Birds of war, giant inflatables, and the power of spite - Taylor and Serrano grab New York spotlight

The 42

11 hours ago

DESIGNED BY THE same Spanish architect who created both the James Joyce Bridge and the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin, The Oculus sits at the heart of the rebuilt World Trade Center site.
Santiago Calatrava's train station-slash-shopping centre is an ode to peace. From the outside, its white, steel ribs resemble a dove taking flight. Its sprawling, glistening interior is lit naturally by a skylight spanning the bird's spine.
On Tuesday evening, however, The Oculus became the launchpad for sporting war, its centrepiece a boxing ring between whose red ropes Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano worked out in front of the New York public ahead of their Madison Square Garden trilogy bout on Friday night.
Behind them were hulking inflatable models of the respective boxers — on a 50-to-1 scale, give or take — whose Netflix branding informed passers as to where and when they could satisfy their curiosity.
Taylor and Serrano engaged with young fans, with Taylor making her usual gesture of inviting a couple of them into the ring to spend time in her orbit as she shadow-boxed playfully in their direction.
Good fun was had by all.
…Or so I heard, anyway. I wasn't actually within an ass's roar of The Oculus myself.
Hours earlier, our flight from Dublin to JFK had touched down in… Dublin.
A bird-strike had made shite of the right engine soon after take-off, forcing the pilot into an emergency landing back where we had started.
Incidentally, while there is no scientific or taxonomic distinction between the two, those peaceful doves become known as 'f***ing pigeons' when they ground your plane and delay your trip to New York by six or seven hours. (At the same time, the poor little crayturs would have justifiably felt they had the right of way up there).
After a second flight and a gruelling bout of post-clearance with US customs — we had to go through the rigmarole again at JFK for reasons too boring to express — four or five of us travelling journalists emerged from the airport to a thunderstorm.
But we couldn't help but feel lucky at that stage: had the wind and lightning stirred up a ruckus even half an hour earlier, we could have found ourselves negotiating an omnishambles with our respective employers from a back-arse airport in a different state.
Instead, we were in New York City. And working a fight week in New York City is a privilege of which nobody can grow weary.
Several of the yellow cabs outside International Arrivals were embellished with digital displays on their roofs, used to advertise to pedestrians the sports events and concerts due to take place in the city on a given week.
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On Tuesday night, the taxi-top graphics alternated between hip-hop star Tyler The Creator, satirical musician 'Weird Al' Yankovic, and boxers Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano.
The top of the Empire State Building, meanwhile, was lit up in Irish and Puerto Rican colours, with Taylor and Serrano having pulled the lever together earlier on Tuesday morning.
Their fight promos have also adorned a huge digital billboard on Times Square in recent days. And while the sample size is only one, the fact that the Peruvian gentleman from whom Maurice Brosnan and I are renting an apartment in Queens knew of the fight would suggest that Netflix's marketing splash has been effective.
On previous trips, the concept of Katie Taylor required explaining to Airbnb hosts or barkeeps in Boston, Philadelphia, and here in the Big Apple. But since their original Madison Square Garden classic — and especially since adding the heft of a streaming giant with over 300 million global subscribers — Taylor and Amanda Serrano have infiltrated the mainstream sporting conversation on this side of the Atlantic.
And his Taylor-Serrano instalment happens to be well-timed: the NBA and NHL seasons have been finished since June. The NFL is still two months away from its return. Taylor and Serrano are really competing only with the in-form Mets of baseball for the New York spotlight this week.
By the time the lights dim on Pennsylvania Plaza this Friday night, the world's two leading female boxers will probably have been worth to each other about $12-14 million across three fights. Only a handful of male fighters boast greater earning power. That Taylor and Serrano have become one percenters in an industry which ignored women until 2016 is an extraordinary feat.
It's no wonder that there appears to be an increasing fondness between them during their promotional engagements, which these days are less fraught with tension and more regularly punctuated with hands on shoulders and laughter.
But while it's a safe bet that they will be someday, they're not friends yet.
Serrano, who is again the promotional 'home' fighter this week as she was in Dallas eight months ago, began to subliminally stir the pot at Tuesday's workouts: two of her Puerto Rican prodigies had fully sanctioned, professional bouts in the middle of The Oculus — and each of Krystal Rosado and Elise Soto's outings took place over three-minute rounds as opposed to the conventional two minutes for a female professional bout.
It has long been a bugbear of Serrano's that Taylor has refused to face her over the men's distance, her contention being that with an extra 60 seconds per round, she would have a greater chance of stopping Taylor as she so nearly did in the fifth round at MSG in 2022.
Were she bothered, Taylor might point out that she won an Olympic gold medal boxing three-minute rounds, and that the longer duration would arguably favour her as the superior technical boxer in that it would inevitably slow the fight down.
But to take the bout over three-minute rounds would mean that Taylor would have to forfeit the belts belonging to the sanctioning bodies which forbid such a thing. Plus, on a more fundamental level, she just enjoys annoying Serrano where she can having contended with her whingeing for nearly nine years at this stage.
We don't typically associate Taylor with spite but she will be driven borderline feral by it this week. That her name is first on the poster is a conventional mark of respect to the past victor but this is very much a Serrano week, more so even than was the case in Dallas eight months ago.
Despite leading the rivalry 2-0, Taylor is the 11/8 underdog. Those odds make sense. Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that Serrano is owed one. The judges are bound to subconsciously side with her in a coin-flip round.
Taylor is acutely aware of this but she equally knows how sweet it feels to track mud across her rival's red carpet.
Three-nil feels unlikely, yes. But so did 2-0.