Katie Taylor Goes Out As The Belle Of The Brawl

Boxers almost never leave on their own terms, let alone get to say goodbye with the fight of their dreams. Then there’s Katie Taylor’s going away.

The Irish superhero will take on Flora Pili of France for the undisputed super-lightweight championship Saturday night in front of more than 80,000 fans at Croke Park in Dublin. Taylor, who turned 40 years old in July, has promised to hang up her gloves, win or lose.

Either way, she’ll go down as the most beloved and internationally accomplished athlete in Ireland’s history, as well as the most important female boxer from anywhere since Christy Martin.

As an amateur, Taylor was a five-time world champion and won a gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics, where she carried her country’s tricolour flag in the opening ceremony. She then turned pro and went on to win undisputed championships in multiple weights, while delivering one instant classic brawl after another. In 2022, she defeated Amanda Serrano, who served as Frazier to Taylor’s Ali, while headlining the first women’s boxing card ever held at Madison Square Garden; the noise inside the iconic boxing arena was such that the referee couldn’t even hear the bell.

Taylor’s professional fight record now stands at 25-1, with six knockouts. Her sole career loss came in 2023 to Chantelle Cameron by majority decision, which she avenged just six months later with a rematch win. Taylor defeated Serrano for a second time in an all-timer of a donnybrook on the undercard of the Mike Tyson/Jake Paul super-circus in 2024 in Arlington, Texas. And she beat Serrano once more last summer in front of another sold-out MSG crowd, completing a sweep against her Puerto Rican rival. Her trilogy against Serrano comprises arguably the three biggest fights in women’s boxing history.

Thanks to Taylor as much as anybody, along the way the female fight game changed. Boxing always has been hugely popular in Ireland, but the sport wasn’t even sanctioned for women or girls in the country when Taylor was growing up.

"I had to actually disguise myself as a boy to actually get a few fights," Taylor said this week, while also recalling being "snickered at and laughed at" strictly because of her gender whenever she walked into a boxing gym.

Taylor's legend holds that as a 10-year-old, she wrote a letter to Deirdre Gogarty, an Irish boxer who had moved to the United States in the 1990s just so she could get fights.

"How did you do it when everyone tried to stop you?" the youngster asked.

"If you keep working at it and keep showing your skills, somebody's going to say 'We've got to let this girl box'," Gogarty told her young pug pen pal. In a 2023 interview with the BBC, Gogarty recited the last line of her letter from Taylor: “Maybe one day they'll let us box in the Olympics.”

That "they" did, with Taylor’s help. Taylor, after winning amateur world championships, became a leading advocate for Olympic inclusion for women’s boxing. A 2011 report in The Guardian said the Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA) had made Taylor the "poster athlete" of its campaign for a spot for women’s boxing in the 2012 Olympics. Taylor traveled to St. Petersburg and Chicago for exhibition bouts in front of Olympic decision makers. Her fistic lobbying effort worked: The 2012 London Games became the first Olympiad with women boxing for medals. After the IOC agreed to sanction the sport, AIBA president Ching-Kuo Wu said that women would not be boxing in the Olympics without Taylor. She went on to win the first gold medal ever awarded in the women’s boxing lightweight (60 kilogram) division.

Taylor turned professional in 2016 and, from the start, held lofty ambitions for that version of the fight game. She texted promoter Eddie Hearn—the founding force behind the now-massive fight promotion company Matchroom Boxing—and asked him to take her on as a client.

"I think I could do for women's pro boxing what I did for the amateur sport: bring it into focus and generate a serious interest," Taylor wrote in 2016, in a message that Hearn shared with the media in 2020.

He said yes. Hearn and Taylor have been a team ever since.

Taylor came to the U.S. in 2016, as Gogarty had done generations earlier. Taylor relocated just as she was going pro in order to work with Connecticut-based trainer Ross Enamait, after Taylor’s father and former trainer as an amateur, Peter Taylor, divorced her mother and left the family. She ended up staying stateside, and for years has lived a virtually anonymous existence in the small Connecticut milltown of Vernon, less than a half-hour outside Hartford. The disinterested locals allowed her to focus on her profession in ways the adoring hordes back home never would. She got married last year to Sean McCavanagh, a real estate broker and widower with five children.

Mere months after getting McCavanagh’s ring, she was back in the ring earning her third and last win over Serrano, leaving Taylor with all the belts and really nothing left to accomplish in the sport—except to fight at Croke Park. Croker is the temple of Irish athletics, and more. The massive stadium opened in 1884 as a vehicle to keep Irish culture alive in the face of British occupation and oppression, and its use over time was generally restricted to Gaelic events. As enamored as the Irish are with the sweet science, the only other boxer invited to fight at Croke Park over the last century was Muhammad Ali, who beat Al “Blue” Lewis there in 1972. (Yes, the Irish also claim Ali, whose great-grandfather, Abe O’Grady, came from County Clare.)

Taylor has been pining for several years for a Croker gig. But despite everything she’d accomplished and all she meant to Ireland, the Gaelic Athletic Association, which owns and operates the sacred grounds, played hard to get. Taylor and promoter Eddie Hearn thought they’d get their wish following her rematch win over Cameron, but hurling and football seasons supposedly got in the way. After loosening its Gaelophile grip and opening the stadium’s doors to outsider megastar musical acts like Garth Brooks, Oasis, and Taylor Swift, Croke Park landlords really could no longer refuse the homegrown Taylor’s pleas.

Tickets for Taylor’s goodbye fight sold out within 30 minutes.

"I'm not sure if there’s any other country in the world where 80,000 people turn up for a female athlete," Taylor said this week.

Pili, a 29-year-old French national, comes into the match undefeated (12-0, 2 KOs), yet irrelevant. She knows everybody in the stadium but a few family members and French nationals will be there to see her lose. But she has been promising to try to win.

“I'm going to be giving it 200 percent from round one right to the end and give everything I can and hopefully take away all these fantastic belts,” Pili said through an interpreter at the final pre-match press conference.

Lots of tears and—given Taylor’s relentless fighting style—blood will likely flow throughout Saturday's 10-round fight. There will be no snickering at the belle of the brawl, however.

"You walk into every boxing gym now in the country, it's packed with female fighters," Taylor said at the final press conference for the Pili bout, "and that to me is the greatest part about this legacy."

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