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Taylor and Serrano embracing after their historic fight at Madison Square Garden in April 2022. Matchroom Boxing/Ed Mulholland/INPHO

Taylor and Serrano may have dragged women's boxing as far as it can go in the sport's current climate

Boxing’s increasing reliance on Saudi Arabia has halted momentum but the next generation will still have a headstart.

THE PURSES PAID to Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano on Friday night will be the two largest ever received by female fighters.

Taylor [23-1, 6KOs], whose 140-pound throne will be under siege, will pocket somewhere just north of $6 million. Challenger Serrano [47-2-1, 30KOs], whose promoter Jake Paul is effectively running the show at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, stands to earn somewhere closer to $8m.

The Irishwoman’s purse will be at least twice bigger than her previous best. Serrano’s will be worth between seven and eight times more than her own career-high payday to this point.

You need look no further than the headline bout above them, in which Jake Paul will square off with a 58-year-old Mike Tyson, to understand the extent to which money talks in professional boxing. It tends to speak more than either of the introverts in Friday’s female co-main event, too, but it was doubtless instrumental in their decision to attach themselves to this Paul-Tyson clown act rather than to push for their own headline slot the second time around.

Taylor, Serrano and their respective teams understand acutely that the terrain they helped to reshape is beginning to creak and shake. They would have known full well that an alternative plan for their rematch may never have crossed their desks.

So much of boxing’s money, now, is centralised in Saudi Arabia, whose current ‘Chairman of the General Entertainment Authority’, Turki Al-Sheikh, has the sport’s stakeholders on strings.

Major promoters now effectively answer to ‘His Excellency’, who foots the bill for major Riyadh Season cards consisting of fights between boxers whose career handlers wouldn’t otherwise pick up the phone to each other.

That Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren, years-long nemeses who met in person for the first time only last year, are now cheeky chums tells its own stories. They might as well open a joint bank account at this point.

The stacked nature of these Saudi boxing shows is such that the high-level female fights which previously populated Matchroom or Queensberry cards, or those under the Top Rank and Golden Boy banners in the States, are being squeezed out by higher-profile male equivalents.

In such a vacuum of male talent, then, the number of major shows in both the UK and the USA have fallen off a cliff.

Turki Al-Sheikh’s grip on the sport often feels more like a vanity project than a state project, but it can be both: he has woven himself into the tapestry of the sport with which he is personally obsessed, and his country only strengthens its international standing — particularly in the Gulf Region — by rolling out the red carpet for the likes of Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury.

Australia’s Skye Nicolson and England’s Raven Chapman recently became the first female boxers to contest a world-title fight in Saudi Arabia, but that it was the fifth-last bout of the night is indicative of the reality that the Saudi state is still only soft-launching women’s rights.

A Taylor-Serrano headliner in Riyadh or Jeddah would make for a proposition that would grim many people out as much as their propping up of Paul-Tyson on Friday night, but it also wasn’t even an option. And at their respective ages of 38 and 36, neither woman can afford the luxury of waiting for boxing’s new Mecca to take its baby steps towards embracing them for the stars that they are.

It increasingly feels as though the Irish icon and the Puerto Rican great, who have pushed their bodies to the limit for the same cause, have dragged female boxing about as far as it can go for the time being.

Whenever their legendary careers end, a cycle will end with them.

Taylor and Serrano’s only true peer in the modern era, Claressa Shields, struggles to find commercially viable opponents in the higher weight classes in which she operates. Chantelle Cameron is in No Man’s Land since severing promotional ties with Eddie Hearn following her two bouts with Taylor. Another high-profile undisputed champ, Seniesa Estrada, recently retired to start a family with her husband.

The tier of talent below those women, too, has begun to either age or fade into obscurity, relatively speaking.

Many of those boxers will retire financially secure having risen with the tide pulled in by the star-power of Taylor in particular. But their six-figure paydays were likely the subject of inflation caused by the Katie Taylor bubble.

It might take another few years before the going is as good as it has been. Still, there is a lot to be said for the fact that it will never again be as bad as it was.

Serrano explained on Tuesday that she has taken under her wing a protégée who recently earned a bigger paycheck on her professional debut than Serrano herself did when she became a four-weight world champion in October 2016. That Serrano victory over Alexandra Lázár incidentally took place a month before Katie Taylor made her own bow in the paid ranks.

Taylor, meanwhile, is cognisant that while she and Serrano had to box their way upwards from the ground floor, this was an opportunity afforded to them only by the women who began their own professional careers in the basement.

When it was put to her that her childhood hero, Drogheda’s Deirdre Gogarty, also boxed on a Mike Tyson undercard against American great Christy Martin in 1996, the two-weight undisputed champion initially had to pause for breath.

“I have to compose myself,” Taylor said. “I’m still a small bit emotional but yeah, I think what the likes of Deirdre Gogarty and Christy Martin have done for women’s boxing, they’re pioneers of the sport.

“I don’t feel like we’d be in the position today if it wasn’t for those women, as well.

“I think they were getting booed going to the ring that day but it was actually the fight of the night and on the way out of the ring, they got a standing ovation.

That’s one of the biggest moments in women’s boxing for me, that. I don’t think it gets talked about as much as it should, really.

“An absolutely iconic moment for the sport.

Talk about pressure. Those girls were under pressure going into the ring that day and they came out as heroes, and I’ll be forever grateful for women like that because that’s the reason we’re here right now. I’m just very, very grateful.

“But I am surprised that it took so long for women’s boxing to get to this stage — but I’m glad that we got here.

“And I feel like there’s a lot more ground to make, but I’m very, very happy that we got to the point where we are making good money and I hope that continues.”

Taylor’s typically reserved dance partner on Friday, meanwhile, is not shy in making it known that her bank balance is more than healthy.

Amanda Serrano — or perhaps her trainer-manager Jordan Maldonado, who typically posts to social media on her behalf — recently issued a correction to a tweet from a boxing news aggregator which stated that Taylor’s reported $6.1m purse would be the biggest in the history of the women’s game.

The reply came from Serrano’s Twitter account that “Mine is bigger lol.”

On Tuesday, the Puerto Rican Brooklynite expanded:

I don’t brag about the money for the [sake of it]. I brag about it to show the girls that, through hard work, consistency and a great team, you can make this type of money in and out of the ring.

“I fight for all of them, for women in general, so they can go out there and believe in themselves that they can do whatever they want, and the sky is the limit.

“Sometimes that job is a lot harder than getting punched in the face. You have to make sure you live the right life. I’m a role model, I have young girls looking up to me in everything I do — on social media, I have to make sure that I speak right and do the right things.

“It’s not always about money,” Serrano added. “It’s about changing the sport. I’ve been through the good, the bad, the ugly and the nice. I don’t want young girls to feel the way I felt.

There were so many times where I’d just ask myself and the team, ‘Why am I doing this? Why are we doing this? There’s just no light at the end of the tunnel.’

“Obviously, I did it for so many years fighting for nothing because of my love for the sport.

“Now that I’m making a lot more money, it’s a lot more fun,” Serrano laughed. “But I just want to open the doors for the newer generation coming through the sport.”

Irrespective of Taylor and Serrano’s facilitation of Friday night’s car-crash headliner, they and plenty of their own generation have blown as many doors off their hinges as was possible in boxing’s volatile ecosystem.

Prizefighting is a Ronseal job description and their occupation is among the most treacherous on the planet. If ever two boxers have earned the right to take the money and run, it’s those involved in Friday night’s support act.

And that they will do so live on Netflix, a portion of whose 282 million global subscribers will witness their sporting excellence, is hardly akin to pulling the ladder up behind them.

“I’d like to think my legacy is already secured in the sport,” Taylor said.

“But I think the big stage, these kind of platforms… When I first started boxing as a nine- or 10-year-old, I was the only female fighter I really knew of. And if you go home now, every single boxing gym in Ireland is full of female fighters and that, to me, is the absolute best.

“And we have Olympic champions now, our women’s boxing teams are absolutely outstanding. It’s very strong. That means the absolute most.”

The task facing some of those up-and-comers will be to eclipse Taylor and Serrano’s respective profiles and remove the remaining shards of glass from their sport’s glass ceiling.

That will probably require a further shift in boxing’s climate but they’ll have a significant headstart on the women who went before them.

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