The Road to New York
RATHER THAN A trophy cabinet, Katie Taylor has a trophy room in her childhood home in Bray. It’s unclear as to whether she made similar allowances for the house she bought in her new home in the hills of Vernon, Connecticut, three years ago. Even if she did, you’d be lucky to get a foot in there arseways at this stage.
Taylor’s RTÉ Sports Personality of the Year award for 2022 will sit alongside the other two in the Oldcourt estate where she grew up but recognition of her unique transcendence is these days transatlantic. She was this year nominated in a four-person shortlist for an ESPY — American sport’s equivalent of the Oscars or Grammys — in the unisex ‘Best Boxer’ category, and she now features in some shape or form in her sport’s most prestigious end-of-year awards on an annual basis.
It has taken the bones of her six-year professional career for it to become consensus outside of Ireland but there is now a universal understanding in boxing that Katie Taylor is truly one of the great ones.
That she won five World Championships and six Europeans as an amateur didn’t really put her on the map internationally. Nor did the fact that she was so largely responsible for women’s boxing’s inclusion at the Olympic Games or that she went on to win gold at London 2012 with the weight of five million people’s expectations on her shoulders. This glorious chapter of her career sealed her legend at home, if not abroad.
The first four years of her professional career brought Taylor’s greatness to a wider audience, sure: she picked up world titles, procured thousands of fans outside of Ireland and, eventually, began to pocket female boxing’s first million-dollar paychecks; she had again become her sport’s poster-girl, spearheaded the change in narrative around women’s professional boxing from ‘who cares?’ to ‘who is Katie Taylor fighting next?’ But not everybody was convinced. Her controversial undisputed-title victory over fellow lightweight beltholder Delfine Persoon at Madison Square Garden in June 2019 sparked doubts among the previously uninitiated as to her legitimacy — not only as the ruler of the 135-pound division but as the living legend as which she had been packaged since signing with Eddie Hearn and Matchroom in 2016.
A clearer victory over Persoon in their August 2020 rematch smoothed things over, even if a minority of minds had already been made up that Taylor was merely a promoter’s creation, an A-side hype job who would have to be knocked out to get beaten.
Without that minority, the train rolled on. The deterioration in quality of Taylor’s next four performances didn’t slow the cultural movement that has become her professional career: she continued to win, at least, and her stock as a rare, gracious boxing champion continued to rise even if her form seemed to be tracking in the opposite direction.
The thousands that turned out for Taylor as she saw off the unheralded Kazakh Firuza Sharipova in Liverpool last December, combined with her noticeable athletic decline at 35, dictated that it was time to go big or go home in 2022.
Eddie Hearn and Taylor’s manager Brian Peters went big. Really big. They booked the big room at New York’s storied Madison Square Garden. They dipped deep enough into the pocket to finally lure Taylor’s career-long nemesis, the generationally great Puerto Rican Brooklynite Amanda Serrano, into the opposite corner. And they gave it one of the great promotional heaves in recent boxing history, eventually putting a capacity 20,000 bums on seats for what rightly felt like not only the biggest women’s bout of all time, but one of the year’s true marquee fight events; female, male, boxing, MMA, whatever.
It was on this April night in New York when Katie Taylor properly etched herself into professional boxing history, and when any residual doubts about her greatness evaporated with the sweat from hers and Serrano’s foreheads as they produced an unprecedented female-boxing spectacle.
Indeed, you can pinpoint it more specifically to both the fifth and final rounds of their classic: the former in which Taylor invoked two decades’ worth of belligerence to survive an almighty, bell-to-bell battering by Serrano, and the latter in which she poured it on the Puerto Rican in one of the most pulsating rounds ever to grace Pennsylvania Avenue’s great stage.
As a reporter fortunate enough to be sitting a couple of rows back from the point of combat, there are dozens of defining images from the entire Taylor-Serrano fight-week experience that will be carried as far as old age: the hundreds of New Yorkers, Irish, and Puerto Ricans who swarmed the corridors of MSG to watch the fighters’ workout on a Wednesday midday; the few thousand who turned out at Friday’s weigh-in, Irish and Puerto Rican fans exchanging songs and chants and amalgamating for a minute of blood-curdling noise as Taylor and Serrano stared each other down on the eve of battle; Jake Paul being surprisingly sound, all told.
Weirdly, though, the most profound memory is probably this: five New York State Athletic Commission officials — not necessarily ‘boxing men’, but suits — are sandwiched between the broadcast seats at immediate ringside and the Irish press seats in the third row. There are 10 seconds remaining in the bout and nobody dares check if there remains a roof on the building because Taylor and Serrano have thrown caution to the wind. Might all come down to these last 10 seconds. Might not. Who knows? Jesus, they’re going for it. ‘Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!’ The final bell — and an extra few whacks of it in case the fighters couldn’t hear it.
There are 20,000 people on their feet, hands on heads, screaming. Glances to the left, to the right, and a quick sweep behind reveal that this includes, without exception, every member of the press. A quick glance forward reveals that it also includes the five suits from the New York State Athletic Commission.
Amid the bedlam, one of them leans back towards the Irish media row. “Oh. My. God,” he says. “…Taylor 6-4?”
The Irish journalists to whom he was speaking had known it for some time beforehand but like many others around the world, this particular gentleman learned it that night in April: Katie Taylor is a lunatic. A warrior. A legendary boxer.
Brilliant little peek into the ring after Saturday’s fight. Jordan Maldonado telling Katie Taylor ‘we earned every dollar, baby.’ Jake Paul visibly moved. Brian Peters still orchestrating amid the delirium.
— Gavan Casey (@GavanCasey) May 4, 2022
(Full 🎥 on @MatchroomBoxing’s YouTube channel: https://t.co/UyWKg3WiMl) pic.twitter.com/jYvbl8AY7I
There was a fitting reverence shown towards both the magnanimous Serrano and the memorably jubilant Taylor during their post-fight press conferences. The great sportswriter Donald McRae, who covered the fight for The Guardian, told Taylor that it had been “moving” to bear witness to their fight in person. Taylor seemed equally stirred to hear it described in such words.
Applause broke out among the international press pack when she put it firmly that the night had, to her mind, eclipsed her victorious Olympic final in 2012. There was weight to that admission: Taylor had spent the previous few days batting away questions comparing the two, just as she did in 2019 and 2020 after her most significant previous professional victories against Delfine Persoon.
As she sat at the top table exhausted, bruised and beaming, everybody facing her wondered but nobody dared to ask: how the hell do you top a night like this?
That’s where a boxer’s promoter comes in, of course. Granted, in that moment, Eddie Hearn probably had the same question rather than the precise answer. But it was there in the bowels of Madison Square Garden where, for the first time in a long time, the prospect of staging a Katie Taylor fight in Ireland was proposed not by hopeful Irish journalists but by the man who can make it happen.
Mind you, Taylor knew better than to get too excited.
‘I wasn’t sure if anything could reach my Olympic gold-medal moment but tonight was absolutely the best moment of my career.’ — @KatieTaylor pic.twitter.com/fGEbKn6KON
— Gavan Casey (@GavanCasey) May 1, 2022
The Road to Croker
There exists a perception that Taylor and her team have prioritised the greater riches of fighting in the UK or in America over a less lucrative homecoming, and that this is why her Irish fans have had to fork out small fortunes of their own in order to see her compete in person over the last six years.
This is truly nonsense. It’s nonsense, however, that was first floated by her manager, Brian Peters, as the lesser of two evils. The alternative was to publicly acknowledge that Daniel Kinahan’s indivisible links to the sport, and the accompanying security risk since the Regency shooting in 2016, had rendered Ireland virtually inhospitable to major professional boxing events.
To have opened that can of worms from Peters’ position would have helped no one — not least Taylor, who has no connections to Kinahan or to his now-defunct boxing management company, MTK Global, and who would have deserved better than to have her name share headlines with the aforementioned parties.
Peters and Hearn did come within days of announcing a Taylor homecoming bout at Dublin’s 3Arena for the spring of 2018 but as they prepared to cross the ‘Ts’, they were advised by the gardaí that “the climate” in the capital was still “not conducive” to staging a large professional boxing event. With that, the idea was shelved indefinitely. Taylor, desperate to fight in Ireland since turning pro, has in time come to understand that her dream is a logistical nightmare.
Time is a healer, though, and the long and short of it is that to run a show in Dublin now doesn’t carry the same risks as it might have more than four years ago. Equally pertinently, Taylor has in the intervening years added to her legend to such an extent that it would make for an embarrassing black mark against Hearn, her management, and even the State if she was to exit stage left without taking a bow in front of a home audience who recently voted her Ireland’s most popular sportsperson for the sixth year in a row.
Illustrative of Taylor’s elevated standing both at home and abroad, now, is not only the political will behind her prospective homecoming but the fact that the event in the works for 2023 is literally 10 times bigger than that which was shelved in 2018.
It had to be Croke Park. Sometime last spring when Ireland was first suggested as the next destination, Taylor’s promotional and management teams agreed that if they were going to do it once, they had to create a kind of ‘where-were-you’ Reeling In The Years-worthy event that would forever remain stitched into the country’s sporting tapestry.
It was decided that an Irish history-maker such as Taylor belonged in her country’s most historic sporting venue. Plus, Muhammad Ali had boxed there 50 years earlier. It just felt right. So too did the opportunity to bring a staple of Irish culture, the home and history of Gaelic games, to a global audience on Hearn’s partner broadcaster, DAZN.
Dialogue with the GAA began in late spring and they were provisionally on board for an autumn date.
Ultimately, Serrano’s management/promotion crew of Jake Paul and MVP pulled the plug on it happening this year. Frustrating as it might have been, it was an understandable call: Taylor is 36 and only beat Serrano by a hair’s breadth in April. It suited Serrano to wait. From a purely business standpoint, too, her team understood that she was a key piece of this equation: Serrano’s name recognition and the genuine danger she poses to Taylor as a challenger are probably worth an extra 20,000 ticket sales over any other prospective opponent. That’s roughly the difference between the event turning a small profit and Hearn losing his arse on it.
So, Taylor instead took a stay-busy fight at London’s Wembley Arena in October, safely outpointing Argentina’s Karen Elizabeth Carabajal. But it became clear from Hearn’s bullishness in the immediate aftermath that conversations had continued both with Croke Park and with Serrano’s team with a view to staging an epochal boxing event in Ireland in the first half of next year.
"WE WANT THE FIGHT AT CROKE PARK" - @KatieTaylor @Serranosisters 👀#TaylorCarabajal pic.twitter.com/Mgze7EV6tD
— DAZN Boxing (@DAZNBoxing) October 29, 2022
The Puerto Rican great first intends to seal the undisputed title down at featherweight in February but she is tentatively on board for another crack at Taylor in early summer, probably May.
Croke Park, too, have the rematch penciled it in.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio’s All Roads to Croker programme on Friday, stadium director Peter McKenna said: “We’re looking at dates earlier in the year. We’re quite a way along the road in the talking with Brian Peters and Matchroom.
“It could be early summer – that’s the time. This is the type of event… that requires a number of moving parts. What we do is we say, ‘We have these dates available, and this is how it would work from our perspective.’ That job has been done. And now we need to make sure Matchroom and Brian Peters can make all the other things come together.”
There will be an element of financial assistance provided by the State, a safety net in the event that ticket sales don’t meet expectations. Hearn’s company Matchroom, meanwhile, have been putting money behind Instagram posts promoting the concept with videos from Madison Square Garden, images of Croke Park, and the accompanying caption “imagine” followed by the Irish tricolour.
Taylor’s team imagine an event for which not only Ireland will stand still, but for which Taylor’s international fans will fly in from around the world; one with family tickets, celebrity attendees, and a festival atmosphere to match that of an All-Ireland final if not better it.
It’s not over the line yet, but it’s no longer merely a pipedream.
Go big or go home. Or if you can swing it, do both.
