California, and in 2009, he earned a referee license from the California State Athletic Commission, where a veteran commission employee encouraged him to attend an officiating clinic.
Accidentally enrolled in a continuation class for veteran referees, Taylor met the man who would become his mentor, David Mendoza, and absorbed invaluable direction.
“I still have my notepad from that day … while [Mendoza] pointed me to the amateurs, it was all very cut and dry: Rules, rules, rules, and the sentence I underlined three times was ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ You’re not going to learn this sport overnight. Learn and listen,” Taylor said.
It was a “phenomenal base on rules, regulations, mechanics,” Taylor said, as he dedicated free time to stepping into pro sparring sessions at TKO Gym in Santa Ana, California.
Taylor moved fast from timekeeping in 2006 to chief of officials for California Golden Gloves while getting a glimpse of the expected deliberate process of officiating.
“A judge told me in the amateurs, ‘You’ll timekeep for three-four years, then you’ll be judging for another three-four years, and then around year eight-nine, we’ll start working you in,’” Taylor recalled. “I’m sitting back, biting my tongue, thinking, ‘You have no fricking clue the path I’m taking and how I’m going to get there, and you’re not telling me the path I’m going to take.’ I did my own thing. No one was going to stop me.”
So enthused for his first pro fight at the Doubletree Hotel in Ontario, California, Taylor arrived four hours early. He remembered Mendoza telling him to eat something light before the fights, and since no one was inside the convention room yet, he found a restaurant and ordered a BLT sandwich, french fries and a Diet Coke.
Russell, the senior official that night, praised Taylor’s two stoppages as “perfect … the movement … if I didn’t know it, I’d say you’ve been reffing for six-seven years.”
Taylor’s confidence soared, and he reasoned, “Ok, every event, I’ve gotta have my BLT, my Diet Coke and my fries – but chips will do.”
He’s nearing 900 BLTs.
The only crisis in the routine occurred in Saudi Arabia, which forbids pork consumption on religious grounds.
Taylor sought an alternative to smuggling bacon into the country, and a cook devised a plan to shave meat in the appearance of bacon atop the sandwich with lettuce and tomato.
And Beterbiev-Bivol I went off without a hitch.
The routine is so frequent that the staff at the Subway at the bottom of MGM Grand know Taylor’s order as he approaches the counter.
Similarly, he requires to snack on two handfuls of M&Ms before and during his fights. He brings a hearty bag to ringside, sharing with others.
“It’s not for any extra sugar energy. It’s purely superstition,” Taylor said.
You can’t argue with the results.
One night near his home at the Orange County Fairgrounds, Taylor was refereeing a fight with CSAC Executive Officer Andy Foster sitting ringside.
A fighter got knocked out falling backward. Instead of letting him crash backward, where it appeared his neck would strike the second rope and whip violently, Taylor – who rises each morning for a 3 a.m. workout at 24-Hour Fitness – caught the falling fighter, cradled him, and set him down on the canvas, waving the fight over.
Foster was so impressed, he stopped Taylor’s near 50-50 assignments as a referee and judge, and effectively made him the state’s No. 1 referee.
“He doesn’t make the fight about him,” Foster said of Taylor. “He stays out of the way, enforces the rules, and you forget he’s in there. That’s a gift.”
The glamour fights in Las Vegas came to Taylor as veteran referees Kenny Bayless and Tony Weeks moved to the close of their referee careers.
Nevada commission head Jeff Mullen asked Taylor of his interest in working Las Vegas fights, and invited him to a Zoom call with the state’s other officials to – unknowingly to Taylor – introduce him as the Davis-Garcia referee.
Before the announcement came, Taylor texted Mullen and apologized, saying he had to exit the room so he could go pick up his son, Sebastian, at high school.
When Mullen and others were so pleased with Taylor’s work in that bout, they asked him to return for the Vasily Lomachenko-Devin Haney lightweight title fight.
Taylor had to say no. It was Sebastian’s 16th birthday party, and reservations had already been made.
“One thing I’ve never done is miss my son’s birthday or first day of school or a graduation,” said Taylor, reducing his potential world-title bout list by five bouts. ”He’s my one and only.”
Taylor’s quest for perfection is sincere, but this being boxing, even he has strayed into controversy.
One of those bouts was Elwin Soto’s 12th-round knockout of Angel Acosta to capture the WBO light-flyweight title. With Acosta leading on all three scorecards, Soto clocked him with a big punch, prompting Acosta to freeze.
“As Soto comes in to rip his head off, I jump in to stop him and everyone goes crazy: ‘This is the champion, you’ve got to let him stop him!’” Taylor recalls hearing.
Acosta and his father would sneer at Taylor upon each meeting for more than two years before the referee sought to clear the air, telling Acosta’s father, “We can debate [if I should’ve let Soto throw] another punch or two. What we can’t debate is if I had let it go, and your son can no longer take care of himself. I slept well that night, knowing I protected your son.”
Acosta went on to participate in eight more bouts, meeting two world champions.
Taylor said the episode is a stark reminder of why referees have to remain engaged in the sport. “Work’s a great thing,” he said. “It keeps you sharp.
“In the NFL, the guy up in the booth off a hard hit will order the player into the [medical] tent,” Taylor said. “In our sport, we’ve got eight to 10 seconds to tell if a guy’s concussed, and if he can take care of himself. You have to have good judgment. When you’re not working, you better be studying.”
Movement, positioning, staying out of the way are Taylor’s strengths.
“I let fighters fight. First thing I tell fighters is, ‘If you guys get wrapped up, I might give you the chance to break on your own. Pull your arm out. Let his arm go. Hands are free. Work out of it. It isn’t until I say stop that I need you to stop punching,’” he said.
“Otherwise, it gets boring, I’m in every frame. One of the nicest things I hear from the camera crews is that my nickname is, ‘Mr. Invisible.’”
The anonymity element of his high-profile work extended to his interview with an “American Gladiators” producer, who asked him, “Have you done anything on TV?”
Somewhat sheepishly, he explained yes.
The series, which was filmed in France over three weeks, features the classic events like “Breakthrough” and “Hanging Tough” as the gladiators compete to stop athletic contestants from completing obstacle events.
Taylor has already made a distinct impression. Dressed in a black-and-white-striped shirt, he orders the competition to start with a phrase he dreamed up himself: “Gladiators, Ready?! Contenders, Ready?! 3-2-1, go!”
He’s also asserted his voice into the Association of Boxing Commissions’ rule book that functions as an ever-updated “working document.”
One Taylor-advocated change is replacing the instruction “break,” which can be misinterpreted by non-English-speaking fighters, to “stop,” with the pre-fight instruction to stop punching, protect yourself at all times and take a full step back.
The other is to dry-wipe a fallen-out mouthpiece, insert it properly into the mouth and resume the fight quickly, rather than allowing such an event to become a stalling tactic.
Wearing a black T-shirt imprinted with the phrase, “Greatness is Within,” Taylor spoke to BoxingScene in between bites of a protein-heavy Carne Asada-shrimp bowl at a Newport Beach, California, taco shack, “GreatMex.”
The staff know him and his order well, of course, because routine is such a prominent part of his life.
On Saturdays, he says friends and associates fully understand not to call or text him. He vows there’s no consideration to “A” or “B” side status among the fighters, only a neutral treatment of boxers from the red and blue corners.
“You don’t have to be a boxer to have that love for the sport,” he said.
Asked what that compassion is connected to, Taylor’s eyes welled with tears as he considered the deep meaning of the event, for a beginner and a veteran champion.
“It’s two guys who’ve spent time away from their family. They’re training. They put in all this time, from their nutrition to their mental preparation, knowing the punches they have to take,” he said.
“They get into this ring and it’s you versus me. I need to break your will before you break my will, or I need to take you to a point where you cannot continue.
“It’s not done with knees, feet, whatever. It’s done with style, with speed. It’s done with knowledge and with toughness. Two guys just going at it, saying, ‘I want this more than you. May the best man win. I’ve got no teammates to blame. Only myself. Let it happen.’
“That is the ultimate. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing. It’s art.”
