Esther McCarthy: Thanks to Katie Taylor, girls can now punch above their weight
Katie Taylor’s achievement isn’t that she persuaded girls to take up boxing. It’s that she made it possible for any girl to choose it. Picture: Leon Farrell / Photocall Ireland
“I’ll kneel down to make it fair,” she says kindly, helping me tie the battered brown leather boxing gloves. They keep falling off because they are not made for a seven-year-old girl.
My aunt is seven years older than me and true to her word. She kneels down.
I’m actually a bit taller than her now, hey! I could win this...
WHAABAMMO.
A right hook to the head, a left to the jaw, and one for good measure into the kidneys. I am down but not out. Uncoiling myself, I start sidestepping, skipping around her. Because she’s kneeling, I have better movement, but my punches are weak and ineffectual, even when I’m digging one into the back of her unguarded head. I have to keep my fists held high or the gloves will slide off altogether. I’m like a butterfly bothering a buffalo.
She gets bored before I do. I go back to colouring after the stars stop dancing around my vision, and she throws the gloves back into the hall cupboard.
Boxing gloves were part and parcel of growing up in our house. My uncle was a Munster champion. The front room was full of trophies and medals, with two shelves devoted entirely to them. All the boys in the house went through the local boxing club, Leeside, but none of the girls. It just wasn’t the thing.
Besides bashing ourselves around a bit in the hall, and occasionally taking the ankles off ourselves with a leather skipping rope (oh, how we scoffed at Margaret down the road with her rubbish skipping rope, made of... well, rope), boxing wasn’t something the girls in the house saw as a possible extracurricular activity. We were sporty enough. The shed was full of hurleys, sliotors, basketballs, footballs, tennis rackets, boot skates, and racquets of all sorts. But none of the girls would have dreamed of taking up boxing. It wasn’t even a conversation.
The gloves were there, but the sport wasn’t. We just couldn’t picture ourselves in a ring.
Girls growing up today don’t have that problem. Because, thanks to Katie Taylor, they can see it.
Imagine that an ordinary girl from Bray, with a soft voice and fists of steel, is regarded as the greatest female boxer of all time. OF ALL TIME. How fecking brilliant is that?
We Irish are fond of saying we punch above our weight. Pun intended. Usually it’s shorthand for doing reasonably well despite being a small country.
Katie Taylor has turned that phrase into an understatement.
This isn’t because every parent suddenly dreams of raising a champion boxer. I certainly don’t. I can barely cope watching my sons take a shoulder in a GAA match — my nerves! — never mind volunteering to have them repeatedly punched in the face. Nah, not for my boys.
But that is beside the point. Katie Taylor’s achievement isn’t that she persuaded girls to take up boxing. It’s that she made it possible for any girl to choose it.
Did you know that her mother, Bridget Taylor, became Ireland’s first female boxing judge and had to campaign simply for women to be allowed to box at all? Women’s boxing faced enormous barriers here and abroad. Katie was born into a fight that had already started.
She went on to win Olympic gold in London in 2012 and become a global superstar. Before that, she won senior caps for the Republic of Ireland soccer team. Boxing wasn’t even her only option. It was just the one she happened to be best at.
Tonight, that ordinary girl from Bray steps into Croke Park for her final professional fight, against France’s unbeaten Flora Pili. When the tickets went on sale in June, all 82,000 of them sold out in half an hour. Thirty minutes for a women’s boxing match. Oasis, eat your heart out. It’ll be the first time professional boxing has been staged at GAA headquarters since Muhammad Ali fought there in 1972 — over half a century ago, and Katie Taylor is the one who brought it back. RTÉ will carry it live and free-to-air, on top of a global audience on DAZN, the streaming platform where her last fight against Amanda Serrano was, at the time, the most-watched women’s boxing event ever broadcast. As it happens, I watched that fight in an Airbnb in Connemara, with the uncle who was the Munster champ, the aunt who used to tie on the gloves and another uncle who was part of the Leeside club, back in the day.
I’ll watch the fight tonight too. I’ll bear witness to a woman who started out having to disguise herself as a boy just to get a fight, walking into a sold-out stadium built for hurling and football to take her place as the main event. This is not a niche interest anymore. This is history. Herstory.
I think I still have those old brown gloves somewhere, gone stiff and pale with age. But the point was never really the gloves. The point was that boxing was simply there in the house, alongside the camogie stick and the football, available if somebody wanted it. (And fierce handy for solving disagreements.) For girls of my generation, the choice outside the front door was more limited.
Thanks to Katie Taylor, and thanks to her mother and more like her before her, that door is properly open now, and whether a girl walks (or skips) through it is up to her.
And nobody gets to tell her she can’t. G’wan Katie, ya legend.
