BY JEREMY PEPPAS

Mark Lukas, Brent Gregg, PhD,the director of the UAMS/UALR Stuttering Clinic, introduces boxer Jermain Taylor, who used to stutter, was at the clinic to speak to the patients who are undergoing therapy.

You might have thought Jermain Taylor had something else to do or somewhere else to be that Tuesday afternoon in December.

After all, Taylor was going to be defending his world middleweight championship later that week in a boxing match against Kassim Ouma.

So it was a little surprising that Taylor, instead of working on his jab, was speaking at the UAMS/UALR Stuttering Clinic.

Or maybe it wasn't that surprising, considering that Taylor, a Little Rock native who was himself a stutterer before becoming a world champion boxer, worked as a busboy at Murry's Dinner Playhouse. Also on the wait staff at Murry's then was Brent Gregg, PhD, now director of the stuttering clinic for UAMS and UALR.

The full name of the facility is The Arkansas Center for Stuttering Research and Treatment, and Gregg, a Conway native, said, "We started in August of '04 and we had one kid enrolled." But the program has seen some remarkable growth. "We now have over 50 and that's statewide," Gregg added.

And of those students, not all come into Little Rock for treatment.

"Those 50 students," Gregg said, "include the ones who come here and those we go out and see. We see a lot of people off-site."

The program also sees patients who range from pre-school to their mid-30s from across the state.

"We've had people come in for evaluations from Fort Smith to Lake Village," Gregg said. "Well, really all four corners of the state, so it is truly a statewide facility."

In addition to the PhDs on staff, the clinic also has a large contingent of graduate students working on their degrees in speech pathology.

While stuttering is widely known, the cause of stuttering isn't.

"There is no known cause," Gregg said. "There is no known cure, so it makes it really frustrating on this end. But what you have to do is completely assess the kid and try to put the pieces of the puzzle together. We assess them for all the possible causes, but what we really try to determine is if they are going to continue to stutter or if they are going to stop on their own."

Which brings us back to Taylor, who through a combination of therapy and practice shows little or no stuttering.

"I'd just look at the mirror and practice what I was going to say," Taylor said. "I'd have to do a lot of interviews and a lot of people would ask me questions and I'd start to get nervous, but then I'd remember back to what I had practiced and I wouldn't stutter."

Taylor now looks poised and polished, completely confident in front of a group of children who were being treated at the clinic. But it isn't always that way.

"Every now and then, I do a little, but I'm rich, so who cares," Taylor, now a multi-millionaire, said with a laugh.

Taylor is far from unique though.

"(The program) is completely individualized," Gregg said. "You have people like Mel Tillis who stutters when he talks, but when he sings, he doesn't. People who stutter don't when they sing. So it is a completely natural phenomenon and it may start, then stop and we don't know why." Well, at least for now.

"The research is ongoing," Gregg said. "We know more and more and that 70 percent of the people who stutter have some genetic component as an indicator. We know that blood flows differently in their brain. It is all just a matter of time (before we understand the root cause)."

And for those who might have missed Taylor's fight against Ouma, it was a unanimous decision for Taylor after going all 12 rounds.

In the post-fight interview, HBO's Larry Merchant quizzed Taylor, and those years of practice in front of the mirror paid off. Taylor didn't stutter once.


February 2007