Eddie Hearn: Katie Taylor's Croke Park ring walk will be one of boxing's greatest moments

Croke Park would have happened without the undercard and the music acts but it would not have happened without Taylor’s belief and stubbornness

TRUSTED CONFIDANTE: Katie Taylor with Matchroom Boxing’s shootin' from the lip Eddie Hearn know they don't need the sales talk for Saturday in Croke Park - but that won't stop the Londoner. Pic: Gary Carr, Inpho.

THE sell never ends. The last of the tickets for Katie Taylor’s farewell fight at Croke Park was snapped up within 30 minutes. That was last June. DAZN and RTÉ are booked to screen the event on pay-per-view and terrestrial TV. The country is on board. Locked in.

But Eddie Hearn is Eddie Hearn.

The larger-than-life boxing promoter – aren’t they all? – was no sooner off a flight into Dublin on Tuesday than sitting down in the teeniest of dressing rooms at The Helix on the city’s northside with two dozen reporters and playing the Pied Piper.

Pen pics of past performers hung on the wall to one side. Everyone from Eric Clapton to Hilary Clinton, Glen Hansard and Taylor herself. Hearn can’t sing and he can’t dance but he can hold a room like the best of them. Four days before the big night and he can't help himself.

This was him on Taylor’s ring walk come the weekend.

“I truly believe it'll be one of the greatest moments the sport has ever seen. Like, forget... Yes, one of the biggest events Irish sport has ever seen. Biggest female boxing event, obviously. But maybe even sporting events of all time.” 

He wasn’t alone.

Peter Aiken, whose local knowledge of putting extravaganzas together stretches back to 1962, labelled this the biggest thing he has ever done. Brian Peters, Taylor’s manager, called for a priest to have a word with the Almighty and ask that the rain stay away from 4pm on.

Cut through the sales pitches and the smiles and Aiken got to the nub of all this. He’d heard the public pronouncements from some of his co-promoters about how key a cog he had been in getting this done, but the only salesperson that mattered, he said, had been Taylor.

There is no denying this. The sceptics were many when the Croke Park deal was announced, and seemingly onto something when word emanated that this would be more than just a boxing night. That there would be music, a wider celebration of Irish culture.

The inference was obvious: the confidence wasn’t there that Taylor, Ireland’s most celebrated sports star according to annual polls, didn’t quite have the pull to fill the big house. Even Hearn expressed his amazement at how quickly the seats eventually shifted.

None of those musical acts have been named. Hearn is still keeping that card up his sleeve, but the truth is that the night didn’t need them to shift over 80,000 tickets on an island of just five million people and with very little tradition of hosting big-time pro boxing.

Peter Aiken and Brian Peters at the Katie Taylor vs Flora Pili press conference. Pic: ©INPHO/Gary Carr

Reasonably-priced tickets helped. Of course they did. The promoters took Katie on a special bus tour around the country to talk to every local paper and radio station. That helped too, but it feels like Taylor would have sold this on her own just by sitting on her hands.

The story about how she messaged Hearn back in the day when looking to turn pro has been told a thousand times, but the Englishman never balks at the opportunity to give it another spin.

It’s a familiarity that doesn’t, can’t, dilute the truth within it and the tale of their first meeting that, between them, gave us insight into the force of personality powering someone who has offered so little of herself in a public form outside the ring itself.

“Firstly, not being sexist at all, but when you're sitting in a room with a female who is so powerful and driven, and someone who has repeatedly had people say ‘no’, or ‘you can't’, or ‘women don't do that’… 

“It was almost like the confidence that she had to sit there and tell me, ‘you need to’. Like, she wasn't asking. She was almost telling me ‘you need to do it’.” 

It’s a door Taylor never stopped pushing.

She pulled in the majority of the crowd when topping a bill, against Cindy Serrano, in Boston eight years ago, and then took exception when, having confronted Hearn the following morning, was told that Tevin Farmer had been paid three times her purse.

Six years later and she was turning her nose up at a proposed purse for an Amanda Serrano rematch that Hearn thought was already off the charts, told him to renegotiate and came out with a bigger pot again for the fight in Texas.

Croke Park would have happened without the undercard that Hearn talked up again at the official press conference in Dublin. It would have happened without music and without bells and whistles. It would not have happened without Taylor’s belief and stubbornness.

“She was right, but she's been incredible to work with, incredible, and we haven't had a contract for years and years and years,” said Hearn. “And that's in boxing where you just never know who's going to stab you in the back. If she did, I'd retire for good, because you just know it would never happen.”