A PENNY for Katie Taylor’s thoughts.
Remember, it is largely because of her that professional female boxing enjoys a profile elevated way beyond anything imaginable pre-Taylor turning over eight years ago.
Before that, it wasn’t even a case of receiving scraps from the top table - it was out of sight, out of mind. The money on offer now is still dwarfed by the purses afforded their male counterparts, but back then it was a total embarrassment.
American Claressa Shields may have won gold at consecutive Olympic Games once female fighters were finally allowed to grace the greatest show on earth but, even before hanging up the vest after a traumatic Rio 2016, Katie Taylor was already the poster girl.
Her story captured the imagination more than any other, because of the arduous journey that thrust her, unwillingly, into the public eye; the young woman who first forced change in Ireland before the weight of amateur achievement, and the class displayed en route to the top, could no longer be ignored on the global stage.
And, when the final bell does inevitably toll, Taylor has a tangible means to measure the impact made a little closer to home too.
Whereas she avidly followed the fortunes of Deirdre Gogarty - even when access to the Dundalk woman’s fights was virtually non-existent – an entire generation has grown up in her thrall.
At all age groups, right up to elite level, Ireland now stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best nations when it comes to female boxing. That interest has surged across the last decade is no accident.
And while the exploits of double Olympic gold medallist Kellie Harrington perpetuate those dreams, nobody can deny Katie Taylor’s role in kicking down the door all those years ago.
She raised the game; she changed the game.
Right now, this should be the peak of it all. In the early hours of Saturday morning, Taylor walks to the ring for a huge rematch with Amanda Serrano at the 80,000 capacity AT&T Stadium in Dallas.
They are made for each other; the stalker versus the counter-puncher, the street smart Puerto Rican and the understated, unrelenting Irishwoman. In April 2022, they served up one of the greatest fights of recent times at the iconic Madison Square Garden.
For the first time female purses exceeded the one million dollar mark. History in the making. This time, both will pick up an estimated $6.1 million.
Big crowds, big money - on the face of it, female boxing has never had a grander platform.
Yet it is entirely possible that, at times this week, the Bray woman has found herself wondering just how it came to this, and what the hell she is doing in the middle of it.
Because it is a shameful, if utterly unsurprising, indictment of where boxing is that a fight of this magnitude should find itself reduced to little more than a sideshow; somehow left skulking in the shadow of a grotesque main event.
How much have you seen or read about Katie Taylor v Amanda Serrano this week? A couple of Irish newspapers have sent reporters over to Dallas for that express purpose, and fair play to them.
But so much of everything else making its way back across the Atlantic has focused entirely on the circus freakshow that is Jack Paul’s bout with a clearly cash-strapped, and clearly unwell, 58-year-old Mike Tyson.
Honestly, I have no desire to go down the YouTuber-bashing route here. It’s been going on too long, and offers promoters and participants far too much money, for there to be any end in sight.
The horse has bolted, the train has left the tracks. The whole thing is tiresome now.
Let them knock seven bells out of each other for all I care. Let promoters trot out the hackneyed rubbish about ‘bringing new eyes to the sport’. It isn’t – they know that, you know that, we all know that.
How many of those paid up for Saturday morning’s main event would have had any interest in the technical brilliance of last month’s unification bout between Artur Beterbiev or Dmitrii Bivol?
But where a real problem lies is the cross-contamination of actual sport, and actual world class athletes, with whatever the hell these guys are.
Katie Taylor has never been a big fan of interviews, or media engagements. Her own personal cringe factor was incredibly high the first few times she was asked to face off against an opponent for the cameras.
It is not her and, at 38, it is never going to be.
This week has been a different level altogether; never has she appeared more like a fish out of water.
In some ways, Taylor must have been secretly delighted with the lack of attention at Wednesday night’s shambolic press conference, which featured a not-brief-enough cameo from Tony Bellew holding a Fisher Price microphone.
Paul, whose Most Valuable Promotions company are behind the show, was always going to want this to be about him. But for only a handful of questions to come the way of women ready to go to war, with four world titles on the line, exposes so much of what is wrong here.
Eddie Hearn is nothing to do with this promotion thus, when Taylor was asked whether he would be in her corner, she was a little lost for words. So Paul stepped up.
“That’s what they submitted to the promotion,” he snapped, “it doesn’t surprise me because he is a crowd-chasing bitch.” Nice.
Paul would later stomp around the stage with that fake badass Johnny-from-Karate-Kid shtick, demanding everybody at the top table give their verdict on how his ‘fight’ would go.
Taylor must have wished the ground would swallow her whole as he neared, laughing nervously before venturing that her fight purse should be on Tyson winning. ‘Iron Mike’ was the first to leave the Toyota Music Factory, but nobody will have been happier to head for the exit than Taylor.
This is a far cry from the humble beginnings that made her; those hours honing her craft with dad Pete, or behind closed doors with Zaur Antia and Billy Walsh in the austere surrounds of Dublin’s National Stadium.
Once Taylor ducks between the top rope on Saturday morning, nothing else will matter. Same as it ever was. But she deserves better than to be caught up this charade.
