Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano's trilogy now rivals any in boxing history
The mega-night at Madison Square Garden, which was headlined by Taylor and Serrano, delivered in the early hours of Saturday morning as the former reaffirmed herself as an extraordinary champion.
The battles between these two greats now rival the best men's trilogies, whether it be Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier, Eric Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera or Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward.
All three, 10-round contests have gone to Taylor yet they were so close and all could have been scored to Serrano.
While this contest did not ignite in the flurries of fists witnessed in the first two fights, the tension was just as high as Serrano – a champion in seven weight divisions – sought redemption against her nemesis Taylor, a two-weight division, undisputed champion and an Olympic gold medallist.
The third chapter between them was more focused on evasion with fewer punches thrown. It was tactical and razor-tight, round after round, with the two-minute periods speeding through.
Taylor, at 39 years young, and Serrano, 36, belied their ages with their fitness and desire. But Serrano's decision to be more passive than in the first two fights played into Taylor's hands and the judges scored it by majority decision to Taylor.
For the record, like one of the judges, I scored the contest 95-95, but the other two judges scored it 97-93 in Taylor's favour.
Never let it be said that women's boxing cannot draw a crowd or the world's attention. It was a night of pomp and pageantry in Manhattan's great hall, packed with 20,000 partisan fans of the Irish and Puerto Rican warriors.
Plaudits must go to Jake Paul, often the villain, but a women's boxing advocate who underwrote and promoted the event with aplomb on Netflix, ensuring another huge audience. The previous Taylor-Serrano bout drew a TV audience of 65 million as the chief support to Paul's fight against Mike Tyson.
The three fights between Taylor and Serrano have brought together the two greatest fighters from an era in which women's boxing has grown hugely. A groundbreaking night featured the largest purses in the history of women's boxing and six world championship fights on the all-women, eight-fight card, with victories for Britons Chantelle Cameron, Ramla Ali and super-bantamweight world champion Ellie Scotney.
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Recent reports suggest Democrats are slinging money to all corners of the country in a desperate attempt to find the progressive answer to Rogan: the chatter is all about 'speaking with American men' and investing to generate a 'return on culture', and Democrats such as Hakeem Jeffries and Josh Shapiro have in recent months zombied from sports podcast to sports podcast in a doomed and focus group-refined attempt to revive a cadaverous Democratic party with the tonic of their everyman cool. These appearances might be wooden and inauthentic, but it does suggest a key role for sports in the left's attempt to pull itself off the canvas following the catastrophe of last November. Sports are hardly the exclusive preserve of the right. The Golden State Warriors' four-time championship winning head coach, Steve Kerr, is probably the most vocal critic of Trumpism at work in American sports today, and Democrats have long associated themselves with sports: Barack Obama, of course, is an accomplished hooper, while Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate for New York City mayor who loves Arsenal and cricket and has spun his appearances at Knicks games during the recent NBA playoffs into campaign trail gold, is living proof that it's possible to be passionate and knowledgeable about sports while eschewing the ugliness of bro culture. But left-leaning sports pundits? That's a tougher ask. The pallor of recent attempts to seed a more robust progressive presence online highlights how severely Democrats have been left behind in the new world of sports talk. Broadcasts such as the Pat McAfee Show are powerful engines of political orientation not because they address politics directly – they almost never do – but because their politics emerge in the interstices of everything said on screen. There aren't many popular voices in sports punditry that do for the left what McAfee and his cohort do, casually yet masterfully, for the right: embody an ethos, solidify an idiom and transmit a set of values that find a natural downstream outlet in electoral politics. Influential Twitch lefty Hasan Piker occasionally discusses sports but they are not his main focus; pundits such as Pablo Torre and Bomani Jones lean liberal but they do not have the same reach that the McAfees of the world do, and they don't express their politics with anything like the same splash. Over the past decade sports broadcasters who discussed politics from a leftist perspective, such as former ESPN host Jemele Hill, were gradually forced out of the mainstream. NFL star Travis Kelce, who hosts a popular podcast with his older brother Jason, seems vaguely progressive in orientation but he also said playing in front of Trump at this year's Super Bowl was 'a great honor', a tellingly wimpy political intervention. Like LeBron before him, he's too big to get too real, too good to get dirty; the Kelce-James brand of progressivism is very much by the book, a progressivism of the civics class. Where the right is loud, the sporting left speaks with a militant squeak. On-field athletic competition is about domination, strength, winners and losers, yes, but it's also about finesse, beauty, cunning and wit; it's a place where conservative fantasies of order and the cerebrations of the progressives can both find a home. But if any side should be controlling the field of sports talk, it is the left, since so many of the inequalities that plague society at large now infect sports as well, which are increasingly run on extractive lines for the benefit of predatory rentiers, autocrat-backed sovereign wealth funds and private-equity ghouls. Meanwhile the leveling mechanisms that still keep the American professional leagues interesting and unpredictable – collective wage bargaining, drafts, salary caps and luxury taxes – have their roots in this country's unlikely tradition of sporting socialism. Far from being a natural stage for the tiresome politics of cultural revenge in which the right traffics, sports (as a thing to shoot the shit about) offer a rich canvas for the exploration of many issues about which the left cares deeply: race, gender, class, social mobility and the corrupting influence of money. The left should not be afraid of learning from the lords of the sporting bro-zone even as it spurns their machismo and lack of tact. A culture used to crew necks can't go back to buttoned collars. For example, as part of his deal with ESPN, McAfee is allowed to swear live on TV: 'The following progrum is a collection of stooges talking about happenings in the sports world,' announces a disclaimer that airs before each show, read aloud in a geriatric voice reminiscent of Grampa Simpson. 'There may be some 'cuss' words because that's how humans in the real world talk.' This is one area where the bros and the left should make common cause: swearing is good. Viewers love McAfee not despite the fact he's loose, unpolished and has a dirty mouth; they love him because of these things. This is a man, let's not forget, who first came to prominence at age 23, while playing for the Colts, after being arrested in downtown Indianapolis for taking a pre-dawn swim in a canal. Asked to explain why he was soaking wet, McAfee replied: 'I am drunk.' The charge was dismissed but the hearts of a city were won, and a media career was born. Why can the left not take the best of McAfee and his ilk while jettisoning the worst? Surely it's possible to talk sports in a way that's biting, real, unfiltered, funny and even mean – to 'connect with men where they are', as we are repeatedly told the left must – without descending into toxicity, cruelty, belligerence and hate. If progressives want to reclaim the White House, they could do worse than to start rambling for hours on end about games and players that have nothing to do with politics at all. Sports-loving leftists of America, unite: you have nothing to lose but your parlays.
