When women fight: Taylor v Serrano and the meaning of choice in the ring | Boxing

THere are Two Salient Pictures of the Katie Taylor – Amanda Serrano Trilogy: Taylor Walking to the Ring on Friday Night Under the Green, Orange and White Bars of Light, Her Neck Like A Tree Trunk, Eyes Fixed Ahead with Stoic Grandeur As Even Though I Walk Played Overhead – and the Image, Hours Earlier, of Yulihan Luna Blooded and Bruised, Standing Beside A Ring Girl Whose Hoisted Breast Had Been Shellacked in Oil, rigidly smiling at a camera that was not looking at the fighter.

It’s boxing. She is also a woman.

At Madison Square Garden – Half Cathedral, Half Thunderdome – Katie Taylor approached the ring like a martyr. His arms remained low and again, his stony expression, the moment both moderate and transcendent. I am not religious. I personally cracked Serrano. But when I heard that the worship of music and that Taylor ride and bow between the strings, I seemed to see the stars like tears blurred the lights of the Lofted ceiling in the garden in a constellation: the fighter.

A show like this should be Mawkish. But this is not the case. Because when the song ends, two women risk their inheritance, their health, their life – even unlikely – feel something like a greatness. And unlike most sports, in boxing, the risk is not metaphorical. The danger is useless. He does not protect any country. No one is enlisted. But he subscribes everything that seems noble in this violent and anachronistic art. And when women, historically deemed too fragile to fight, are an emblematic arena that has never granted them before, the danger takes on a new meaning.

They say that styles are fighting. They also make stories. Taylor, the pride of Ireland, is the entire monk discipline and private speed. Serrano, the south of Puerto Rico by Brooklyn, combines firepower with the grain. One has made their way through 15 years of amateur pedigree, the other became pro at 19 and never looked back. The two are in the middle of the thirties, both single, both silencer. Saint reclaims with 17 world titles between them and a life of sacrifice.

If Taylor is the tactician, Serrano is the flame thrower. This polarization is what produced lightning in the first two fights. But Friday evening, their attack plans had changed. Serrano, looking for alternatives after two controversial decisions that did not take place in his direction, tried to subboat the boxer. Taylor, burned before in the fights, turned and struck, then moved away. From the first round, it was clear: it was no longer a storm of fire. The fight looked more like Mayweather-Pacquiao than Ali-Frazier I. Smart. Tactical. Control. For some, disappointing.

But why do we need chaos to believe in the greatness of a woman?

In other sports, I approve of my team to win, ugly or not. But in female boxing, I admit a double standard: I want a glory and a good show. I want drama, blood, something irrefutable. This fear – that if women do not entertain, sport will disappear – persists as smoke above the ring. But Taylor and Serrano were not performing for our approval. They were fighting to win.

This, in itself, is progress.

True equality in boxing is not the right to inspire. It is the right to be boring. To get and move. Fight safely. To win ugly. Taylor-Serrano III was not transcendent because he was exciting. It was transcendent because it should not be.

And yet, boxing remains a sport of contradictions. To protect yourself, you have to risk everything. To win glory, you run death. And again – some would refuse women the choice to do so.

When Amanda Serrano and more than a dozen elite fighters launched a joint call last year for 12 laps of three minutes – like men – they did not conceive it as a request, but as a right: “We have won the choice,” they said.

Irony is that boxing is one of the only spaces in Western society where a woman can risk her life and be remunerated. But even then, the logos only fans hover on the Ring posts and the girls in the parade cards of Bikinis while the bloody fighters await the judgment. Fans call athletes they have overflown through the oceans to support the “autistic lesbians”. Serrano obtains seven figures. Some women in the Undercard receive $ 1,500 and no health insurance – turning, even more ironic, only fans for financial security.

What do we mean when we are talking about a choice?

We are fighting for the right of a woman to have a child – or not. But what about the right to bleed for nothing more than self-confidence? What about the right to hurt glory, not survival? Women are told that their bodies are sacred, but only at the service of others – children, husbands, God. In boxing, they recovered them. Not for education, but for risk. Not for life, but for something more provocative. Not Madonna. Not whore. Something else.

Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano did not ask for holiness. They asked for a trilogy. They made the story, then made again, then closed the book.

Now that Friday evening becomes a watershed or a footnote does not depend on them.

But for those of us watching, feeling the hush before the bell, the flutter of green, orange, red and blue manufacturing, the rush when taylor’s glove was raised and an irish flag driftly down from the upper seats – thather catholic or atheist, Irish or Puerto Rican, ORMAN, or Something in Between – These Two Ensured One Thing:

Watching them repeatedly after finally having time will do something more than impress.

He will solve the contradictions – between styles, between images of a fight, between life and death – in a single indelible calculation.