THEY HAVE SINCE been lost to the sands of time, but two routine title defences in the back half of 2018 would ultimately yield transatlantic boxing stardom for Katie Taylor, who was in the process of revolutionising her field for the second time.
While she was, by this stage, already a revered athlete in Britain, championed at every turn by her then-affiliate broadcaster, Sky Sports, Taylor’s American breakthrough was broadly achieved within the space of seven weeks towards the end of the year.
His arm twisted by Taylor and Brian Peters in a meeting at his office in Essex two years earlier, promoter Eddie Hearn had signed Taylor more so as a passion project than as a business investment. He once joked with The 42 that he hadn’t joined forces with the Irish icon in the interest of feminism, and yet there was no chartered course to commercial success in the female code, which for decades had played out in leisure centres in front of only families, friends and neighbours.
In Boston on 20 October, 2018, however, Hearn’s eyes were opened to boundless opportunity.
Taylor’s display in a 10-round victory over Cindy Serrano was dazzling, certainly. Cognisant of the responsibility to entertain as she once more hauled her sport from the underground, the Bray woman had, at one point, even casually rested on the ropes, hands by her side, and beckoned forward the Puerto Rican, who had been unable to lay a hand on the champion. More arresting for Hearn, though, was the footfall around TD Garden.
Katie Taylor lands a right hand on Cindy Serrano in Boston in 2018. Emily Harney / INPHO
Emily Harney / INPHO / INPHO
Taylor’s third outing in the States had been the fourth-last fight of the night, a routine title defence designed solely to lure Serrano’s younger sister, Taylor’s long-time nemesis, Amanda Serrano, out of hiding for a fight that would earn some cultural cachet, at least, in the man’s world that was prizefighting. And yet, while the arena was only half-full at first bell, the turnout was almost entirely for Taylor, tricolours streaming from the mezzanine and rapturous noise greeting her every attack.
After Taylor’s victory, enough spectators departed that the arena felt virtually empty. This was noteworthy for the simple fact that the next fight involved a world-title opportunity for Demetrius ‘Boo Boo’ Andrade, the 25-0 middleweight of whom Hearn was trying to create a star. The kicker was that Andrade hails from Providence, Rhode Island, less than an hour down the road from Boston.
But hundreds of supporters had already seen what they had paid to see. Some of them returned from bars on the concourse to watch Belfast’s James Tennyson in his own world-title challenge of Tevin Farmer in the main event, but others hit the road entirely. The latter cohort might not even have known who Tennyson was, let alone that he was due to fight. They weren’t boxing fans, per se, but casual Irish sports fans who had turned out to support a national institution in their adopted city; the kind of latent audience with which a promoter — and indeed a fighter — can begin to turn a profit. They were Katie Taylor fans.
But Taylor herself was flummoxed. She met Hearn for breakfast in Matchroom’s hotel the following morning and inquired as to how much headliner Tevin Farmer had been paid for his fifth-round stoppage of Tennyson. She was insulted to learn that, despite there having been fewer bums in seats for the main event than there had been for hers, Farmer had earned roughly three times her paycheque.
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She asked her promoter if he felt this was fair. Hearn, taken aback by Taylor’s stern line of questioning, confessed that he found it unjust, but he stressed to Taylor that she worked in an unjust industry, run by men for men, and that she was already on course to shift the paradigm of female fighter pay.
Katie Taylor and Eddie Hearn at Croke Park. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
Just under two months later, in the lead-up to Christmas, Taylor made her Madison Square Garden debut on the undercard of a men’s super-middleweight bout between Mexican great Canelo Alvarez and Rocky Fielding of Liverpool.
Such is Canelo’s stardom that his events tend to exist almost in a paradigm of their own. They are frenetic exhibitions of Mexican national expression for which undercards are scarcely necessary. A Canelo show is, invariably, The Canelo Show and, in December 2018, boxing’s most famous active competitor was entering the peak of both his powers and prominence following two contentious preceding bouts against generational middleweight talent Gennady Golovkin.
Taylor’s defence of her two lightweight world-title belts against Finland’s Eva Wahlstrom, a super-featherweight beltholder who had been bested by Taylor in all six of their amateur meetings, was positioned third-last on this particular Canelo Show at MSG.
With 10 days to go until Christmas, the Irishwoman ring-walked to Fairytale of New York (her entrance songs were once chosen by her brother, Peter, before she began to more recently select Christian-pop songs of personal significance from the jukebox).
Fairytale is a sufficiently ubiquitous festive anthem that it was difficult to discern whether the crowd noise that accompanied this particular airing was that of Irish fans gatecrashing a Canelo Show or, rather, simply New Yorkers who had ventured to MSG to catch a rare glimpse of Alvarez on the East Coast.
The MC’s introduction of Taylor from centre-ring, however, removed all ambiguity: the acclaim that greeted her name was thunderous, with Brian Peters’ smile over his boxer’s shoulder evincing a sense that Team Taylor were truly beginning to suck diesel in the States.
For nine rounds, a career-best Taylor rendered the wobbly Wahlstrom fit for the drunk tank, but the gallant Finn — a fine fighter and a former three-time European medallist — refused to submit to her once-more conqueror.
As such, in the final round, Taylor pivoted from trying to stop Wahlstrom and began to peacock. Hanging in the pocket towards the last bell, she unleashed a 12-punch combination to Wahlstrom’s body, the kind of sequence with which one might sprain their thumb if they were to try it on a Fight Night video game. Boxing’s Mecca almost became an open-air space, such was the noise. This Canelo Show had introduced a memorable guest star.
Eva Wahlstrom embraces Katie Taylor at Madison Square Garden in 2018. Tom Hogan / INPHO
Tom Hogan / INPHO / INPHO
Among the thousands to take to his feet during Taylor’s ballistic 10th-round barrage was American boxing great Roy Jones Jr, his right arm stretched above his head as he filmed the Bray woman from his ringside seat.
That Taylor made such a dent on the event greatly impressed Madison Square Garden boss James Dolan, who, from that point onwards, became hellbent on bringing a Taylor-headlined show — and a first-ever female boxing main event — to the sport’s most celebrated venue.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, and Taylor and Amanda Serrano eventually did exactly that: two thirds of their era-defining rivalry between 2022 and 2025 took place at The Garden, sold out on each occasion, and they pocketed somewhere between $15 million and $20 million each in the process.
A far cry, then, from December 2017, when Taylor made the maiden defence of her first professional world title against Jessica McCaskill, and manager Brian Peters was keen to stress to The 42 that his fighter had progressed to six-figure paydays. It was a point of pride for Peters; Taylor had earned around £6,000 (€7,000) for her professional debut in 2016 and, within the space of eight fights, she had become the only female boxer on the planet to break the hundred-thousand-pound barrier. Multi-weight world champion Serrano, meanwhile, lacking major promotional backing, was still earning only four figures per fight across the Atlantic.
When they eventually met in the middle for the first time at MSG, 13 fights later for Taylor and nine further down the line for Serrano, Ireland’s reigning undisputed lightweight champion was paid somewhere in the region of $2.5 million (€2.4m), while Serrano earned the first $1 million cheque of her 13-year professional career. For the final instalment of their trilogy, back at The Garden and live on Netflix three years later, the pair are reported to have split evenly between them a total purse of $18 million (€15.5m).
Taylor and Amanda Serrano are reported to have earned roughly €7.75m each for their trilogy fight last July. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
A crucial component to this exponential growth predates Taylor’s three-fight series with Serrano entirely, however. A chain of events caused by the Irishwoman’s original meeting with a previous rival, Delfine Persoon, was particularly catalytic.
Such was the apparent scandal of Taylor’s majority-decision, undisputed-title victory over the Belgian at an almost-packed Madison Square Garden in June 2019 (this writer scored the bout a draw from near ringside), even female boxing’s detractors found themselves emotionally invested. Taylor, the promotional sweetheart, copped plenty of stray abuse intended mostly for Eddie Hearn, whom many believed to have in some way influenced the judges in order to finagle a victory for his fighter.
This was, of course, absolute horse product, but for some time afterwards, Matchroom’s social media posts about Taylor were awash with comments claiming she was ducking Persoon (Taylor eventually avenged her own victory in a rematch 14 months later).
It wasn’t ideal, arguably, but it also wasn’t ‘nobody cares about women’s boxing’, which was the common refrain of men with eggs for Twitter profile pictures during the earlier stages of Matchroom’s promotion of Taylor. Fittingly, it was a judging controversy which began to align the discourse around women’s professional boxing to that of its male equivalent.
But equally pertinent was that Taylor, the world’s most prominent female boxer, no longer appeared invincible: there suddenly existed a jeopardy to her fights, as well as a curiosity as to how the next squeaker might be scored.
Katie Taylor and Delfine Persoon locked in battle in New York. Tom Hogan / INPHO
Tom Hogan / INPHO / INPHO
Unbeknownst to anyone outside of her inner circle for years, however, was that Taylor had torn her right calf muscle in the early stages of her preparation for the Persoon fight, an injury from which she has never fully recovered.
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As her trainer, Ross Enamait, explained to The 42 in an interview last Saturday, she thus entered a new phase of her professional career at 34. Comparably immobilised, many of Taylor’s subsequent fights would become not boxing exhibitions but blood-curdling battles of will.
The Persoon rematch, the latter stages of a fight-of-the-year contender against old amateur adversary Natasha Jonas, the perilous fifth round — and beyond — against Serrano in their initial meeting, both Chantelle Cameron fights, the first Serrano sequel; these were barnburners that set a new benchmark for female prizefighting.
During the earlier years of her professional career, Taylor’s penchant for grandstanding in the ring — hanging in the pocket, gratuitous exchanges, general violence — was done in a conscious effort to elevate the female code as an entertainment product. Post-calf injury, however, this kind of lunacy has often become Taylor’s only path to victory. She has, in turn, become even more captivating as a sporting figure, earning the near-universal respect of her peers, pundits, and observers female and male.
And she has become compensated as such, earning more, now, than 99% of the men with whom she shares a trade.
In mid-2024, an offer crossed Eddie Hearn’s desk from Jake Paul’s MVP Promotions for Taylor to face Amanda Serrano for the second time. Their Netflix-broadcast rematch would be the co-main event to Paul’s sham fight with Mike Tyson at Cowboys Stadium.
Hearn believed the multi-million dollar contract to be sensational, but when he showed it to Taylor, she scoffed and asked him if he really believed it to be fair. She argued that she was worth more.
Aghast, Hearn went back to MVP and informed them that Taylor wanted a better offer.
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How Katie Taylor cracked America and changed the paradigm of female fighter pay
THEY HAVE SINCE been lost to the sands of time, but two routine title defences in the back half of 2018 would ultimately yield transatlantic boxing stardom for Katie Taylor, who was in the process of revolutionising her field for the second time.
While she was, by this stage, already a revered athlete in Britain, championed at every turn by her then-affiliate broadcaster, Sky Sports, Taylor’s American breakthrough was broadly achieved within the space of seven weeks towards the end of the year.
His arm twisted by Taylor and Brian Peters in a meeting at his office in Essex two years earlier, promoter Eddie Hearn had signed Taylor more so as a passion project than as a business investment. He once joked with The 42 that he hadn’t joined forces with the Irish icon in the interest of feminism, and yet there was no chartered course to commercial success in the female code, which for decades had played out in leisure centres in front of only families, friends and neighbours.
In Boston on 20 October, 2018, however, Hearn’s eyes were opened to boundless opportunity.
Taylor’s display in a 10-round victory over Cindy Serrano was dazzling, certainly. Cognisant of the responsibility to entertain as she once more hauled her sport from the underground, the Bray woman had, at one point, even casually rested on the ropes, hands by her side, and beckoned forward the Puerto Rican, who had been unable to lay a hand on the champion. More arresting for Hearn, though, was the footfall around TD Garden.
Taylor’s third outing in the States had been the fourth-last fight of the night, a routine title defence designed solely to lure Serrano’s younger sister, Taylor’s long-time nemesis, Amanda Serrano, out of hiding for a fight that would earn some cultural cachet, at least, in the man’s world that was prizefighting. And yet, while the arena was only half-full at first bell, the turnout was almost entirely for Taylor, tricolours streaming from the mezzanine and rapturous noise greeting her every attack.
After Taylor’s victory, enough spectators departed that the arena felt virtually empty. This was noteworthy for the simple fact that the next fight involved a world-title opportunity for Demetrius ‘Boo Boo’ Andrade, the 25-0 middleweight of whom Hearn was trying to create a star. The kicker was that Andrade hails from Providence, Rhode Island, less than an hour down the road from Boston.
But hundreds of supporters had already seen what they had paid to see. Some of them returned from bars on the concourse to watch Belfast’s James Tennyson in his own world-title challenge of Tevin Farmer in the main event, but others hit the road entirely. The latter cohort might not even have known who Tennyson was, let alone that he was due to fight. They weren’t boxing fans, per se, but casual Irish sports fans who had turned out to support a national institution in their adopted city; the kind of latent audience with which a promoter — and indeed a fighter — can begin to turn a profit. They were Katie Taylor fans.
But Taylor herself was flummoxed. She met Hearn for breakfast in Matchroom’s hotel the following morning and inquired as to how much headliner Tevin Farmer had been paid for his fifth-round stoppage of Tennyson. She was insulted to learn that, despite there having been fewer bums in seats for the main event than there had been for hers, Farmer had earned roughly three times her paycheque.
She asked her promoter if he felt this was fair. Hearn, taken aback by Taylor’s stern line of questioning, confessed that he found it unjust, but he stressed to Taylor that she worked in an unjust industry, run by men for men, and that she was already on course to shift the paradigm of female fighter pay.
Just under two months later, in the lead-up to Christmas, Taylor made her Madison Square Garden debut on the undercard of a men’s super-middleweight bout between Mexican great Canelo Alvarez and Rocky Fielding of Liverpool.
Such is Canelo’s stardom that his events tend to exist almost in a paradigm of their own. They are frenetic exhibitions of Mexican national expression for which undercards are scarcely necessary. A Canelo show is, invariably, The Canelo Show and, in December 2018, boxing’s most famous active competitor was entering the peak of both his powers and prominence following two contentious preceding bouts against generational middleweight talent Gennady Golovkin.
Taylor’s defence of her two lightweight world-title belts against Finland’s Eva Wahlstrom, a super-featherweight beltholder who had been bested by Taylor in all six of their amateur meetings, was positioned third-last on this particular Canelo Show at MSG.
With 10 days to go until Christmas, the Irishwoman ring-walked to Fairytale of New York (her entrance songs were once chosen by her brother, Peter, before she began to more recently select Christian-pop songs of personal significance from the jukebox).
Fairytale is a sufficiently ubiquitous festive anthem that it was difficult to discern whether the crowd noise that accompanied this particular airing was that of Irish fans gatecrashing a Canelo Show or, rather, simply New Yorkers who had ventured to MSG to catch a rare glimpse of Alvarez on the East Coast.
The MC’s introduction of Taylor from centre-ring, however, removed all ambiguity: the acclaim that greeted her name was thunderous, with Brian Peters’ smile over his boxer’s shoulder evincing a sense that Team Taylor were truly beginning to suck diesel in the States.
For nine rounds, a career-best Taylor rendered the wobbly Wahlstrom fit for the drunk tank, but the gallant Finn — a fine fighter and a former three-time European medallist — refused to submit to her once-more conqueror.
As such, in the final round, Taylor pivoted from trying to stop Wahlstrom and began to peacock. Hanging in the pocket towards the last bell, she unleashed a 12-punch combination to Wahlstrom’s body, the kind of sequence with which one might sprain their thumb if they were to try it on a Fight Night video game. Boxing’s Mecca almost became an open-air space, such was the noise. This Canelo Show had introduced a memorable guest star.
Among the thousands to take to his feet during Taylor’s ballistic 10th-round barrage was American boxing great Roy Jones Jr, his right arm stretched above his head as he filmed the Bray woman from his ringside seat.
That Taylor made such a dent on the event greatly impressed Madison Square Garden boss James Dolan, who, from that point onwards, became hellbent on bringing a Taylor-headlined show — and a first-ever female boxing main event — to the sport’s most celebrated venue.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, and Taylor and Amanda Serrano eventually did exactly that: two thirds of their era-defining rivalry between 2022 and 2025 took place at The Garden, sold out on each occasion, and they pocketed somewhere between $15 million and $20 million each in the process.
A far cry, then, from December 2017, when Taylor made the maiden defence of her first professional world title against Jessica McCaskill, and manager Brian Peters was keen to stress to The 42 that his fighter had progressed to six-figure paydays. It was a point of pride for Peters; Taylor had earned around £6,000 (€7,000) for her professional debut in 2016 and, within the space of eight fights, she had become the only female boxer on the planet to break the hundred-thousand-pound barrier. Multi-weight world champion Serrano, meanwhile, lacking major promotional backing, was still earning only four figures per fight across the Atlantic.
When they eventually met in the middle for the first time at MSG, 13 fights later for Taylor and nine further down the line for Serrano, Ireland’s reigning undisputed lightweight champion was paid somewhere in the region of $2.5 million (€2.4m), while Serrano earned the first $1 million cheque of her 13-year professional career. For the final instalment of their trilogy, back at The Garden and live on Netflix three years later, the pair are reported to have split evenly between them a total purse of $18 million (€15.5m).
A crucial component to this exponential growth predates Taylor’s three-fight series with Serrano entirely, however. A chain of events caused by the Irishwoman’s original meeting with a previous rival, Delfine Persoon, was particularly catalytic.
Such was the apparent scandal of Taylor’s majority-decision, undisputed-title victory over the Belgian at an almost-packed Madison Square Garden in June 2019 (this writer scored the bout a draw from near ringside), even female boxing’s detractors found themselves emotionally invested. Taylor, the promotional sweetheart, copped plenty of stray abuse intended mostly for Eddie Hearn, whom many believed to have in some way influenced the judges in order to finagle a victory for his fighter.
This was, of course, absolute horse product, but for some time afterwards, Matchroom’s social media posts about Taylor were awash with comments claiming she was ducking Persoon (Taylor eventually avenged her own victory in a rematch 14 months later).
It wasn’t ideal, arguably, but it also wasn’t ‘nobody cares about women’s boxing’, which was the common refrain of men with eggs for Twitter profile pictures during the earlier stages of Matchroom’s promotion of Taylor. Fittingly, it was a judging controversy which began to align the discourse around women’s professional boxing to that of its male equivalent.
But equally pertinent was that Taylor, the world’s most prominent female boxer, no longer appeared invincible: there suddenly existed a jeopardy to her fights, as well as a curiosity as to how the next squeaker might be scored.
Unbeknownst to anyone outside of her inner circle for years, however, was that Taylor had torn her right calf muscle in the early stages of her preparation for the Persoon fight, an injury from which she has never fully recovered.
As her trainer, Ross Enamait, explained to The 42 in an interview last Saturday, she thus entered a new phase of her professional career at 34. Comparably immobilised, many of Taylor’s subsequent fights would become not boxing exhibitions but blood-curdling battles of will.
The Persoon rematch, the latter stages of a fight-of-the-year contender against old amateur adversary Natasha Jonas, the perilous fifth round — and beyond — against Serrano in their initial meeting, both Chantelle Cameron fights, the first Serrano sequel; these were barnburners that set a new benchmark for female prizefighting.
During the earlier years of her professional career, Taylor’s penchant for grandstanding in the ring — hanging in the pocket, gratuitous exchanges, general violence — was done in a conscious effort to elevate the female code as an entertainment product. Post-calf injury, however, this kind of lunacy has often become Taylor’s only path to victory. She has, in turn, become even more captivating as a sporting figure, earning the near-universal respect of her peers, pundits, and observers female and male.
And she has become compensated as such, earning more, now, than 99% of the men with whom she shares a trade.
In mid-2024, an offer crossed Eddie Hearn’s desk from Jake Paul’s MVP Promotions for Taylor to face Amanda Serrano for the second time. Their Netflix-broadcast rematch would be the co-main event to Paul’s sham fight with Mike Tyson at Cowboys Stadium.
Hearn believed the multi-million dollar contract to be sensational, but when he showed it to Taylor, she scoffed and asked him if he really believed it to be fair. She argued that she was worth more.
Aghast, Hearn went back to MVP and informed them that Taylor wanted a better offer.
She got it. Because she was right.
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