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As Katie Taylor prepares for what promises to be an emotional final fight on Saturday night, the article reflects on her revolutionary impact on women's boxing while honestly confronting the moral discomfort many feel about the sport. From her early amateur dominance that made the contest appear almost artistic to her brutal later battles against Persoon, Serrano and Cameron, the piece traces how Taylor's brilliance forced even boxing's harshest critics to separate the player from the game. Drawing on the reflections of legendary boxing writers Donald McRae and Hugh McIlvanney, the article acknowledges the savage toll the sport has taken, including the tragic death of Johnny Owen and the estimated 2,000 boxers lost since the Queensbury Rules. Ultimately, it argues that while the sport raises profound ethical questions, Taylor's choice to fight and her historic influence deserve recognition regardless of one's view on boxing itself.
It says something profound about our collective fondness for Katie Taylor that even those who have long felt uneasy about boxing, sometimes nauseated by its violence, have somehow managed to separate their revulsion for the sport from their admiration for the woman who has defined it.
For more than two decades, Taylor has been a transformative presence in the boxing world, her impact both inside the ring and beyond it proving immense and historic. While many have spent recent days fondly reminiscing about her remarkable career and preparing themselves for what promises to be an emotional conclusion on Saturday night, there will inevitably be those, including a writer who once suggested bringing children to watch two women box themselves to submission before rounding off the evening by watching gladiators at Dublin's colosseum, wondering why this career is being celebrated at all.
Such are the visceral feelings of revulsion some hold for boxing and all its inherent dangers. For these critics, glorifying Katie Taylor amounts to glorifying the sport itself, a difficult distinction to navigate. What made Taylor extraordinary for so long was that during the extended spells of her amateur and professional careers, she was so superior to her opponents that she made the sport appear almost clean and effortless.
It was not, of course, and certainly not for those opponents, but her extraordinary skill rendered the contest more artful than brutal. It was only later, in brutal encounters against the likes of Delfine Persoon, Amanda Serrano and Chantelle Cameron, that vulnerability finally revealed itself in the Irish champion. She had endured difficult days in the ring before, but for the first time spectators witnessed her battered, bloodied and visibly bruised. The sight was shocking.
Those who advocate for boxing to be banned are entirely entitled to pose a pointed question: was it only when Taylor herself was so damaged, rather than her opponents, that the watching public felt queasy? A fair question, and the answer is probably an uncomfortable yes.
Nowhere was this more evident than in April 2022 when she met Serrano at Madison Square Garden in a contest chosen as fight of the year by Sports Illustrated, a blood-soaked epic that forced many to rethink their position on the interminable harm inflicted upon human brains. Donald McRae, one of the greatest writers ever to chronicle boxing, spoke last year of the hypocrisy inherent in his relationship with the sport, describing the constant fluctuation between acknowledging how it saves lives while simultaneously recognising that it damages, maims and kills people.
Perhaps the greatest of them all, Hugh McIlvanney, often shared his own misgivings about the sport and that notion that it saves lives, not least in his seminal piece on the Welsh fighter Johnny Owen, who died at the age of 24 following a fight in Los Angeles in 1980. In his regular life, Owen was painfully shy, but in boxing he came alive, finding his one positive means of self-expression.
Outside the ring he was an inaudible and almost invisible personality, yet inside he became astonishingly positive and self-assured. It is his tragedy, McIlvanney wrote, that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language. Estimates vary wildly, but the rough calculation places Owen among over 2,000 boxers who have died since the Queensberry Rules were introduced in 1884, a savage toll of approximately 14 each year.
Yet those who defend boxing often point to the paternalism of those who denounce it, and there is truth in that argument too. If its competitors enter the sporting world of their own free will, fully aware of the dangers, then why should they be denied their choice?
It is a whole 26 years since Anita DeFrantz, then vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, was asked about the female version of the sport in the days before Taylor nigh on single-handedly got women's boxing into the Olympics. If women want to box, she remarked, then no one should stop them, though she had thought they had more sense. But boxing was Taylor's choice, and she has had a revolutionary impact upon it.
For all the qualms about her sport, she, if not the game itself, most certainly deserves to be celebrated
Katie Taylor Women's Boxing Olympic Boxing Madison Square Garden Amanda Serrano Delfine Persoon Boxing Controversy Johnny Owen Hugh Mcilvanney Donald Mcrae
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