IT WAS A trilogy bout before which there were three noticeable differences about Katie Taylor in New York.
Firstly, there was a new addition to her fight-week entourage. For years, Taylor’s troupe had consisted only of trainer Ross Enamait, management duo Brian Peters and Tomás Rohan, and Taylor’s mother, Bridget. In July, a fifth member, a man in his 40s and fully kitted out in Team Taylor gear, hung around with the original crew all week.
The second difference explained away the first: Taylor was wearing a wedding ring. The fresh face in her team was indeed her husband, Sean McCavanagh, an Irish-American property broker whom she had married at home in Ireland earlier in the year.
The handful of Irish journalists in New York for Taylor-Serrano III knew the scéal, or the bullet points at least. The hope was that the dozens of other media from America and Britain wouldn’t spot the ring on Taylor’s finger and pose her the kinds of questions that would make her baulk, or potentially even shut us all out.
Because the third difference was that Taylor seemed happy. Like, genuinely happy, to the point that one could have been fooled into thinking she was actually enjoying the week’s promotional formalities (she later confirmed to this writer that she still hates them, but she appeared willing to embrace them at least).
Already the bookies’ outsider, Taylor was made to feel like the away fighter at every turn by Jake Paul’s MVP Promotions, and yet she bounded and beamed her way around each corner of New York as though she was the cock of the walk. Sure enough, between rounds 21 and 30 of their rivalry, she made the brick-fisted Serrano look like a feather duster. Taylor ended a years-long debate with such emphasis that it probably relegated her trilogy with the Puerto Rican-Brooklynite from boxing’s very top shelf.
The causal connection between such an exciting time in her personal life and the sheer enthusiasm with which she approached the whole week was impossible to ignore.
As we departed MSG in the wee hours, the Empire State Building glowed green, white and orange over its shoulder. For the first time in Taylor and Serrano’s saga, no Puerto Rican could justifiably argue that their colours deserved equal placement in the Big Apple skyline.
Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano take in the appreciation of a sold-out MSG after their trilogy fight. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
Taylor didn’t merely close out her rivalry with ‘The Real Deal’ but closed a loop on her career, too: for the first time since before the Rio 2012 Olympics, her father, Pete Taylor, with whom she has been reconciled for several years, played a meaningful role as a trainer in her preparation.
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Within this context, there was a kind of poetry to how Taylor finally eschewed her war-mongering professional style and instead rolled back the years with a technical masterclass to which Serrano had no reply. It was the kind of performance that Pete Taylor had always believed possible against Serrano whereas most of the rest of us presumed that his daughter’s 39-year-old calf muscles could no longer stand up to such perpetual motion.
It was clearly on Taylor’s mind that July’s bout might be her last when she decided to formally involve her dad in her training camp. Sure enough, during her post-fight presser, Taylor was for the first time ever non-committal on a return to the ring. She seemed thoroughly satisfied.
And it wasn’t so much the fact that she dismissed the idea of a rubber match against her last remaining worthy opponent, Chantelle Cameron, but the manner in which she did it, which shed light on how she interpreted her boxing future.
“I think Chantelle has to see if she can sell out a 1,000-seater arena first,” laughed Taylor, who has twice sold out the 20,000-capacity Garden for bouts with Serrano. “Honestly, I don’t think she can sell out any stadium at all,” Taylor added of her one-time conqueror. “I probably made her more money than she deserved, to be quite honest.”
These were justifiable comments if somewhat cruel on Cameron, who is 1-1 against Taylor following their 2023 fight and subsequent rematch at the 3Arena.
The Englishwoman, who parted ways with Matchroom having felt Eddie Hearn and co. openly sided with Taylor around those Dublin bouts, is an exceptional fighter but brings little to the table from a commercial standpoint. After nine years, Taylor understands enough about the market in which she operates to know that she would currently earn a relative pittance for a settler with Cameron, who tends to spend more time at remove from the boxing zeitgeist than she does within it.
Taylor making her ring-walk at MSG in July. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
Taylor exists in the top 1% of boxing’s earners, now — well shy of the highest-profile 10 or so male boxers on the planet but well clear of the rest. She and Serrano are understood to have split a purse in the region of $18m — or €15.2m — for their trilogy bout in July alone. At the tail end of an all-time great boxing career which has spanned 25-odd years, it’s understandable that the Irish icon would no longer be motivated to sacrifice her body for any less than that same purse again. In reality, though, Serrano is the only other female boxer on the planet who can bring that kind of money to the table, and Taylor has killed any demand for a fourth fight between them by winning the first three.
This dearth of financially viable options — as well as Netflix’s incorrigible appetite for car-crash fights between incompatible athletes — recently led to exploratory talks between Taylor’s team and that of former UFC champion Ronda Rousey about a potential boxing match.
And while few would begrudge Taylor another huge paycheck, it would be a shame to see her conform to this scourge on modern culture.
Her participation in a genuine boxing match against Serrano on the undercard of the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul farce last November was, in this writer’s opinion, totally digestible in that it was always going to exhibit the best of the women’s code to a passive audience of tens of millions. And so it proved, with Netflix inviting them back in July minus the bawdy male showpiece.
But Katie Taylor should never become the Anthony Joshua to somebody else’s Jake Paul, and a boxing fight between Taylor and judo specialist Rousey — a truly hopeless ‘striker’ during her MMA career — would be significantly more one-sided than even last Friday’s horseshit in Miami.
To be clear, Rousey, the once-dominant wrestler who got pancaked by former boxing world champion Holly Holm in the Octagon over a decade ago, would likely face no serious danger; even scaled to size, Taylor obviously packs nowhere near the same kind of wallop as Joshua, and she could probably stop Rousey with a deep breath. But the former UFC posterwoman would bring with her to the ring even less of a curiosity factor than Paul did last week. Not everybody has a puncher’s chance. You have to know how to punch first.
That things have since gone quiet again on the Taylor-Rousey front hopefully indicates that somebody at Netflix has realised a fight between them would be a bar too low even for the streaming giant.
In which case, Taylor has all but run out of road heading into 2026. Or, to put it another way, she has completed the game.
Exceptionally few boxers can afford to purchase a home with their career earnings. Taylor has a property portfolio on either side of the Atlantic. Even fewer boxers still can hold a candle to Taylor’s cultural impact on their sport; she has reshaped the game as both an amateur and as a professional and, similar to the recently retired men’s pound-for-pound great Terence Crawford, she has now effectively outgrown her space within it.
Outside of the ring, Taylor has become not only a wife but a stepmother — her husband Sean’s previous wife, Alicia, passed away unexpectedly in 2023; their five children range in age from 11 to 23.
Whether or not she catches the boxing bug again next year — and it would probably be her final ring appearance should she choose to return — she’ll likely be kept occupied.
“Love snuck up on me,” Taylor recently told Patrick Kielty of her marriage on The Late Late Show.
She stands at the intersection between two fairytales and the route is entirely hers to choose.
But it would be nice to be able to think that it was love, and not Father Time, that got Katie Taylor in the end.
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Katie Taylor closed the loop, tied the knot, and completed the game
IT WAS A trilogy bout before which there were three noticeable differences about Katie Taylor in New York.
Firstly, there was a new addition to her fight-week entourage. For years, Taylor’s troupe had consisted only of trainer Ross Enamait, management duo Brian Peters and Tomás Rohan, and Taylor’s mother, Bridget. In July, a fifth member, a man in his 40s and fully kitted out in Team Taylor gear, hung around with the original crew all week.
The second difference explained away the first: Taylor was wearing a wedding ring. The fresh face in her team was indeed her husband, Sean McCavanagh, an Irish-American property broker whom she had married at home in Ireland earlier in the year.
The handful of Irish journalists in New York for Taylor-Serrano III knew the scéal, or the bullet points at least. The hope was that the dozens of other media from America and Britain wouldn’t spot the ring on Taylor’s finger and pose her the kinds of questions that would make her baulk, or potentially even shut us all out.
Because the third difference was that Taylor seemed happy. Like, genuinely happy, to the point that one could have been fooled into thinking she was actually enjoying the week’s promotional formalities (she later confirmed to this writer that she still hates them, but she appeared willing to embrace them at least).
Already the bookies’ outsider, Taylor was made to feel like the away fighter at every turn by Jake Paul’s MVP Promotions, and yet she bounded and beamed her way around each corner of New York as though she was the cock of the walk. Sure enough, between rounds 21 and 30 of their rivalry, she made the brick-fisted Serrano look like a feather duster. Taylor ended a years-long debate with such emphasis that it probably relegated her trilogy with the Puerto Rican-Brooklynite from boxing’s very top shelf.
The causal connection between such an exciting time in her personal life and the sheer enthusiasm with which she approached the whole week was impossible to ignore.
As we departed MSG in the wee hours, the Empire State Building glowed green, white and orange over its shoulder. For the first time in Taylor and Serrano’s saga, no Puerto Rican could justifiably argue that their colours deserved equal placement in the Big Apple skyline.
Taylor didn’t merely close out her rivalry with ‘The Real Deal’ but closed a loop on her career, too: for the first time since before the Rio 2012 Olympics, her father, Pete Taylor, with whom she has been reconciled for several years, played a meaningful role as a trainer in her preparation.
Within this context, there was a kind of poetry to how Taylor finally eschewed her war-mongering professional style and instead rolled back the years with a technical masterclass to which Serrano had no reply. It was the kind of performance that Pete Taylor had always believed possible against Serrano whereas most of the rest of us presumed that his daughter’s 39-year-old calf muscles could no longer stand up to such perpetual motion.
It was clearly on Taylor’s mind that July’s bout might be her last when she decided to formally involve her dad in her training camp. Sure enough, during her post-fight presser, Taylor was for the first time ever non-committal on a return to the ring. She seemed thoroughly satisfied.
And it wasn’t so much the fact that she dismissed the idea of a rubber match against her last remaining worthy opponent, Chantelle Cameron, but the manner in which she did it, which shed light on how she interpreted her boxing future.
“I think Chantelle has to see if she can sell out a 1,000-seater arena first,” laughed Taylor, who has twice sold out the 20,000-capacity Garden for bouts with Serrano. “Honestly, I don’t think she can sell out any stadium at all,” Taylor added of her one-time conqueror. “I probably made her more money than she deserved, to be quite honest.”
These were justifiable comments if somewhat cruel on Cameron, who is 1-1 against Taylor following their 2023 fight and subsequent rematch at the 3Arena.
The Englishwoman, who parted ways with Matchroom having felt Eddie Hearn and co. openly sided with Taylor around those Dublin bouts, is an exceptional fighter but brings little to the table from a commercial standpoint. After nine years, Taylor understands enough about the market in which she operates to know that she would currently earn a relative pittance for a settler with Cameron, who tends to spend more time at remove from the boxing zeitgeist than she does within it.
Taylor exists in the top 1% of boxing’s earners, now — well shy of the highest-profile 10 or so male boxers on the planet but well clear of the rest. She and Serrano are understood to have split a purse in the region of $18m — or €15.2m — for their trilogy bout in July alone. At the tail end of an all-time great boxing career which has spanned 25-odd years, it’s understandable that the Irish icon would no longer be motivated to sacrifice her body for any less than that same purse again. In reality, though, Serrano is the only other female boxer on the planet who can bring that kind of money to the table, and Taylor has killed any demand for a fourth fight between them by winning the first three.
This dearth of financially viable options — as well as Netflix’s incorrigible appetite for car-crash fights between incompatible athletes — recently led to exploratory talks between Taylor’s team and that of former UFC champion Ronda Rousey about a potential boxing match.
And while few would begrudge Taylor another huge paycheck, it would be a shame to see her conform to this scourge on modern culture.
Her participation in a genuine boxing match against Serrano on the undercard of the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul farce last November was, in this writer’s opinion, totally digestible in that it was always going to exhibit the best of the women’s code to a passive audience of tens of millions. And so it proved, with Netflix inviting them back in July minus the bawdy male showpiece.
But Katie Taylor should never become the Anthony Joshua to somebody else’s Jake Paul, and a boxing fight between Taylor and judo specialist Rousey — a truly hopeless ‘striker’ during her MMA career — would be significantly more one-sided than even last Friday’s horseshit in Miami.
To be clear, Rousey, the once-dominant wrestler who got pancaked by former boxing world champion Holly Holm in the Octagon over a decade ago, would likely face no serious danger; even scaled to size, Taylor obviously packs nowhere near the same kind of wallop as Joshua, and she could probably stop Rousey with a deep breath. But the former UFC posterwoman would bring with her to the ring even less of a curiosity factor than Paul did last week. Not everybody has a puncher’s chance. You have to know how to punch first.
That things have since gone quiet again on the Taylor-Rousey front hopefully indicates that somebody at Netflix has realised a fight between them would be a bar too low even for the streaming giant.
In which case, Taylor has all but run out of road heading into 2026. Or, to put it another way, she has completed the game.
Exceptionally few boxers can afford to purchase a home with their career earnings. Taylor has a property portfolio on either side of the Atlantic. Even fewer boxers still can hold a candle to Taylor’s cultural impact on their sport; she has reshaped the game as both an amateur and as a professional and, similar to the recently retired men’s pound-for-pound great Terence Crawford, she has now effectively outgrown her space within it.
Outside of the ring, Taylor has become not only a wife but a stepmother — her husband Sean’s previous wife, Alicia, passed away unexpectedly in 2023; their five children range in age from 11 to 23.
Whether or not she catches the boxing bug again next year — and it would probably be her final ring appearance should she choose to return — she’ll likely be kept occupied.
“Love snuck up on me,” Taylor recently told Patrick Kielty of her marriage on The Late Late Show.
She stands at the intersection between two fairytales and the route is entirely hers to choose.
But it would be nice to be able to think that it was love, and not Father Time, that got Katie Taylor in the end.
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Boxing glove and marriage