DUBLIN -- Sound, that familiar byproduct of sport, had another heyday Saturday night. It thundered across old Croke Park with such might you would have thought it could have swelled the waves clear across Ireland in Galway Bay. It reminded us that sport remains peerless at making the sounds that dance with the neck hairs.
More than 83,000 people had come to fete an athlete -- a woman boxer, a matter once unforeseeable -- for whom their love had spent the past 25 years amassing depth, width and height. The run-up to the final fight of Katie Taylor's renowned career became so protracted, loud and ceremonious that it's a wonder any human being could function properly at any task thereafter. Coronations can be so draining, and Taylor's walk to the ring for her final bout felt more like a half-marathon. But Taylor, long since dwelling in the company of pressure, kept her head while others were losing theirs. She managed a unanimous 10-round decision over Flora Pili, the previously unbeaten Frenchwoman Taylor called "a very awkward opponent."
"My legs are shaking [in the hours before the fight], and I can't sleep [during the week], but every fighter in the whole world wants to be in this position," Taylor said, hours after the finish. "That's what I was saying to myself in the dressing rooms when the nerves were going: It's an absolute privilege to be in this position."
That privilege and her capacity to handle it showed just how far she had come from life as a shy child in the coastal town of Bray who seemed to "come alive," as she put it, only in the ring. It left her retired at 40 years old, looking forward to being more "spontaneous" with life and reflecting on a 2012 Olympic gold medal, a 10-year pro career that settled at 26-1, an undisputed status as junior welterweight champion, an argument for the best woman boxer ever and a Saturday in Dublin unlike any other Saturday in Dublin or anywhere else.
"I don't think there's another country in the world that would sell 80,000 tickets for a female athlete," she said well after midnight. "I'm convinced that Ireland's the only country that could do that."
Ireland's capital spent the afternoon hours gradually tilting toward totally abuzz (and not just in the pub sense). Flags and signs honoring Taylor hung from residential windows. Vendors sold caps and shirts and scarves and more scarves. In a shopping promenade in the City Centre, it was possible to walk past a small girl in a Katie Taylor T-shirt one moment and a grizzled man in a Katie Taylor cap five paces after that. Queues formed on the streets around the 135-year-old stadium, promising a crowd rangy in ages, regions and interests. A father shepherding two young daughters got a photo taken along the nearby canal.
The weather stayed polite with docile clouds, quashing a general fear of drench, and the headline fight went off outdoors at 61 degrees Fahrenheit (16 Celsius) for Croke Park's first boxing occasion since Muhammad Ali bested Alvin "Blue" Lewis before 18,725 in July 1972. The old joint had imported some exotica in a floor redecoration that placed a boxing ring in its midst with primo seats surrounding. It looked like some architectural, gladiatorial wonder. The whole idea seemed so elaborate and happy that it was possible to feel queasy imagining an eventual letdown.
The very idea of the seven-hour event, with its motto "Once Upon a Time" and with its comparisons to fairytale, set up a singular pressure that meant a loss would have dimmed the night, if not the adoration. The show had aspects that could pile atop even more pressure, with serial videos in between bouts featuring Irish stars and dignitaries congratulating Taylor and wishing her well. In one sequence, musicians Dermot Kennedy, Mary Black, Ed Sheeran, Niall Horan and Bono turned up, with Horan extolling Taylor's accomplishments and saying, "And you brought us along with you." In another, here came golfers Rory McIlroy and Padraig Harrington, boxer Tyson Fury, and soccer players Katie McCabe and Troy Parrott. Videos showed Taylor in the dressing room getting taped up and bobbing and weaving with trainer Ross Enamait, and the audience made noise again.
The crowd grew and grew and sang and sang across the hours, in a country where the people always seem to know the lyrics: "The Auld Triangle," "The Green and Red of Mayo," "Oro Se do Bheatha 'Bhaile," "Put 'Em Under Pressure" (the Ireland 1990 World Cup song), "The Galway Shawl," the Pogues' "Dirty Old Town," "Killeagh." It felt like a festival, like a pageant, save for the oddity of the heavyweight fight just before Taylor's during which English boxer Dave Allen hit Irish boxer Thomas Carty upside the head 82 seconds into the bout and Carty toppled face-first through the ropes, down onto the edge of the platform and all the way down to the floor. (The referee declared a no-contest.)
Some confusion and empty time followed, but songs such as "Wonderwall," "Livin' on a Prayer" and "Zombie" filled it, along with a touching rendition of Frank and Sean O'Meara's "Grace" with the lyric "There won't be time to share our love so we must say goodbye." The fans sang the national anthem ("Amhran na bhFiann," or "The Soldier's Song") with something well north of oomph. At going-on-10, "All Hail King Jesus" began to play and Taylor took her walk to the ring on a path more meandering than all the other fighters -- from a stadium corner, around a left turn, a walk so long and so full of roars and goose bumps you'd have thought she might need a nap rather than 10 rounds of combat. But: "Yeah, my mind was pretty much focused on the fight all along, even making the ring walk." She reveled in "a real live opponent in front of me, an unbeaten opponent in front of me."
The fight itself proved sort of tepid, and the crowd sounded subdued with worry at moments -- their "Katie, Katie" chants got quieter -- but Taylor finished the last 10 seconds with a hellish flurry on Pili against the ropes.
"Did you enjoy that?" she said to a reporter who asked about it later, about as cheeky as she gets while actually not even really cheeky. The last bell of 25 years of bells sounded, and Taylor and Pili hugged, and Taylor hugged everyone in sight, fairly certain of the verdict. She then did something uncharacteristic.
The fighter long so disinclined toward microphones took the mic from the interviewer in the ring, held it and said, "Let me just look around for a second." She studied the stands and the thousands who had come to show her how much she meant to them with her victory and her humility and her appreciation of them in turn.
Asked hours later if she might explain all the adoration, she rummaged through possible reasons having to do with her modest background and big dreams but then concluded, "To be honest with you, I don't know how to answer that question."
