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Katie Taylor with the major belts and medals she accrued during her glorious career. Matchroom Boxing
From The 42slán agus beannacht
'La Madrina' Taylor remained in charge until her momentous Croke Park mic drop
The world’s greatest female boxer earned a career climax that would have been considered unrealistic in a movie.
KATIE TAYLOR MADE the decision even before the clacker signalled the final 10 seconds of her boxing career.
‘One more time’ had been the order of the week, and one more time Taylor threw her fists with wanton abandon, Flora Pili clinging to a tree branch until the storm ran its course.
The last ‘Olé Olé’ paved the way to a surge of guttural noise, 80,000 people at Croke Park rising to their feet in unison, cognisant that they would never again feel the specific full-body charge of an umpteen-punch Taylor fusillade.
The Bray woman went out as she came in 30 years ago, in a whirr of indomitable madness.
Those in attendance at Croke Park on Saturday will carry the occasion with them to their graves. It was an incomparable celebration of a peerless force for good. Replete with rousing musical performances, pretty pyrotechnics, and a pyretic atmosphere, Taylor’s farewell was the most impressive stadium show in boxing history.
For four years, the idea of a Taylor bill at Croke Park was abstract to the point of being almost impossible to visualise. It was so distant a possibility that to attempt to envisage it in the first place felt like a fool’s errand; like flying cars, its apparent impracticality outweighed its theoretical possibility.
But there soared the resplendent Croker into living rooms around the world, and millions watched Katie Taylor become one of the very few protagonists in boxing history to not only uphold her legacy in her final fight, but burnish it.
The mind wandered back to nights like Liverpool in 2021, for example, when Taylor’s entrance to The Las’ ‘There She Goes’ almost blew the roof off the Echo Arena, and how the overwhelming feeling was an exasperation that she would never get the chance to experience such adulation from those who revered her most.
But there went Katie Taylor, out the tunnel between the Nally and Hogan Stands, confounding her doubters one more time for the road.
Even her Christian pop ring-walk song, unfamiliar to most of her audience, didn’t dilute the energy in the stadium. Indeed, it symbolised who Taylor has become, and not strictly in relation to her faith.
It used to be her management team, or occasionally her brother, Peter, who chose Taylor’s entrance music; Taylor was indifferent, believing it to be only a distraction. For more recent fights, however, the boxer has taken control of the Spotify playlist, choosing songs which make her feel closer to both God and her family, centring her as she makes the long walk to the spike point beneath the spotlight.
She doesn’t care if people don’t sing along, or if they plainly don’t like it. She has come to learn that she is, in fact, Katie Taylor, and Katie Taylor can kind of do what she wants. This was further evidenced when she grabbed the microphone from DAZN interviewer Jamie Ward post-fight and told him she just wanted to look around for a few minutes. “Insane,” Taylor said to herself as she surveyed the green-tinged stage that she had willed into existence.
For a movie to end in such a way would nearly be considered ‘a bit American’, and yet here was a real-life fairytale finish in a sport which typically punishes gooey sentiment with a kind of sick glee.
There may be a movie yet, of course. Asked at the post-fight press conference who she thought should play the lead in her prospective biopic, Taylor responded promptly: “I dunno, Saoirse Ronan, maybe?
“She has to start working on her neck, though. She has a bit of a skinny neck”, Taylor laughed, “and I have a big fat neck.”
It was the kind of question for which Taylor used to turn awkwardly to manager Brian Peters or promoter Eddie Hearn for answers. She used to be terrified of saying the wrong thing at pressers, or having her words misconstrued.
As she has neared the end of her career, however, she has certainly loosened in media settings.
“The amazing thing is we’ve reached the end of her career, and she starts talking loads,” laughed promoter Hearn during the post-fight presser. Taylor, to his right-hand side, was in stitches.
“She used to get more nervous for the pressers than she was for the fights,” Taylor’s trainer, Ross Enamit, told The 42 last month. “She’s not comfortable speaking in front of people. But I think at this point, she’s like, ‘Who cares? I’ll say what I say and if they like it, they like it, and if they don’t, they don’t.’
“It took probably longer than we thought for her to get comfortable with it, but it’s just the natural progression over 10 years.”
Taylor, though, stands as an antithesis to the notion that controversy is the only vehicle with which a boxer can drive their popularity. Indeed, she retires as an even more revered figure for having said so little over the years, affording her opponents respect — with only the odd exception — and rarely extolling her own virtues.
Speaking on Max Kellerman’s podcast, Inside the Ring, in the lead-up to Croke Park, Taylor was asked if she agreed with Ring Magazine’s assessment of her being the pound-for-pound number-one female boxer on the planet.
Taylor insisted that such matters were for other people to determine before heaping praise the magazine’s current number two, Claressa Shields. On an Instagram clip of the exchange, the top eight comments — mostly from American viewers — made reference to Taylor’s ‘class’.
The juxtaposition of her grace outside of the ring and her routine lunacy within it has contributed to Taylor’s universal popularity within her sport, and she has walked away as its highest-ever female earner.
The extent to which she changed the boxing business will only be revealed further into her retirement: there is a chance that she and longtime nemesis Amanda Serrano created a kind of bubble of inflation that will pop in their absence. But Taylor has certainly laid the blueprint for any individual female boxer to make serious buck for their bang, and she has done it without straying far from her inherent values.
Promoter Eddie Hearn would often joke throughout her professional career that Taylor was the unambiguous boss in her arrangement with Matchroom Boxing and manager Brian Peters. Off the record, though, Hearn would acknowledge that he found Taylor an oddly intimidating presence on the rare occasions on which she was disappointed with him, and would find himself compelled to appease her far more so than any other boxer with whom he has worked.
When Taylor suffered the sole defeat of her professional career to Chantelle Cameron at the 3Arena in 2023, Hearn and manager Brian Peters were criticised by some fans for encouraging their boxer to move up in weight and accept such a perilous fight for her long-awaited homecoming. In reality, it was Taylor who pulled the trigger on the fight with an Instagram post directed at Cameron following Amanda Serrano’s withdrawal. It was she who instructed her team to make it happen.
Among her peers, too — except for Cameron, granted — Taylor is held in a reverence so deep that it is unprecedented for an Irish athlete. All week, La Madrina’s hand was kissed by tributes from fellow world champions and former foes, with seven-weight world champion penning an open letter in which she described her rivalry with Taylor as “one of the greatest honours of my life.”
Giving someone other than yourself their Flowers is what everyone should do. @KatieTaylor is and will always be a true Legend. I was Honored to have shared the Ring with her 3 times. pic.twitter.com/goBCqGap8r
— Amanda Serrano (@Serranosisters) September 3, 2026
Taylor spent so much of her week fighting back tears that there were concerns that the fight with Flora Pili might creep the way of Cameron I, when an emotionally draining week manifested itself in a physically flat performance.
During a mammoth and magical event on Jones’ Road, however, Taylor’s remained the only dry eyes in the house. She quickly impressed upon her French visitor that while the night might one day make for a nice anecdote in Saint-Avold, it belonged to her and the country for which she has so proudly competed for over two decades.
She took the mic, and then she dropped it. She won’t be back, she’s not like other boxers. She never has been.
She’ll do her own thing, now: run her businesses, mentor younger boxers in Brian Peters’ management stable (she does this already with the likes of Dublin heavyweight prospect Adam Olaniyan), and live a life in Connecticut with her husband, Sean, and her five stepchildren. Taylor, incidentally, is trying to get him to move to Ireland, but so far to little avail.
Next year, she will embark on a tour of live Q&As. The first half of these shows will consist of a theatrical play documenting Taylor’s story. Brian Peters wants to take it to Broadway, which feels like a long shot. But so too did Croke Park only four months ago.
From there, who knows? Saoirse Ronan might be wise to start warming up her neck.
Written by Gavan Casey and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.
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