What a place for Katie Taylor to find herself: stepping into the ring immediately after Mike Tyson for her open workout in a Dallas concert venue with a touch of the nightclub about it.
The biggest payday of her life beckons and on Tuesday evening, she found herself torn between her two public guises: the cool professional face of women’s boxing and the fearless child of 20 years ago who chased what was, at that stage, an illusion.
“When I first started boxing as a nine- or 10-year-old I was the only female fighter I really knew of,” Taylor marvelled on Tuesday evening after going through the motions for the crowd. “And to go home now, every single gym in Ireland is full of female fighters and that to me is the absolute best.”
Friday night’s Netflix-sponsored event is a mad invention: proof that the streaming age reigns supreme. It showcases what will be a high-octane rematch between Taylor and Amanda Serrano, who served up the fight of the year in 2022 with their brutal, thrilling encounter in Madison Square Garden.
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But if that bout features two fighters at the top of their game, the main event, which pits the 58-year-old Tyson against the YouTube celebrity Jake Paul, has baffled and dismayed many boxing insiders.
As ever, Taylor has been diplomatic about the nature of the fight but is also unabashedly in awe of Tyson. In addition to starring on the same card as Tyson on Friday, she shares the volatile New Yorker’s love of boxing folklore.
So, she was quick to take up the invitation to reflect upon a long-forgotten footnote in Tyson’s career during which he has burned through all of the excess and nihilism possible in the fight game and is now coming back for more, with the trademark tattoos and black trunks.
In March 1996, when Tyson fought Frank Bruno in Las Vegas, Louth fighter Deirdre Gogarty met Christy Martin on the undercard. The fighters were paid a paltry sum. Taylor had not yet turned 10.
“Yeah they were pioneers of the sport and I don’t feel we would be in the position we are in today if it wasn’t for those women,” Taylor said.
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“They were also on a Mike Tyson undercard and absolutely incredible ... I think they were getting booed going into the ring that day. But it was the fight of the night. On the way out they got a standing ovation. That was one of the biggest moments for women’s boxing for men, that moment alone.
“I don’t think it gets talked about as often as it should, really. We talk about pressure. Those girls had pressure going into the ring that day and they came out as heroes. And I will be forever grateful for them because they are the reason we are here right now.”
Taylor will reportedly earn just over €6 million dollars from this fight. It’s a sum she could hardly have imagined when she turned professional after her tortuous exit at the Rio Olympics. Asked about what it was like to have her mother, Bridget, as her constant companion, Taylor started to respond.
“Well, it’s amazing,” she began. “She is my biggest support.” And then, distracted by whatever torrent of memories, Taylor was overcome and started to cry. We can only guess what the Taylor women have gone through to arrive at this moment in Dallas. The Serrano camp has claimed that their fighter’s purse will exceed even the Irish fighter’s: a far cry from the $1,200 Serrano says she earned for her debut back in 2009.
The wild and all-but-inseparable New York duel between the two served to announce women’s professional fighting as an entertainment that can draw crowds and Taylor acknowledged that their individual boxing characteristics cause rare sparks to fly in the ring.
“Yeah that’s exactly what it is. You have to have a good dance partner. And myself and Amanda’s name will be embedded forever in the history of the sport. And we are doing it again on Friday night. Hopefully this one won’t be as close as the last one and hopefully it won’t be as exciting.”
The Taylor-Serrano fight speaks for itself. What, then, are we to make of the co-main event – Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul – other than that as further evidence of a fallen world?
The meeting of the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion and Paul, a 27-year-old boxing novice, has scandalised many in the world of boxing – which is not a world easily scandalised.
There is the complaint that the match brings the noble art into disrepute. There is also the danger to the combatants: you can find plenty arguing that it is wrong to allow a man of Tyson’s years back into the ring – and that it is equally wrong to allow a callow amateur into the ring with the most destructive boxing force of the colour-television era. There is, finally, the unspoken possibility that neither man is currently capable of doing any damage and will thus bore the worldwide Netflix audience to death.
Paul is a Clevelander who, 10 years ago, found himself a pioneer of YouTube content celebrity by posting personal videos, promptly made himself a millionaire many times over and now finds himself destined to wander through the hinterland of American success as restless as the fictional Tom Buchanan, “forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game”.
Or in this case seeking, a little violently, the ghost of the most feared boxer of the television age. In the three-part Netflix advertorial, Paul comes across as amicable with an inexplicable surfeit of confidence and is given to outbursts of mind-numbing earnestness. Which is a tough station when your dramatic lead is Tyson, who will never tire at looking back at his stunning emergence from the ghetto of 1980s Brownsville in astonishment.
There is a genuinely poignant moment in the documentary when the crew has Tyson return to his childhood apartment, which in his eyes remains a rat-infested nightmare. In tandem with the city, it has become modernised and gentrified. But part of Tyson remains locked into that period of vicious New York and to the ferocious animalistic fighter who thrilled and appalled boxing afficionados of the mid-1980s.
“People are branding this as potentially the biggest fight ever,” Paul, who rose to online fame along with his brother, tells Tyson at some stage.
“Stop,” Tyson says lispily. “The”.
“The biggest fight ever.”
Tyson is one of the most dedicated boxing historians out there. He knows this is nonsense. And those of us who were in the Capitol arena in downtown Washington on a May night back in 2005, when Tyson’s wild and wildly uneven career ended as he remained on his stool when the bell sounded for the eighth round of his fight against Clones man Kevin McBride, could not have believed then we would see Tyson in gloves again. Iron Mike was spent, hollowed out that night. He looked the same but the kryptonite was gone. McBride was ecstatic and the occasion was graced by one of the final public appearances of Muhammad Ali, there to see his daughter Laila fight on the undercard.
Now, when he took to the ring in the Music Factory, a determinedly soulless venue in concrete-and-highway heartland between Fort Worth and Dallas, Iron Mike still looked the part. There is something of the timeless comic-book anti-hero about Tyson in silhouette: the broad frame, the chiselled skull and the classic stance when he slips into his dark, skulking version of the orthodox stance.
Paul, at 6ft 1in, is athletic in a cumbersome sort of way and has come through a series of respectable exhibition fights and is the right age. But there is no question that if he met Tyson in his prime he may have lost his life. The mystery over how much – if any – of that animal coldness Tyson still possesses is what lends this odd exhibition the necessary allure of danger.
To many, it is a dismaying spectacle. But boxing has a reputation for killing its darlings. It doesn’t do to become too sniffy. Boxing left poor Joe Louis to live out his twilight as a Vegas greeter, left the beloved Ali a diminished figure and ushered Tyson’s personal hero, Sonny Liston, out of the world as soon as he was done in the ring.
Tyson was hardly out of his teens when forecasts of his inevitable path towards self-destruction were made, most frequently by himself. But here he is in a strange boxing alliance with Ireland’s most famous sportswoman and in for a multimillion dollar payday as he approaches the age of 60. Many old champions would have jumped at the chance.
The venue was becoming quiet when Tyson was asked, theatrically, if he would be bringing the familiar darkness with him into the ring on Friday night. “Better again,” he answered, the voice turning suddenly icy.
“I’m gonna bring the devil himself.”
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