How Katie Taylor seized the championship spotlight in the Kilkenny camogie dressing room
Kilkenny captain Caoimhe Dowling with Katie Taylor
Katie Taylor’s visit to UPMC Nowlan Park back in June was a special occasion that Kilkenny captain Caoimhe Dowling will never forget, for all the right reasons.
Fourteen years ago, Taylor was an Irish hero when she added her name to the illustrious list of Irish gold medal Olympians, and since then she has gone to become a global icon, as well as a national hero.
The moment when that glamourous world collided with the world of Kilkenny Camogie is something that Dowling describes as “something truly incredible”.
The element of surprise involved in the world super lightweight champion calling into the Cats’ dressing room sticks in her mind too, albeit in a very different way!
“A special guest, before a match? We were nearly all rolling our eyes, thinking, ‘We’re trying to get ready here, leave us alone!” is how the Kilkenny captain describes the initial reaction on hearing the news before the Glen Dimplex All-Ireland senior championship clash with Offaly.
“We had a mascot for all our games, an U12 camogie girl. Someone said, ‘There’s a special guest coming,’ and my initial reaction was that the mascot girl was our special guest and she’s hardly going to talk to us.”
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Ever the leader however, Dowling pulled her troops in line, telling them to “smile and nod,” for whoever walked through the doors, before pandemonium broke loose when they realised what was happening.
“She walks in and everyone’s jaw just drops. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt like so many people be so shocked at the one time. You don’t often have someone walk into a room and not have to tell you what their name is, but no-one needed to be told that it was Katie Taylor in front of us.”
Taylor’s chat to the Kilkenny panel was short and sweet, quickly summarising her own sporting journey, from playing international soccer for the Republic of Ireland, through to her historic achievements as an amateur boxer and some of the highlights of her professional career that spans 26 fights, 25 of which ended with Taylor’s arm held high by the referee.
For Dowling and many of the Kilkenny players however it was the sheer presence and relatability of the Bray native, who transformed the sport of women’s boxing, that made the biggest impact.
“When you’re younger, you probably just see the sporting aspect of what she did,” Dowling said.
“But when her Netflix documentary came out, I suppose that’s where I actually realised how much deeper it went, how much she changed the landscape for her entire sport. After I watched that, I could see there’s so much more to her, and behind her career, than what I knew.
“It’s funny, on match-day programmes, hers is the name that we always put down when you’re asked for a sporting hero or a woman you admire, either in sports or in whatever. It’s usually her that’s listed, and it might seem like an obvious answer but how can you look past everything she’s done, as a competitor but also what she’s done for the profile of women’s sport in Ireland and across the world?”
If the name of the game was to elevate Kilkenny’s performance on the field on that Summer Saturday three months ago, it didn’t quite hit the mark - albeit Offaly had to handle the same distractions, since Taylor also went in to share her good wishes to the Faithful County.
Offaly roared out to an early 0-4 to 0-1 lead, so it was the underdog visitors who did a better job of returning their focus to the championship match in front of them, but Dowling and Kilkenny eventually settled into their stride, prevailing by 5-15 to 3-9.
As an experience, Dowling says she’ll always savour their meeting with Taylor. As an ideal warm up to play a championship game, not so much.
“When she left and everyone was delighted, having the chat, then you say to yourself that ‘Okay, I’m going to tune back in now.’ But it’s funny how you can tell your body to do it, but it doesn’t always do what its told!
“We went back out onto the pitch to puck around, just to try and clear the heads. Next thing, she comes out to the field, the crowd are delighted, and the management were saying, go over and get a picture. They said that this isn’t going to happen again, go over to her while you can.
“And they were right, it was something I’ll remember forever, but if I look at my own performance in the game, I definitely don’t think I was fully there!”
Tomorrow night, the roles are reversed. Taylor will bring the curtain down on her incredible career in front of a passionate and partisan packed house at Croke Park with a bout against Flora Pili, while a handful of the Kilkenny camogs will be back up on Jones’ Road, relishing the opportunity to witness a piece of sporting history.
“After that day in Kilkenny there was a lot of publicity for the fight, with our game and with lots of other different things going on,” Dowling recalls.
“A few of the girls got tickets at the time and you can see the interest building up as the fight gets closer and closer, more and more people are talking about going to it. I suppose how reasonable the prices are is such a major attraction, when you look at the prices of going to concerts or anything nowadays. These are really made for a family to go, it’s so accessible.”
Though as she told Taylor herself back in June, not every promotional opportunity is seized as readily as it could be. The Dicksboro player noted at the time that it was a pity that nobody took advantage of that surprise visit, so that some of the Taylor magic might have swelled the crowd in Nowlan Park for their game.
“Jimmy (Meaghar, Kilkenny manager), after she spoke, thanked Katie for coming, then he said that ‘our captain might say a few words.’
“I turned and I said, ‘What, I’m going to say a few words?’
“What do you say to someone like Katie? So all I said to her was that if you said you were coming here, we might have got a sell out in Nowlan Park, there was no need to keep it a secret! The Kilkenny county board let that one slip!”
Tomorrow night, there are no secrets, as the final chapter on a sensational sporting career will be written. And while for Taylor, her afternoon at UPMC Nowlan Park is unlikely to be one of the bigger moments in her career, for the camogs of Kilkenny and Offaly, it will be a treasured memory for a long time.
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