3 days Ago
AS A MEMBER of Jake Paul’s communications staff attempted to deny Eddie Hearn entry to the post-fight press conference and her manager Brian Peters kicked off in front of her, Katie Taylor made the executive decision to round them all and make her way towards the stage. Taylor hasn’t made millions in a man’s world by paying heed to their petty disputes. She rose above this one literally, taking her seat at the top table with trainer Ross Enamait and promoter Hearn, eventually, in tow.
Her right eyebrow was stitched together. Her face was puffy and bruised. Even her laboured walk betrayed the extent of her physical discomfort.
But whereas Taylor is usually even further removed from her element when she’s confronted by a room full of cameras and microphones, she had a couple of things to get off her chest about her sequel with Amanda Serrano which had been viewed in some form by 50 million Netflix accounts only a couple of hours earlier. These were, namely, that she “couldn’t care less” about Serrano’s complaints regarding the officiating or the judges’ razor-tight decision, which had been awarded to Taylor 95-94 across the board; that the clash of heads which widened a cut over Serrano’s right eye to a sickening extent during the sixth round had been the unintentional consequence of their competing in a rough sport; and that she had now beaten Serrano twice — both as the promotional home fighter and the promotional away fighter — in two very different kinds of fights, rendering any debate as to her slight superiority futile. The degree of satisfaction with which Taylor made that third point was palpable.
It all made for such a pronounced contrast to the last time a Taylor victory had been roundly booed. In a Manhattan hotel following her contentious majority decision over Delfine Persoon at Madison Square Garden in June 2019, Irish journalists assembled for their own sit-down with the Bray woman only to be informed by her management that she didn’t want to leave her room. Taylor struggled with being pigeonholed into the role of villain that night five years ago.
Even privately, she had to be reminded that there was nothing wrong with getting the nod in a close fight (this writer scored it a draw from MSG, but Taylor’s victory was certainly not the robbery it was made out to be by the thousands in attendance or the thousands of tweets which followed). Perhaps on some instinctive level, Taylor just didn’t feel she had done enough to beat Persoon in that first bout between them. But she had no such concerns when her hand was raised at Cowboys Stadium on Friday night.
In her interview with Ariel Helwani in the ring afterwards, Taylor’s immediate extension of an invitation to Serrano to do it again over the Puerto Rican’s preferred distance of 12×3-minute rounds was not an olive branch but a shot across the bow. It was the Irishwoman’s cheeky way of pointing out that Serrano has always believed she could beat Taylor up over the longer distance, but when the fight was there to be won in Dallas it was the champion who outgunned the heavier-handed challenger down the stretch. Taylor even invited more boos from the 70,000 in attendance by stressing that she didn’t care what the pro-Serrano crowd thought of the result.
That she said the same of “the commentary team” only seconds removed from the final bell indicated that Taylor had landed in Texas in full knowledge that Netflix would go to bat for her opponent during their live broadcast. It grates that only a minuscule portion of the passive audience would have recognised that Netflix were running the event in conjunction with Amanda Serrano’s promoter, Jake Paul; or that co-commentator Rosie Perez is not a qualified boxing authority but an actor who follows the sport and is friendly with her fellow Brooklynite Serrano. Whereas all-time boxing great Roy Jones straight-batted his analysis, lead commentator Mauro Ranallo, whose background lies more in MMA and wrestling than in boxing, followed Perez’s lead in building a narrative for the American boxer who was supposed to win this rematch.
But boxing people, well accustomed to this kind of partisan chicanery, saw clean through it — even the Americans. “I think Katie won though,” tweeted unbeaten three-weight world champion Shakur Stevenson. “Lemme guess yall think that’s a robbery.
. Lol these commentators brain washing yall.” Several of Stevenson’s fellow top-level boxers, including pound-for-pound top dog Terence Crawford and former super-middleweight champ Caleb Plant, expressed similar sentiments.
Even Taylor and Serrano’s only true female peer, two-time Olympic gold medallist and five-weight professional world champion Claressa Shields, who is friendlier with Serrano than she is with Taylor, said in an interview: “I think Katie won the fight by a hair. It is what it is and look, I wanted Amanda to win.” Perhaps sensing she had failed to capture the mood of boxing-informed viewers, co-commentator Perez tweeted a few hours after the fight: “Congrats to both women.
We can agree to disagree, respectfully. I don’t think it was a straight-up robbery but just saying. Was close.
Emotions were high. May not agree but Katie Taylor got the decision and she doesn’t deserve the hate or disrespect.” The shame in what Perez and Ranallo did is that their biases will be immortalised with the broadcast, much the same as how Jessica McCaskill’s obvious personal dislike for Taylor still sullies the footage of her original meeting with Serrano two and a half years later.
Thankfully for Irish fans in this case, Netflix at least offers the option of re-watching the sequel in a different language. And while it should be noted that the crowd in attendance also clearly sided with Serrano without having been exposed to the live broadcast, it should equally be pointed out that this was not a boxing audience but a 70,000-strong congregation of casual event-goers, Mike Tyson devotees, Jake Paul fanboys, and Joe Rogan podcast listeners. That’s not to yuck anybody else’s yum but merely to call a spade a spade: a lot of these people see their own truths in the world.
That Taylor was ultimately deducted a point by referee Jon Schorle for the head-clashes that opened a cut above Serrano’s right eye was, in the opinion of this writer and plenty more like me, unjust. But that she was deducted that point and still won the fight on all three judges’ scorecards was always going to cause a stink in that particular stadium on that particular night. To invoke Joe Rogan isn’t intended as a cheap shot, either.
My truth from the ground is that the entire fight week far closer resembled something from Rogan’s quadrant of American culture than it did a typical boxing event. That was especially glaring at Friday’s public weigh-in, when MMA journalist and event MC Ariel Helwani invited UFC legend Anderson Silva to the stage to support his Brazilian compatriot, Whindersson Nunes, who was to feature on the undercard. The noise which greeted Silva’s introduction dwarfed the reception for Serrano and Taylor afterwards, and was louder even than the welcome for Jake Paul which followed.
Only Mike Tyson was more feverishly celebrated by the three or four thousand packed into Toyota Music Factory. An actual boxing crowd would have made a point of only politely acknowledging Silva, whose reverence in a rival sport in no way bleeds into their own. The inverse is true of Mike Tyson whose crossover appeal, even among those too young to remember his boxing prime, is largely perpetuated by his visibility within MMA.
Tyson is a near constant at UFC events or on adjacent podcasts. He exists more as a pop-culture figure within that sphere than he does as a former heavyweight boxing champion. Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed in the aftermath of the US election that the people are the media now.
As a young sport which is consumed almost exclusively by younger generations, MMA has always embodied that sentiment. Its preeminent media figures tend to have shows, not columns. For every MMA journalist of integrity like Petesy Carroll from Dublin, there are a hundred ‘reporters’ with video cameras willing to bend the knee so long as they are seen to exist in the same orbit as the athletes they revere.
The boxing press is years into the process of devolving into something similar, certainly, but to cover a Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight week as a member of the traditional media was to witness your own extinction. You were a ghost condemned to haunt your own home, invisible until you knocked something over. Jake Paul is not a product of the written word.
Mike Tyson has long since taken his fame beyond it. Netflix deal solely in pictures and numbers. Those of us tinkering away on ‘articles’ from the fringes must have seemed to everybody else like the media equivalent of the Amish community, albeit our beards were a statement not of marriage but of stress.
After Wednesday’s press conference, Robert Hynes from the Irish Mirror approached a couple of us who were congregated in a kind of bewildered Irishness towards the exit. “I was sitting next to your one Hawk Tuah Girl in the media seats,” he said. (If you don’t know, just keep doing what you’re doing).
Outside, Netflix had provided a shuttle bus uptown whose sign read ‘Content Creators’, which threatened to plunge poor Maurice Brosnan of the Irish Examiner into something approaching existential crisis. Why didn’t we get a bus?! Or worse still, maybe we were looking at it. At any number of junctures throughout the week, I peeked at our gentlemanly Guardian colleague, the great Donald McRae, and wondered if this might be the one that would finally cause him to throw a few F-bombs into somebody.
In any case, the various promotional events in Dallas caused print and online writers to unite in recognition that it’s basically over for all of us. Having been kept at arm’s length to such an extent that there were virtually no opportunities to pose a question to a single stakeholder all week, I looked forward to picking Taylor’s brains about her victory at the post-fight press conference. I arrived at the Cowboys’ media room just after midnight to be told by four security guards that it was ‘full’.
My attempt to count the umpteen empty seats through a crack in the door was not well received. When I stressed to one guard that I had travelled from Ireland to cover the event, and that an Irish boxer had won in the co-main event, he told me, “Brother, I don’t care if you’re from , you’re not getting in.” As I ballparked the respective distances in my head for some reason, I spotted my opening.
Newly crowned super-middleweight world champion Shadasia Green and her crew were being led by two security staff towards the back entrance of the conference room, so I left the World War Z pile-up that was developing at the front door and made a beeline for Green’s convoy. I quietly explained my predicament to one of her backroom team as we approached a separate set of guards. “Ireland?” he said.
“That’s cool, man. We love Katie. Welcome to Team Green.
” The room inside was about half-full and it was quickly apparent that the organisers’ sole concern was that the dozens of cameras set up to stream the presser from the back would be obscured by further footfall. Jake Paul came in and admitted he had carried the 58-year-old Mike Tyson to the finish line, and that he never really wanted to hurt him. A video reporter raised his hand and, having been selected to ask a question, he instead told Paul how much he admired him, and how he believes the 27-year-old doesn’t get enough credit for inspiring people to follow their dreams.
(I really don’t think I can impress upon you the degree to which it’s all over). But it was an Irishman closer in age to Tyson who became the online sensation before Katie Taylor’s portion of the presser. “Are ya jokin’?! Are you out of your mind?!” Heads craned over shoulders to my side of the room as Paul’s communications guy tried to inform Team Taylor that her promoter Eddie Hearn — who has an ongoing libel case against Paul — would not be permitted to join the boxer and her trainer Ross Enamait onstage.
All cameras suddenly turned to Brian Peters, who had not taken kindly to this diktat. “Everyone else gets three people up — don’t be acting the shit,” Peters told the MVP Promotions staffer. “Three people go up or not at all.
” Taylor initially hung back, bemused. Hearn said something along the lines of, ‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ and feigned to turn back for the door. But Hearn has thrashed out enough business with Taylor’s manager over the last eight years that he would have known how this was going to end.
“Come on, Big Boy,” Peters implored the staffer. “Make your decision now. Make the decision.
Three goes up or not at all. Very simple.” Even before Peters could call the tongue-tied MVP employee ‘Big Boy’ one last time, Taylor had already begun strolling to the stage with Hearn in pursuit.
It was over for this fella, too. The staffer exited stage left with his phone pressed to his ear. An even bigger bollocking awaited him.
But MVP’s mistake was man-marking only the fairly unconfrontational Hearn. They left a Meath man in open field and they paid the ultimate price in their currency: they got owned online. Peters, of course, has been steeped in boxing promotion since Paul and his fellow MVP chief, Nakisa Bidarian, were in nappies.
With the room filled with cameras and Taylor’s world-title belts dangling from each of his arms, he had taken the opportunity not only to defend his own business partner in Hearn but to make a separate point to these American upstarts: we came onto your show, we rolled your girl again, and now we’re going to do what we want. Cheers for the six million dollars. It was a rare glimpse in the wild of the wolfpack dynamic that drives Taylor’s pro career.
It is led by an alpha female and an alpha male. And Eddie Hearn has contributed handsomely to their pensions. That such genuine animosity remained between the Taylor and Serrano sides while Paul and Tyson relaunched their bromance was actually a tonic.
Whereas the headliners holidayed together in St Barts last summer and their fight was well flagged in advance as a circus act, Taylor and Serrano turned Cowboys Stadium into The Colosseum such were their efforts to beat each other into submission. The co-headliners combined to produce the only real nostalgia blast of the evening, throwing it back to Madison Square Garden 2022 and further beyond to more glorious times for their sport. They conjured something so searingly honest that not even the judges dared corrupt it by bowing to their industry’s demand for a rubber match.
Serrano has since turned some of her sour grapes to wine, congratulating Taylor properly on Twitter and rowing back on her post-fight assertion that the Irishwoman had intentionally used her head throughout their contest. They call her The Real Deal. As the Americans would say, she’s The Real Deal and a bag of chips.
Katie Taylor, then, is as Claressa Shields once put it to me, The Real Deal and a bag of chips and a can of Coke. She was again the deserving victor of a close, stomach-churning battle with her career-long nemesis, this time while playing into the wind. That it was each woman’s greatest performance makes it easily Taylor’s greatest ever win.
Let’s not yet ask what next but instead enjoy this for what it was, albeit maybe in French-language commentary. The future can wait, says he, as he’s ushered out of frame. But whether she retires, headlines again in Dublin or New York, or even faces Serrano in a trilogy bout that props up a main event between Mr Beast and Larry Holmes, Katie Taylor will still feel worth writing about.
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