Punch Out the Lights

Pryce Taylor seems paradoxically unmoved by boxing’s intensity. He rarely arrives to workouts on time. He goes to sleep somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m. Little seems to animate him — including the fact that he is one of the country’s best amateur fighters.

He stumbled into the ring relatively late in life. He was already 19 when he found Cops and Kids, one of the last remaining free boxing programs in the city. The sport became his lifeboat, adding structure and purpose to a life he admits did not have it otherwise.

Until he found boxing, Mr. Taylor’s ambitions were at best vague. Four years ago, his plan was to play basketball for a community college, transfer to a bigger school like Notre Dame, and then get drafted by the N.B.A. Instead, he dropped out after one year and never went back. Later, he thought about trying to become a rapper. It was not until he stepped in the ring that Mr. Taylor’s ambitions and abilities aligned. Despite losing his first fight, by September 2017, he had decided he was a boxer.

But Mr. Taylor’s diffidence has, at times, stunted him. He was a natural, but he was uninterested in the work required. “I just stopped training because it got boring,” Mr. Taylor said with a shrug. He was so unprepared for the 2019 regional tournament — one of the few events that could qualify him for the Olympic trials — that his coach said Mr. Taylor shouldn’t bother fighting.

Mr. Taylor ignored his coach’s advice and traveled on his own to the regionals in Reno, Nev., anyway. He won on a knockout in the first round, but lost in his second bout.

“I could have beat him if I actually trained,” he said of that opponent. The realization snapped him into a more intense regimen. By that fall, he had qualified for the 2020 Olympic trials in Louisiana. It was a remarkable turnaround for an athlete who had fewer than 30 fights in his official amateur bout book.