DUBLIN, Ireland -- The love here abounds. It astonishes. It shouts from bus stop ads and roadside billboards and the outside wall of a 200-year-old all-girls school. It speaks from sidewalks, boxing gyms and taxi driver seats. It resonates from a Dublin news conference with hundreds of people and tens of cameras in attendance.
It crescendos this weekend in an event so singular that pundits grope for suitable hosannas for categorizing. Eighty thousand and then some bought tickets for Katie Taylor's final boxing bout set for Saturday night at deeply storied Croke Park, and a promoter reiterated this week that they did all that buying in less than an hour. Who could have forecasted 40 years ago that some of the damnedest love ever found in sports around the world would coalesce around a woman boxer? Who could have known, nearly 25 years ago when Taylor got her first sanctioned fight at age 15, that the love for her would reach a level rarefied enough to feel close to unanimity? And how futuristic all this would have seemed in 1972, when Croke Park had its last boxing match, when approximately 18,725 turned up to watch Muhammad Ali fight Al "Blue" Lewis.
Age 40 now, Taylor has spent all this century beaming sunlight into the Irish consciousness without dampening it with even one droplet of disgrace. This individual, both bashful and fierce, has won an Olympic gold medal at London 2012 and 25 of 26 fights since becoming professional in 2016, and her name dwells routinely in sentences alongside the usual fun and breathless phrases such as "greatest female boxer ever." Now, as she eyeballs a future that appears strange without the requisite training, as she noted in an interview in mid-August, this citizen of Ireland and resident of Connecticut gets "this fairytale end in this iconic arena," as she put it, an event revved up to can't-miss by its scarcity, if more so by the love.
"It's hard to put into words the significance of this moment for Ireland," the retired Irish boxer Andy Lee said Tuesday from a TV platform at the news conference regarding Taylor's swan song against her 29-year-old French opponent, Flora Pili (12-0-0), a last reminder that Taylor never did like seeking out pushovers. "I still pinch myself that this is actually happening," Taylor soon began at her microphone, her gentle aversion to news conferences just about quelled at last. She marveled at a "world where 80,000 people turn out for a female athlete" and concluded yet again, "I'm blown away by it."
The crowd should be novel in its own right. Brian Horan, walking with his 18-year-old son Cormac last Saturday in Dublin, said, "They're going to have 80,000 people in the stadium, filling it, and you've got everybody: gym instructors, teachers, insurance people..." Eric Donovan, a former top-level boxer who sparred with Taylor hundreds of times through their youth and who teaches now in Drogheda just up the coast, said, "The families are coming. The grandparents are coming. There are people that don't care about boxing coming." Mike Cronin, a historian at Boston College Ireland, said, "It's going to be an audience from Ireland north and south, Ireland urban and rural." Peter Aiken, a famed Irish music promoter who has lent his seasoned hand to this, described the mix as "35% Dublin, 65% the rest" and said he sensed a sellout during Taylor's bus tour of Ireland in June, given the frenzy he witnessed in Kilkenny.
The love flows straight from arrival in Ireland. The guard at passport control expresses his respect for Taylor and her refusal to commit arrogance. The ride into town boasts the first bus stop ad extolling "IRELAND'S MOST POLITE SERIAL PUNCHER," and concluding, "Thank you, Katie." Billboards here and there read, "We're in Katie's Corner," and a sign on the school goes, "If You Can See It, You Can Be It." A 25-year-old taxi driver, Josh Boylan, hears Taylor's name and says straightaway, "Ah, she's a legend. An absolute legend," a reminder that 25-year-old men speak of women athletes in a way 25-year-old men once did not.
Down in Bray, the Victorian coastal town of about 33,000 about 12 miles southeast of Dublin City Centre, with a promenade and a Ferris wheel and Taylor's childhood row house in a hard-times neighborhood, a couple wraps up a summer evening walk. They give directions to Taylor's former gym and Sinéad O'Connor's former house. They deem Taylor "our greatest sportsperson ever," a common sentiment rich in authenticity but also recency.
"Some people were saying, 'I don't know if she'll fill the arena,'" Judith Hearne said.
"She'd fill a couple of arenas," her husband, Denis Baker, said.
Ask person after person if they ever heard a derogatory word about Taylor, maybe a trigger to provide a rebuttal, and the answers are only, "Never," or "No." One mighty Irish heart has lassoed so many other Irish hearts, most the hearts of strangers, and the reasons for this phenomenon do pile up.
The love cascades. Hopscotch among boxing gyms, and it's clear Taylor has headlined the expansion of possibilities and ushered in sights unthinkable 25 years ago. It's visible just before 9 a.m. on a Sunday when a cluster of women gather outside the Tough Glove Boxing gym by the Dargle River, in Bray, waiting for the door to unlock for boxing class. It's there in the Underdog Boxing Gym amid Dublin, a storybook setting classically situated in an urban alley and up some stairs, where afternoon warmups flow in a circle of about a dozen men-- and three women. It's alive across Dublin in the five branches of the Headon Boxing Academy, where one instructor from Brazil, Davi Oliveira, notes that 60-70% of the students are women. "Most of the time, their goal, it's just to get stronger and fitter," Oliveira said, noting how it's "very exciting to see how they're stronger, the power of the women."
The love bubbles up in Drogheda on the coast, where Vikki Walsh says by telephone, "Oh god, no!"
With daughters ranging from ages 11 to 29, she never imagined even for a millisecond she'd be taking her 11-year-old daughter to boxing or hiding her eyes during sparring save for the occasional peek through her fingers. Yet the Taylor effect has proved sweeping, with further boosts by others including two-time Olympic gold medalist and Irish amateur boxer Kellie Harrington, so when a youth soccer program collapsed and Walsh replied to a Facebook ad about a boxing gym with a new coach (Eric Donovan), well, "The rest is history," Walsh said. "She has never looked for a reason not to go. She's always home from school and changed into the boxing gear. The confidence she has gained from going over to the boxing is just phenomenal ... She comes home, and her hair will be stuck to her head with the sweat, and she'll be, 'We did this today. We did that today.' She loves all that. She loves the sparring."
In an office at the Underdog gym in Dublin, co-owner and business manager Renata Bennett said, "We get a lot of phone calls, even for girls who are 6, 7 years old," too young by regulations. "There's a lot of mothers who call, or actually fathers, mostly fathers, who will say, 'I have a little girl,' or 'I have two daughters, and I want them to box.' I ask for the age. If it's actually a certain age, I just have to reject it, and I say, 'Give them a few more years, and you give me a call.'"
She concluded, "That must be attributed to Katie Taylor. She's an amazing role model."
"I'm just so proud to be Irish," Taylor said Tuesday, "and so proud to represent this amazing country every single time I step into the ring. And looking back on my own start as a boxer, as a 9- or 10-year-old where I had to actually disguise myself as a boy to actually get a few fights and I was walking into some boxing gyms as a little girl being snickered at and laughed at because, 'Who's this girl trying to be a boxer?' And I had to earn people's respect along the way. I'm so happy and delighted that these young girls coming through now don't have to go through the same struggles and adversities that I had to go through. The door's actually open for them. And you walk into a boxing gym now in the country, it's packed with female fighters, and that to me is the greatest part about this legacy."
In one swoop, and through one shy girl-then-woman, Irish women's boxing has zoomed from when an infrastructure hurdle howled across the land -- no women's changing rooms or toilets in gyms, as the boxing pioneer and former referee Sadie Duffy pointed out -- to where updating said infrastructure constituted prudent business. And now comes Saturday night, of which Taylor said, "I can't wait to hear the stories of the thousands of girls who took up the sport because in Croke Park something amazing happened."
The love nods. Its origins stem in large part from Taylor's 25-year display of a demeanor that fulfills a cherished Irish tenet.
"Irish people are hypersensitive to ego," Peter Taylor, Katie's older brother by 20 months, said at Dublin City University, where he teaches trying matters such as calculus and researches trying concepts such as black holes. "We have this amazing radar for ego. It's actually -- I think it's one of the things that make it difficult for Irish people to even embed in certain cultures." And so, he said, "This idea that you'd have this quiet little grounded girl who was just a phenomenon in the ring, this was the perfect combination from an Irish perspective."
"We like our heroes in Ireland to behave in a certain way," said Dave Hannigan, a Cork-raised, Long Island-based writer whose books include one on the Ali fight. It went largely unnoticed in American media, he said next, that the mixed martial artist Conor McGregor, for one splashy Irish example, has always been polarizing in Ireland. Hannigan then said of Taylor, "In a sport in which you're allowed to be bombastic, she has carried herself with class and humility and grace, and people in Ireland love that."
"I've traveled with Katie many times," said Duffy, the referee for Taylor's first sanctioned bout at age 15 against Alanna Audley (now known as Alanna Nihell) of Belfast, on Oct. 31, 2001. "She's so grounded. She's very humble ... She's never changed from who she was from Day 1. Yeah, she has global recognition, success, whatever you want to call it, but she's still Katie Taylor."
"Just a lovely, lovely person," said Donovan, the erstwhile sparring partner. "Kind of the best of us." The Irish people, he said, are "very good bulls--- detectors."
An interviewer might jot out a deluge of questions, worried that Taylor's lack of attention-neediness might mean short answers are coming, but no, here come cordial, thoughtful paragraphs, which allow her to address her place in Irish sports history: By - of course! - mentioning other people in Irish sports history. "Um, the history of Ireland sport? I think for such a small country, we've been able to produce some amazing athletes. So that's one of the things that I love about Ireland; we have this fighting spirit in us. It's part of our national psyche, really: The bigger the fight, the bigger the fight in us, basically. And we've had so many amazing fighters, you have Barry McGuigan and Andy Lee, and Aaron McKenna became, became a world champion [in August]. And Olympic champions along the way as well. I'm very, very grateful to be a part of that history also." Her brother points out women from general Irish history, actual fighters such as Grace O'Malley (16th century) and Constance Markievicz (20th), to backlight the idea that an Irish woman boxing might hold some inherent appeal.
The love admires, too. It draws from one of the oldest appeals that any thousands-and-thousands-of-years-old civilization cannot resist: the clearance of obstacles.
The Taylor parents raised their four children in "a small little terraced house" -- or row house -- "and small in Irish terms is small," Peter said. "A council estate, which is a rough estate, surrounded by heroin and drugs growing up," the neighborhood wracked with occasional overdoses and suicides. Yet the parents, Bridget from Ireland and Pete from England, kept a crucial message: It's not where you live, it's how you live.
And Pete did box. He'd shadowbox at home. His gloves lay around the house, welcome for any kid to don and try. And one night he took Peter (third child) and Katie (youngest) to training, "because it was his turn to babysit," Peter said, then laughed. "She was extraordinarily gifted as an athlete," he said of Katie, "and she had a wild heart. What actually happened that very first night, is my Dad was off training, and we were really just there to hang around ... but he turned around at one point, and Katie was actually in the ring, sparring. She had signed herself up to get in. 'I guess we're here, we might as well ...' She was 10 at that point."
They'd train in bingo halls with makeshift rings they'd have to construct each time. Peter tells of "basically old women with their blue rinses and their perms listening to some guy call their numbers at night, on the Monday, and on the Tuesday, you've got people from the local estates punching the heads off each other in the ring!"
Were there vermin around, for utmost modest effect?
Yes!
There were vermin around!
These settings and this sport unleashed from Katie Taylor that inner superpower, whatever it was and is, that her shyness cloaked. It's the same inexplicable force that prompted a story Irish fans long since knew: how she got disqualified from a girls' karate competition for excessive contact and then, placed into a boys' division, got disqualified from that one, too. "She was wild once competition was involved," Peter said, "but not in any other context." And in soccer, at which she excelled so much she graced Ireland's national team from 2006 to 2009, he said, "She was just an absolute tyrant on the pitch."
"I was very, very quiet, very shy, and didn't like to talk too much," Katie Taylor said in August. "But I loved sport, and that's where I came alive, when I was in the boxing ring, and playing soccer on the soccer pitch. That's where I came alive."
The hurdles kept on turning up, though, such as in the mid-2000s when she and her father, then her coach, learned the crushing news that women's boxing would not debut at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. She got on with it, yet. Invited to a men's event in November 2007 in Chicago where muckety-mucks would evaluate whether London 2012 might prove viable for women's boxing, she reached the dressing room where, Donovan recalls, "Katie was told by officials, 'You're fighting for women's boxing to be included in London.' And she went out and gave a masterclass" with opponent Katie Dunn of Canada, while Donovan sat with renowned English male boxers. "They were all, like, 'Oh my gosh, who is she?'" Donovan said. "I said, 'That's my sparring partner.'"
Almost five years later, of course, she lived the dream she carried through childhood, the dream about something that didn't even exist while she dreamed it: a gold medal in women's boxing.
And the love endures. It will do so even if Saturday night turns into a melancholy Sunday morning. Cronin, the historian, believes the stew of factors that feed the love must include Taylor's stunning longevity, right alongside other matters such as being a pioneer or hailing from accessible Bray.
That longevity reaches clear back to the historic Halloween night of 2001, when Taylor finally got a sanctioned fight, against Audley, in the unimposing National Stadium along a residential road, and Duffy officiated while worried. "We were more concerned that the contest goes the distance and everything goes well," Duffy said in an interview. "You know that there are pessimists, waiting in the wings and waiting for things not to go well," and while everything seemed to go well, "It was only in the next day when we read [good reviews] in the papers that it was a pinch-me moment. Meanwhile, Taylor practiced one of her pastimes: self-critique. "I do remember," she said in August, "just being exhausted during the fight, so this was obviously my first fight, so I didn't think I had to pace myself so went out all guns blazing at the first round, and I even had to show a bit of heart in that fight as well."
The longevity courses through the entirety of a global recession, so that in London 2012, Cronin said, "I think she was, 2012 is so important, in terms of Ireland had gone bankrupt in 2009 and 2010. The economy just went pfft. Ireland didn't regain its economic independence from the European Central Bank and the European Union till 2014. So 2012 was a perfect point for the story, where Ireland is on its knees, the economy is gone, all the success of the Celtic Tiger [economic growth] has disappeared, everybody's indebted, and then in 2012, in the middle of that, Ireland has a successful figure."
The longevity carries on into her loss at Rio 2016, about which she extols Irish fans for unwavering support, and through her 10 pro years, such as headlining a card in the United Kingdom and selling out Madison Square Garden. "It's worth reflecting on and celebrating the progress," Peter said, "and celebrating that every major boxing card across the world tends to have a female fight on it, and nobody looks strangely at it ... It's not just that people tolerate it. It's that nobody bats an eyelid at it anymore. It's just another part of the card."
Come Saturday night, whatever happens; it's as big a part of a card as a card ever saw, amid a love as comprehensive as sports ever saw.
