LANDMARK VICTORIES ARE taken literally in New York.
Long after thousands of Irish fans had spilled onto Pennsylvania Plaza still singing her name, Katie Taylor finally exited Madison Square Garden to see that the exterior of ‘The World’s Most Famous Venue’ and, over its shoulder, the top of the Empire State Building, had each been lit up in green, white and orange.
Amanda Serrano’s Puerto Rican red and blue had been switched off.
The celebrations were debauched by Taylor’s standards: she and her team got McDonald’s. They stayed up chatting in the hotel until around 5:30am when time was called for bed.
Brian Peters hadn’t long drifted off when his phone buzzed at 7:30. Taylor informed her manager that she couldn’t sleep.
Back to the streets of Manhattan, then, this time in broad daylight, to walk off the residual adrenaline from the night before and ponder whether there were any worlds left to conquer.
Had they turned down the nearby W 33rd St, they would have passed Legends Bar, on the front window of which was a tricolour poster with the words, ‘Katie Taylor, the greatest to ever do it.’
The Empire State Building and Madison Square Garden salute Katie Taylor. The Final Bell / Instagram (@thefinalbell07)
The Final Bell / Instagram (@thefinalbell07) / Instagram (@thefinalbell07)
While it had paled as a spectacle compared to the previous two instalments, Taylor-Serrano 3 had still been fraught with suspense until the Irishwoman kicked for home in the final two rounds.
Virtually all of its catalytic moments were conjured by Taylor, who rejected the script for a summer blockbuster and instead ‘did one for her’. It was understated and nuanced and ultimately gained critical acclaim.
There were still tensions on set. Peering up at the jumbotron at MSG was to learn that Netflix had pressed ahead with some creative liberties. That Taylor and Serrano were recorded as having landed roughly the same number of punches by the end of the third act was contrived, as was the unofficial scorecard of a draw.
Back in reality, those of us in the media seats dipped back into our laptops in full confidence that, for the first time in the trilogy, we would be publishing our ‘Taylor wins’ drafts.
Taylor and Serrano in combat once more. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Brian Peters had dictated during contract negotiations that the bulk of the previous commentary team from Taylor-Serrano 2 in Dallas, including actor and Serrano super-fan Rosie Perez, would not be used for last Friday’s broadcast. This intervention inevitably did little to achieve impartiality — Netflix were running the show with Serrano’s promoters, MVP, after all — but most boxing people were again able to separate the wood from the trees.
Ahead of his own megafight with Canelo Alvarez on the same streaming platform on 13 September, American pound-for-pound superstar Terence Crawford wrote on Twitter, “Some people just have your number.”
The great boxing trainer and analyst Teddy Atlas noted that we had seen the effect of Taylor and Serrano’s previous two wars. “More controlled and cautious,” he wrote. “Katie Taylor put on a clinic. Ring generalship, countering and defense.
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“This trilogy lifted themselves and the sport with skill and class.”
Some people just have your number. Another great fight tho.
Saw affect of their wars, more controlled & cautious. @KatieTaylor put on a clinic. Ring generalship, countering & defense. This Trilogy lifted themselves & the Sport with skill & Class. 👑🫡💥#TaylorSerrano3pic.twitter.com/oXeFdkNesv
Atlas’ former protégé Mike Tyson, meanwhile, tweeted his old mucker Jake Paul to arrange collection of the million dollars that he had wagered with Serrano’s promoter that Taylor would again prove victorious.
While Paul shook his head at the judges’ verdict, he later made no protestations against Taylor’s decision having likely checked the temperature online between the ring and the post-fight press conference.
For all of their respective flaws, his MVP Promotions and Netflix combined to stage a women’s boxing event of unprecedented magnitude.
Between the digital billboards, the posters outside bars, and the taxi tops all over town, Taylor-Serrano 3 thrived in the off-season vacuum of American football, basketball and hockey. The volume of visual advertising for the fight made it feel like the main event in the city last weekend, entirely overshadowing the promotion of soccer’s Club World Cup final which took place at MetLife Stadium on Sunday.
Saudi Arabia’s own major pro boxing event, which took place in Flushing, Queens, on Saturday, wasn’t so much as an afterthought in the city last week. The omnipotent Turki Al-Sheikh and his broadcast partner DAZN might boast bottomless financial reserves but Netflix lapped them in the marketing race.
Taylor and Serrano prepare to embrace after their bout. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
It culminated in a festival of colour and noise outside MSG from early on Friday evening, most of it Puerto Rican initially.
Serrano’s proud people became a presence on Pennsylvania Plaza far earlier than Taylor’s J1-led Irish army, who were still bundling into the several Irish bars lining The Garden while Los Boricuas made a beeline for the venue.
We’re not so different, it turns out. Spanish sounds equivalent to ‘hats, scarves, and headbands’ permeated the sweltering air outside the main entrance, with tickets and Puerto Rican-themed merch being flogged to all and sundry.
When the rival boxers had first traded blows at the same venue three years earlier, there had been an intermingling of their respective fanbases, whose paths had so rarely crossed in any sporting context.
Friday’s dynamic was notably different for its introduction of playful antagonism, mostly initiated by the Puerto Ricans who felt unjustly scorned by Ireland’s sporting icon after her previous two narrow victories over Serrano.
There were more of them, too: Serrano’s star has grown in the years since 2022 that her fans outnumbered Taylor’s by about the same ratio as was true of the reverse for Taylor-Serrano 1, somewhere in the region of 60-40.
It felt decidedly like a Serrano house until the Irish began to fill the last four or five thousand seats at around 10pm, at which point the two sides began to volley chants back and forth at each other, turning the sold-out MSG into a blender of flag-swirling and guttural noise.
It was only when Taylor emerged from the tunnel that it became clear the extent to which she has become a villain to the Puerto Ricans, whose attempted boos were instantaneously drowned out by those in green.
That there was no such hostility towards the judges’ verdict told its own story.
Taylor makes her entrance. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
A sold-out MSG watches the action. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
The great Serrano, too, was all class in defeat, at one stage jumping from off-camera to hug Taylor as the champion sang her praises. Serrano’s white whale had evaded her for the final time but her contribution to one of boxing’s great modern stories will forever precede her.
The weight of that realisation was apparent in Serrano’s tears.
Still, she’ll be frustrated to have underperformed on the biggest night of her inevitably Hall of Fame career, and one wonders if weight had something to do with it.
Literally as well as figuratively, Serrano might have bitten off more than she was able to chew in her constant efforts to gain a psychological edge over Taylor last week.
Despite being the challenger for Taylor’s undisputed 140-pound title, she won plenty of champion’s privileges in the contract negotiations for their third fight, including the stipulation that it would take place at a 136-pound catchweight.
On the morning of the official weigh-in at the Kimpton Eventi Hotel, which was open to only a handful of journalists, Taylor was first to the scales. She had actually been even lighter than her registered 135.8lbs until moments earlier, when Brian Peters fed her a few gulps of water to edge her closer to the limit and close off a line of questioning before it could begin.
Serrano, by this stage, is understood to have been 0.4lbs over the limit that she had herself dictated. More stressful still, her team had written it into the boxers’ contracts that they would be fined $250,000 for every tenth of a pound over 136 that they recorded on the scales, meaning the Brooklyn southpaw was on the verge of having to fork over $1 million of her fight purse to Taylor if she couldn’t sweat her way below the limit.
There was a grace period of an hour. In the interest of sportsmanship, Taylor’s team gave Serrano closer to an hour and a half, albeit Brian Peters also warned Jake Paul to get his chequebook ready.
Taylor had already headed for a replenishing lunch when her challenger made 136 on the button. Serrano avoided the fine but those 90 minutes were doubtless taxing on her 36-year-old body. We may have seen evidence of as much when Taylor ultimately pulled away from her down the stretch.
Serrano tries to stalk Taylor down. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
Still, few boxers will ever gain so much from a series in which they went 0-3 as Serrano did.
Six million people tuned into Taylor and Serrano’s fight from start to finish on Netflix, an organic figure with no caveats pertaining to the car-crash main event that followed the women in Dallas last November. Over $2.6m was taken at the gate, which would be an excellent return for an elite male title bout.
The point that Taylor and Serrano have been at pains to make since they were young girls has been proven.
Ahead of the public, ceremonial weigh-in at MSG on Thursday evening, a few of us Irish reporters convened at the Tír na nÓg pub directly across the street from the media entrance.
Behind the bar was the actor Kelsey Grammer, who was pulling pints as part of a charity initiative by his beer brand, Faith American Brewing.
Whether you’re a fan of his Frasier character or you know him primarily as Sideshow Bob, he’s exactly who you would hope him to be.
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Relatively unhassled by patrons and clearly making a balls of those pints, Grammer briefly deferred to the real barman and leant in for a chat about boxing, regaling us with tales of attending fights with his friends.
Imagine going to the boxing as a guest of Sly Stallone’s. Imagine being in Vegas to watch Manny Pacquiao in his pomp. Imagine sitting next to Chris Rock when Mike Tyson took a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear.
For thousands of people from Ireland, Puerto Rico, New York or Dallas, at least one portion of the Taylor-Serrano trilogy will make for the same kind of life memory. They’ll remember the sights, the smell, the sounds. They’ll remember the company they kept.
Imagine being able to give people that. Imagine being that good at anything. Imagine being the greatest to do it, possibly ever.
Through that lens, and taking into account the millions she is paid these days to turn the dial, the question as to why Taylor was compelled to take the fight in the first place feels almost rhetorical.
On Saturday evening, the champion put her world-title belts in the boot of a car that drove her back to her adopted home of Vernon, Connecticut. After a week like that, sometimes you wanna go where nobody knows your name.
Usually, when a boxer starts to contemplate retirement out loud, as Taylor did after her third win over career-long nemesis Serrano, they already have a foot out the door. And it’s invariably best that they follow the part of their brain that is acting in the interests of its preservation.
Taylor thanks her supporters on her way out of MSG. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
An underrated aspect of her victory on Friday night was that she removed from the equation all of the ‘headbutt’ bullshit from Dallas.
Taylor boxed against the instincts she has developed as a professional and reverted to a style instead reminiscent of her amateur best, moving fluidly on her 39-year-old legs to finally establish daylight between herself and Serrano.
While his role in her preparation was embellished during Netflix’s promotional documentary, one can’t help but wonder if her father, Pete Taylor, influenced her thinking on the trilogy fight during the few days they spent training together in the Netherlands before she linked back up with Ross Enamait in the States.
Taylor and her dad, who coached her from early childhood in Bray to Olympic glory in London, have been reconciled for a couple of years. But to formally involve him in this camp was surely a recognition from Taylor that her third fight with Serrano could prove her very last.
Only the juice of Croke Park would be worth one last squeeze, and that’s more likely to prove Taylor’s own white whale.
What she does next will be entirely up to her. It always is. But it won’t be better than a landmark victory in New York.
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Landmark victories are taken literally in New York, and Taylor has no more worlds to conquer
LANDMARK VICTORIES ARE taken literally in New York.
Long after thousands of Irish fans had spilled onto Pennsylvania Plaza still singing her name, Katie Taylor finally exited Madison Square Garden to see that the exterior of ‘The World’s Most Famous Venue’ and, over its shoulder, the top of the Empire State Building, had each been lit up in green, white and orange.
Amanda Serrano’s Puerto Rican red and blue had been switched off.
The celebrations were debauched by Taylor’s standards: she and her team got McDonald’s. They stayed up chatting in the hotel until around 5:30am when time was called for bed.
Brian Peters hadn’t long drifted off when his phone buzzed at 7:30. Taylor informed her manager that she couldn’t sleep.
Back to the streets of Manhattan, then, this time in broad daylight, to walk off the residual adrenaline from the night before and ponder whether there were any worlds left to conquer.
Had they turned down the nearby W 33rd St, they would have passed Legends Bar, on the front window of which was a tricolour poster with the words, ‘Katie Taylor, the greatest to ever do it.’
While it had paled as a spectacle compared to the previous two instalments, Taylor-Serrano 3 had still been fraught with suspense until the Irishwoman kicked for home in the final two rounds.
Virtually all of its catalytic moments were conjured by Taylor, who rejected the script for a summer blockbuster and instead ‘did one for her’. It was understated and nuanced and ultimately gained critical acclaim.
There were still tensions on set. Peering up at the jumbotron at MSG was to learn that Netflix had pressed ahead with some creative liberties. That Taylor and Serrano were recorded as having landed roughly the same number of punches by the end of the third act was contrived, as was the unofficial scorecard of a draw.
Back in reality, those of us in the media seats dipped back into our laptops in full confidence that, for the first time in the trilogy, we would be publishing our ‘Taylor wins’ drafts.
Brian Peters had dictated during contract negotiations that the bulk of the previous commentary team from Taylor-Serrano 2 in Dallas, including actor and Serrano super-fan Rosie Perez, would not be used for last Friday’s broadcast. This intervention inevitably did little to achieve impartiality — Netflix were running the show with Serrano’s promoters, MVP, after all — but most boxing people were again able to separate the wood from the trees.
Ahead of his own megafight with Canelo Alvarez on the same streaming platform on 13 September, American pound-for-pound superstar Terence Crawford wrote on Twitter, “Some people just have your number.”
The great boxing trainer and analyst Teddy Atlas noted that we had seen the effect of Taylor and Serrano’s previous two wars. “More controlled and cautious,” he wrote. “Katie Taylor put on a clinic. Ring generalship, countering and defense.
“This trilogy lifted themselves and the sport with skill and class.”
Atlas’ former protégé Mike Tyson, meanwhile, tweeted his old mucker Jake Paul to arrange collection of the million dollars that he had wagered with Serrano’s promoter that Taylor would again prove victorious.
While Paul shook his head at the judges’ verdict, he later made no protestations against Taylor’s decision having likely checked the temperature online between the ring and the post-fight press conference.
For all of their respective flaws, his MVP Promotions and Netflix combined to stage a women’s boxing event of unprecedented magnitude.
Between the digital billboards, the posters outside bars, and the taxi tops all over town, Taylor-Serrano 3 thrived in the off-season vacuum of American football, basketball and hockey. The volume of visual advertising for the fight made it feel like the main event in the city last weekend, entirely overshadowing the promotion of soccer’s Club World Cup final which took place at MetLife Stadium on Sunday.
Saudi Arabia’s own major pro boxing event, which took place in Flushing, Queens, on Saturday, wasn’t so much as an afterthought in the city last week. The omnipotent Turki Al-Sheikh and his broadcast partner DAZN might boast bottomless financial reserves but Netflix lapped them in the marketing race.
It culminated in a festival of colour and noise outside MSG from early on Friday evening, most of it Puerto Rican initially.
Serrano’s proud people became a presence on Pennsylvania Plaza far earlier than Taylor’s J1-led Irish army, who were still bundling into the several Irish bars lining The Garden while Los Boricuas made a beeline for the venue.
We’re not so different, it turns out. Spanish sounds equivalent to ‘hats, scarves, and headbands’ permeated the sweltering air outside the main entrance, with tickets and Puerto Rican-themed merch being flogged to all and sundry.
When the rival boxers had first traded blows at the same venue three years earlier, there had been an intermingling of their respective fanbases, whose paths had so rarely crossed in any sporting context.
Friday’s dynamic was notably different for its introduction of playful antagonism, mostly initiated by the Puerto Ricans who felt unjustly scorned by Ireland’s sporting icon after her previous two narrow victories over Serrano.
There were more of them, too: Serrano’s star has grown in the years since 2022 that her fans outnumbered Taylor’s by about the same ratio as was true of the reverse for Taylor-Serrano 1, somewhere in the region of 60-40.
It felt decidedly like a Serrano house until the Irish began to fill the last four or five thousand seats at around 10pm, at which point the two sides began to volley chants back and forth at each other, turning the sold-out MSG into a blender of flag-swirling and guttural noise.
It was only when Taylor emerged from the tunnel that it became clear the extent to which she has become a villain to the Puerto Ricans, whose attempted boos were instantaneously drowned out by those in green.
That there was no such hostility towards the judges’ verdict told its own story.
The great Serrano, too, was all class in defeat, at one stage jumping from off-camera to hug Taylor as the champion sang her praises. Serrano’s white whale had evaded her for the final time but her contribution to one of boxing’s great modern stories will forever precede her.
The weight of that realisation was apparent in Serrano’s tears.
Still, she’ll be frustrated to have underperformed on the biggest night of her inevitably Hall of Fame career, and one wonders if weight had something to do with it.
Literally as well as figuratively, Serrano might have bitten off more than she was able to chew in her constant efforts to gain a psychological edge over Taylor last week.
Despite being the challenger for Taylor’s undisputed 140-pound title, she won plenty of champion’s privileges in the contract negotiations for their third fight, including the stipulation that it would take place at a 136-pound catchweight.
On the morning of the official weigh-in at the Kimpton Eventi Hotel, which was open to only a handful of journalists, Taylor was first to the scales. She had actually been even lighter than her registered 135.8lbs until moments earlier, when Brian Peters fed her a few gulps of water to edge her closer to the limit and close off a line of questioning before it could begin.
Serrano, by this stage, is understood to have been 0.4lbs over the limit that she had herself dictated. More stressful still, her team had written it into the boxers’ contracts that they would be fined $250,000 for every tenth of a pound over 136 that they recorded on the scales, meaning the Brooklyn southpaw was on the verge of having to fork over $1 million of her fight purse to Taylor if she couldn’t sweat her way below the limit.
There was a grace period of an hour. In the interest of sportsmanship, Taylor’s team gave Serrano closer to an hour and a half, albeit Brian Peters also warned Jake Paul to get his chequebook ready.
Taylor had already headed for a replenishing lunch when her challenger made 136 on the button. Serrano avoided the fine but those 90 minutes were doubtless taxing on her 36-year-old body. We may have seen evidence of as much when Taylor ultimately pulled away from her down the stretch.
Still, few boxers will ever gain so much from a series in which they went 0-3 as Serrano did.
Six million people tuned into Taylor and Serrano’s fight from start to finish on Netflix, an organic figure with no caveats pertaining to the car-crash main event that followed the women in Dallas last November. Over $2.6m was taken at the gate, which would be an excellent return for an elite male title bout.
The point that Taylor and Serrano have been at pains to make since they were young girls has been proven.
Ahead of the public, ceremonial weigh-in at MSG on Thursday evening, a few of us Irish reporters convened at the Tír na nÓg pub directly across the street from the media entrance.
Behind the bar was the actor Kelsey Grammer, who was pulling pints as part of a charity initiative by his beer brand, Faith American Brewing.
Whether you’re a fan of his Frasier character or you know him primarily as Sideshow Bob, he’s exactly who you would hope him to be.
Relatively unhassled by patrons and clearly making a balls of those pints, Grammer briefly deferred to the real barman and leant in for a chat about boxing, regaling us with tales of attending fights with his friends.
Imagine going to the boxing as a guest of Sly Stallone’s. Imagine being in Vegas to watch Manny Pacquiao in his pomp. Imagine sitting next to Chris Rock when Mike Tyson took a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear.
For thousands of people from Ireland, Puerto Rico, New York or Dallas, at least one portion of the Taylor-Serrano trilogy will make for the same kind of life memory. They’ll remember the sights, the smell, the sounds. They’ll remember the company they kept.
Imagine being able to give people that. Imagine being that good at anything. Imagine being the greatest to do it, possibly ever.
Through that lens, and taking into account the millions she is paid these days to turn the dial, the question as to why Taylor was compelled to take the fight in the first place feels almost rhetorical.
On Saturday evening, the champion put her world-title belts in the boot of a car that drove her back to her adopted home of Vernon, Connecticut. After a week like that, sometimes you wanna go where nobody knows your name.
Usually, when a boxer starts to contemplate retirement out loud, as Taylor did after her third win over career-long nemesis Serrano, they already have a foot out the door. And it’s invariably best that they follow the part of their brain that is acting in the interests of its preservation.
An underrated aspect of her victory on Friday night was that she removed from the equation all of the ‘headbutt’ bullshit from Dallas.
Taylor boxed against the instincts she has developed as a professional and reverted to a style instead reminiscent of her amateur best, moving fluidly on her 39-year-old legs to finally establish daylight between herself and Serrano.
While his role in her preparation was embellished during Netflix’s promotional documentary, one can’t help but wonder if her father, Pete Taylor, influenced her thinking on the trilogy fight during the few days they spent training together in the Netherlands before she linked back up with Ross Enamait in the States.
Taylor and her dad, who coached her from early childhood in Bray to Olympic glory in London, have been reconciled for a couple of years. But to formally involve him in this camp was surely a recognition from Taylor that her third fight with Serrano could prove her very last.
Only the juice of Croke Park would be worth one last squeeze, and that’s more likely to prove Taylor’s own white whale.
What she does next will be entirely up to her. It always is. But it won’t be better than a landmark victory in New York.
Three-nil. Game over. Thanks for use of the hall.
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Boxing Katie Taylor must read thanks for use of the hall