The moment is almost here because, on Saturday night, in front of 80,000 fans at a fevered Croke Park, Taylor will fight for the very last time. She will depart as a quietly defiant pioneer and an overwhelming force for good – both in Ireland and women’s boxing. The fight game is full of heartbreak and broken promises, corruption and damage, but it also produces singular characters who elevate the world.
Joe Louis in the 1930s, and Muhammad Ali in the 1960s, had a profound impact on American society. In a very different world today, Oleksandr Usyk is also more than a boxer. He remains an inspiration and a source of undimmed hope in wartime Ukraine.
Taylor’s story might carry less global significance but that suits her. The Irish, after all, have always loved her humility in the bombastic business of boxing. They also revere the trailblazing Taylor as she made it possible for girls and women to become fighters.
This week, Ireland is even more besotted with its favourite sporting personality. Apart from being at Croke Park, the ancestral home of Irish sport, Taylor’s last fight will be screened live on free-to-view television so the whole country can watch her say farewell on RTÉ. A supermarket in her home town, Bray, has been renamed the Katie Taylor Lidl Store – while Barry Keoghan paid glossy tribute to her in a promotional video.
It might seem a tad cheesy, with the actor talking earnestly in an Irish pub, as the Celtic music swirls in the background, but there is truth in Keoghan’s brooding brogue: “It’s a funny thing, greatness. It’s rarely found in the loudest voice. See, back when the boxing world believed it belonged only to boys, a girl walks into a gym.
Fighting not as Katie but as K from Bray … before there was a path, there was Katie. With each step she trod new ground.” In 2022 Taylor told me: “It was not easy. Boxing runs in my family’s blood but there were no opportunities for girls.
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