Norris’ Fists Do the Shouting : Boxing: The quiet junior-middleweight champion stops Meldrick Taylor with five seconds remaining in the fourth round.

Terry Norris vaulted to the top of boxing’s income brackets Saturday night with an overwhelming victory over Meldrick Taylor at the Mirage Hotel.

Norris, from Alpine, Calif., stopped Taylor with five seconds remaining in the fourth round after he smashed Taylor to the canvas twice during the round.

For Taylor, whose welterweight championship was not at stake, it ended as his last defeat had--in the arms of a referee with far more compassion than his opponent. When Taylor lost here in 1990 with two seconds remaining against Julio Cesar Chavez, it created a firestorm of controversy, because Taylor was ahead on points.

Not this time.

Taylor (29-2-1) was a shattered, bleeding and badly beaten fighter after only the second loss of his eight-year career. Norris (32-3), a quiet man who was once a high school baseball star in Lubbock, Tex., defended his World Boxing Council junior-middleweight championship for the seventh time.

The way Norris won was surprising.

It began as an intense, almost brutal battle between two 149-pounders who threw punches with such speed and fury that it was sometimes difficult to tell who had hit whom, and who had missed.

Then, Norris did most of the hitting and Taylor most of the missing.

Afterward, there was talk of a Norris-Chavez match at 147 pounds, and Taylor was asked who would win.

“Norris would kill him,” Taylor said. “He’d turn Chavez into chopped liver.”

Norris was a slight favorite in the long-awaited matchup of two champions.

The first round looked like the kind of fight everyone expected, with both men boxing at a fast pace, and both punching with velocity and accuracy. Two of the three judges gave Taylor the first round.

But the tide turned abruptly in the second. At the outset of the round, Norris began coming straight down the middle with short, punishing right hands. The confident expression on Taylor’s face was soon gone, and he was blinking and backing up.

In the middle of the second round, Taylor showed frustration at Norris’ unerring rights by lashing out wildly with hooks that missed badly. Steadily, Norris raised the intensity of the beating he was giving Taylor. And through it all he fixed Taylor with a glare.

Midway through the second round, Taylor was bleeding badly from a cut inside his mouth.

Taylor, a Los Angeles Olympics champion in 1984, tried to rally in the third, nailing Norris on the chin with a solid right hand. But Norris didn’t blink.

At the end of the third, Norris’ manager, Joe Sayatovich, looked at an acquaintance and held up a finger and five fingers of his other hand, indicating he expected a sixth-round knockout.

Wrong.

With 1:45 left in the fourth round, Taylor buckled when he was hammered by a right. Then Taylor went down from a left-right-right combination. He was up for a standing-eight count by referee Mills Lane, but was down a minute later from a right that snapped his head back on the ropes.

He went down and got up quickly again, but Lane’s embrace ended it.

At that point, Norris walked directly to Taylor’s corner and shook the hand of Taylor’s disappointed co-trainer, George Benton.

Norris’ trainer, Abel Sanchez, came hurtling through the ropes and hoisted his man high. And up the ring steps came Norris’ wife, Kelly, who is due to give birth to their second child next Friday.

Norris earned $1.3 million Saturday, but much bigger checks were envisioned afterward, when there was talk of Norris meeting the likes of James Toney, Simon Brown, Buddy McGirt and, always, Chavez.

Norris said all the right things afterward, thanking Taylor (who earned $2 million) for agreeing to fight him, thanking everyone for attending (7,000 paid). Then he called Taylor foolish.

“He fought a foolish fight,” Norris said. “He stood right in front of me. I sized him up in the first round, and when I saw he wasn’t going to move, that he wanted to stand there and fight me, I knew I could get him with my right.

“Everyone talked about his hand speed. I believe I showed his hand speed is no faster than mine. And I think I showed I’m the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world.”

Taylor: “This is very tough to accept. I trained six weeks. I did everything I could to prepare. I had a positive attitude. He’s (Norris) a great champion. He’s a very . . . very . . . strong . . . strong puncher. He should be considered the greatest fighter in the world.”