The boxing gym that I train at is just a suburban gym but it’s out in the northern suburbs so it’s pretty large. Nothing is special about it except that it is legitimately gigantic. You walk in and there’s a reception area, and behind that there’s a big carpeted area with sleds that you push like you used to see Conor McGregor doing pre-ACL. You definitely would not see him doing it now, in Conor’s post-cardio and desire to compete phase of his fledgling career. Behind that there is effectively what amounts to a fluorescently lit garage with padded floors and boxing bags lining the sides of the pads with a ring in the back right hand corner. The ring is raised and it has a demon on the canvas. Behind the boxing room is the weights area which is full of shockingly new equipment given the gym is owned by a guy who trained low-level Australian champion kickboxers. Some are wondering whether the gym is an integral part of a money-laundering operation. Nobody reads this anyway so I can’t get sued for defamation. Upstairs, there’s a jiu jitsu area for those headcases to roll around and try to playfully render their opponents unconscious.
While I was training doing some one-on-one training in the gym with my trainer, there was a boxercise/beginner boxing sort of class happening next to the ring with a sparring element to it. Men and women were there exchanging light blows and kind of just getting moving, getting used to having fists fly at your face but with no ill-intentions. Nobody was being treated differently, everyone was just learning how to throw punches and learning how to move around in what is a really unfamiliar way when you’re first getting started.
Between rounds my trainer and I were talking about the fight that we were eager to end the session to watch. No it wasn’t the Shakur Stevension – Oscar Valdex fight which proved, predictably, to be an easy win masquerading as a tough fight for Shakur. Instead, we were talking about the only super fight that has happened in boxing in 2022 and, in my estimation, the only super fight currently booked for 2022: Katie Taylor vs Amanda Serrano.
We ended the session and each rushed home to watch the fight and I got in just in time to see the ring walks. The crowd was electric. Barstool sports was covering the fight. DAZN was there giving it the sloppy, but clearly well-intentioned production that it has become known for, and the crowd was buzzing for a women’s fight. It looked to be, truly, the best atmosphere of any fight in the United States since probably the third Fury-Wilder fight.
It was the first time that two women had ever headlined a card at Madison Square Garden. The only women whose names have ever been up on that famous mantle on Pennsylvania Plaza have been artists and singers. Never athletes. And certainly never savage fighters in a state that does have a rich boxing history but less than a decade ago legalised mixed martial arts in an octagon – the product peddled by the megalomaniac Dana White. But here we were, two women fighters headlining The Garden in the room where Jimmy Braddock knocked out Max Baer, where Andy Ruiz improbably knocked out the mechanical Adonis Anthony Joshua, and where Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali.
This reality got me thinking, despite the seemingly performative wokeness being peddled by major sporting leagues, fight sports really have done well by women fighters lately. Taylor and Serrano are literally at the top of the sport but in their recent fights they have been paid in the millions and have become genuine icons. No AFLW player in history would have touched 7 figures and frankly, no AFLW player except for maybe Erin Philips or Tayla Harris would have the Q rating or name recognition in Australia that Katie Taylor would have in Ireland or Amanda Serrano in her native Puerto Rico.
Beyond just the Taylor and Serrano megafight, which is likely an isolated event, there is the infrastructure for women’s boxing to carve out real space in the boxing landscape. Serious promoters in boxing are into women’s boxing. Lou Di Bella, who ran HBO boxing for 11 years and now promotes fighters such as George Kambosos and Regis Prograis is significantly leveraged in women’s boxing and puts on multiple women’s boxing shows a year. Eddie Hearn and DAZN have also poured significant resources into women’s boxing, recognising the space for growth. Eddie has been promoting women’s fights with the same vigour that he lies about Dillian Whyte’s chances vs Tyson Fury or Anthony Joshua’s newfound mental stability. Women’s fights are regularly on undercards of big main events on DAZN, including those main events headlined by the likes of Canelo Alvarez and Gennadiy Golovkin. I would guess, in fact, that if Golovkin and Alvarez meet at the end of the year, a women’s fight involving a fighter like Clarissa Shields or Jessica McCaskill (this would be a welcome relief for those of us who listened to her commentate the Taylor vs Serrano fight. She is clearly not over having lost to the GOAT) and would be the co-main event. Hearn has promoted every single one of Katie Taylor’s professional bouts and turned her into an icon. Can the AFL say that they have produced an icon on the level of Katie Taylor in the women’s ranks? I would say no, decisively.
Even in the UFC, the organisation which, in my view, has chewed up and spat out more human beings than any sporting league on planet earth in the last 15 years and turned into an extraordinarily profitable business, was built off the back of a female fighter. Ronda Rousey, before getting knocked out and mentally demolished in a way that makes Anthony Joshua look like Voldomyr Zelensky in terms of mental toughness, was possibly the biggest single-sport athlete on planet earth. Dana White himself has said, without Rousey and Conor McGregor coming along when they did, the UFC would never have been worthy of a 4 billion dollar valuation and would never have been sold to Endeavour. Beyond just Rousey, women’s fights regularly make their way onto PPV cards and fighters like “Thug” Rose Namajunas and Valentina Schevchenko are becoming genuinely famous and responsible for significant revenue generation (though of course, they are no doubt getting stiffed on fighter pay and will get no health insurance when their careers end).
More than that though, women recently have not been talked down to when discussing their fights. Taylor vs Serrano was a genuine epic and was discussed as such. So was Namajunas vs Zhang. Even a fighter like Ebanie Bridges, famous for being scantily clad in weigh ins as a way to sell fights, is talked about like a fighter when it comes time to talk about her fighting and not her particular method of self-promotion. Like she said “I can fucking fight…I can look hot on the scales and I can fight”. They are not “improving” nor are they “better than you expect”, they’re just fighters and they’re discussed as such. When they fight badly or there is a bad fight, it is decried as a bad fight and we move on. This doesn’t happen in AFLW, where any criticism of gameplay or tactics are construed as misogynistic. Even in women’s soccer in this country, you are not allowed to criticise the Matilda’s because they are so well-liked, even though they consistently underperform in big tournaments.
In fight sports bad fights are bad fights, bad fighters are bad fighters, and good fighters are good fighters.
That is not to say that fight sports are some post-gender utopia where everyone is just discussed on their merits, because they certainly are not. The comment that I am making is more around the coverage of the sport in the mainstream, as opposed to the normal chauvinist who roams twitter looking for thing women do so that he can shit on them. It’s just to say that for all of the foibles of fight sports chewing up fighters and spitting them out, leaving them broke and broken, they have done a good job of providing a platform for female stars to flourish in a way that other sports, which are trying to do the same thing, have simply failed.
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