IN CASE YOU’VE found yourself wondering, Ed Sheeran is just a legitimate boxing fan.
The four-time Grammy winner bumped into Matchroom Boxing chairman Eddie Hearn and CEO Frank Smith at a gig in the States recently. The Matchroom lads invited him to join them for Katie Taylor’s rematch with Chantelle Cameron in Ireland on Saturday 25 November. By all accounts, Sheeran jumped at the opportunity.
That’s the less interesting half of the story.
Sheeran’s late grandfather, William Sheeran, was a boxing lifer.
Originally from Derry, ‘Bill’ moved to London in his youth and went on to assume prominent roles in the British Boxing Board of Control (Ed Sheeran even wore Bill’s BBBofC tie to the 2014 Grammys as a tribute to his granddad, who had passed away a year earlier).
While working as a dentist in a London hospital, the Protestant-raised Bill met Anne ‘Nancy’ Mulligan, a Catholic nurse from Co. Wexford. They eloped to Nancy’s home county, tying the knot in the face of her family’s disapproval in 1951.
The couple retired to Anne’s childhood home in Gorey in 1983. Three years later, the Sheerans founded Gorey Boxing Club.
Today, a giant mural of Katie Taylor greets you at the front of the Gorey BC clubhouse.
***
Reporting live on a boxing match is a blur — and particularly when you’re covering a women’s professional bout given the two-minute, 10-round format.
You’re in the best seat in the house but I won’t lie to you: you see only about half the fight. You watch a couple of seconds’ worth of action, you type. You hear eight or nine thousand people going bananas while your head’s buried, you turn to the journalist next to you and ask what shot you missed. You try watching and typing at the same time — ‘maybe this time, it’ll just work‘ — and you make an unbelievable balls of it. You spend the next minute amending that typo-riddled paragraph: another half a round gone.
You’re nearly as dependent on your ears as you are your eyes and the noise that greeted MC David Diamante’s words, ‘And the NEW’, will stay with me for as long as I live. So too will the portion of Taylor’s celebrations that I caught out of the corner of my eye while I tried to bookend a report that, unexpectedly, bore good news for Irish readers.
𝗥𝗘𝗗𝗘𝗠𝗣𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗞𝗧 👏@KatieTaylor avenges defeat to Chantelle Cameron by majority decision to become a two-weight Undisputed World Champion 🤯
— Matchroom Boxing (@MatchroomBoxing) November 25, 2023
📝 98-92, 96-94, 95-95
𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐳𝐞𝐫. 𝐋𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝. 𝐈𝐜𝐨𝐧. 👑 #CameronTaylor2 pic.twitter.com/K1O3w2Ppu8
I was one of the last journalists at ringside to slam my laptop shut while the dust settled on the 3Arena canvas. I always am. I might just be bad at it, honestly.
The majority of media present had headed out towards the edge of our section of seating, from where we would be led upstairs for the post-fight press conference.
I took solace from the fact that the great Michael Foley of The Times was only just ahead of me. I hadn’t seen him yet on fight week.
“How’re we getting on?’” says Mick.
I just puff my cheeks out. “That was f***ing unbelievable wasn’t, it?”
Mick, his eyes wide, nods and goes: “…Again!”
Rarely has one word so instantly untangled the sea of thoughts and opinions and emotions swirling around my head.
Katie Taylor had done it… again. At a ripe enough age that, for the first time, the majority of people didn’t believe it possible, the Bray boxing icon had served up for Irish sports fans yet another slice of glory.
And for the likes of Michael Foley and myself, Taylor had given us yet another night in our professional lives that we’ll carry with us until we’re dust.
The irony is that so many people in our seats would have preferred that Taylor retire after her defeat to Cameron in May. In fact, plenty would rather that she would have retired before it.
Taylor and her team made the decision to eschew virtually every media opportunity last week, ticking only contractually obliged boxes and otherwise marching solely in the direction of her career-biggest test at the 3Arena.
It’s a solid bet that one of the reasons for this ostensible blackout would have been questions like, ‘How long do you think you can go on for?’ and ‘Do you ever consider retirement?’ and ‘Is there a chance this could be your last fight?’
There is no malice behind those kinds of questions. In fact, the opposite is true. They’re born of concern.
Let’s not beat around the bush: for an elite professional athlete, Taylor is fairly old. She has been boxing effectively in a full-time capacity for 25 years. Her reflexes are not as sharp as they once were. Her legs don’t propel her out of trouble as quickly as they used to. And she has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
And the thing is that Katie Taylor means something to people, particularly in her home country. There are a few million people in Ireland alone who would prefer that, whenever she decides to descend from the ring for the final time, Taylor does so in perfect health and, ideally, with the same champion’s aura that she has worn since her teens.
Taylor understands that sentiment — but it doesn’t feel great to have people constantly try to consign you to the past, however pure their intentions. There must be times when she wants to scream that she’s a fully functioning, 37-year-old adult who is capable of making her own informed decisions as they pertain to her body and sporting legacy.
So, on Saturday, for the first time in memory, Taylor seemed to enjoy her few minutes on the mic at centre-ring. And how immensely satisfying it must have been for her afterwards to sit down in front of a room full of the people whose belief in her abilities had wavered, fielding their questions about her greatest ever achievement.
The siege had lifted but the mentality remained: Taylor’s trainer, Ross Enamait, arrived at the presser wearing a t-shirt which paraphrased Roger Mayweather’s famous words: “You don’t know shit about boxing.”
Two guesses as to whom Enamait’s sartorial statement was aimed at.
Virtually every year, Taylor tops the results of a national survey taken to determine Ireland’s most popular sportsperson. I often suspect that if the poll was taken only among her fellow top-level Irish sportspeople, the results would read the same.
The comments section on Taylor’s Instagram post from Saturday night was a who’s who: spread between the countless messages from boxers and mixed martial artists, there were well wishes from gymnastics world champion Rhys McClenaghan, Irish rugby great Seán O’Brien, Arsenal footballer Katie McCabe and half of her Republic of Ireland teammates, Olympic medalists Sonia O’Sullivan and Rob Heffernan, and more.
Always a champion. @KatieTaylor , winning is all the sweeter when under pressure.
— Padraig Harrington (@padraig_h) November 26, 2023
One of the best I've seen in a long time! #KatieTaylor
— Bundee Aki (@bundeeaki12) November 25, 2023
Four-time All-Ireland winner and three-time All-Star Paul Galvin put it best when, in the aftermath of Saturday’s glory, he explained Taylor’s appeal to her sporting contemporaries: “None of us have any idea how tough and competitive this woman is,” Galvin wrote. “So inspiring. Watching her would make you want to compete again.”
Taylor’s capacity to endure at the absolute apex of her game is becoming an additional dimension to her sprawling legacy.
She still competes because she still can. She’ll let us know when she can’t.
At the post-fight presser on Saturday night, Taylor was quick to shout out two champions with longer stretches of road in front of them: Amy Broadhurst of Dundalk and England’s Sandy Ryan.
Amateur light-welterweight world champion Broadhurst had helped Taylor out in her training camp for the bash-up with Amanda Serrano last year, and she roared her friend on from ringside a couple of nights ago.
Professional welterweight champion Ryan had been brought over to Connecticut for a week’s sparring with Taylor ahead of Saturday’s rematch, which was noteworthy for the simple fact she and Cameron are longtime archnemeses.
Cameron’s crew, meanwhile, duly invited into their camp one Kellie Harrington. Ireland’s Olympic champion politely declined.
Taylor on Saturday earmarked Broadhurst (who remains amateur) and Ryan as the future of women’s professional boxing.
Her night of redemption reminded us that Katie Taylor doesn’t yet belong to her sport’s past. She’s the new undisputed light-welterweight champion of the world. And she’s still very much the present.
