How Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano created their multi-million-dollar rivalry

Gavan Casey Reporting from Dallas

THE PHONE RANG at around 2am on a random night in October 2018.

It was an American number and when you write about boxing as part of your living, you always answer an American number.

“Whullo…” I blurted out.

“SEÁN?!” the booming Brooklyn accent down the line.

“No, sorry, this is Gavan,” I said.

“SEÁN, I READ YOUR ARTICLE IN THE IRISH INDEPENDENT AND LET ME JUST TELL YOU A FEW THINGS…”

I was neither ‘Seán’ nor had I written anything in the Indo, but Amanda Serrano’s trainer-manager Jordan Maldonado was not a happy camper.

Wires having been crossed somewhere, I endured about 15 minutes of his wrath while the great Seán McGoldrick presumably slept soundly.

Without so much as coming up for breath, Maldonado proceeded to tell me that his boxer was absolutely willing to face Katie Taylor in the near future, that she feared nobody, but that she would need significantly more than Eddie Hearn’s $100,000 offer to do so.

A hundred grand, Maldonado acknowledged, would amount to 10 times Serrano’s previous highest paycheck. But after tax, training/management fees, and payments to sparring partners, it would leave the Puerto Rican with relatively little to show for her part in a generationally significant female fight.

Maldonado contended that he could hold out for more. He would sit down with Eddie Hearn the following week in Boston, where his wife Cindy Serrano — Amanda’s older sister — was to challenge Taylor for her IBF lightweight world title.

I asked him to keep me, and not Seán, in the loop.

It took five and a half years before Taylor and Amanda Serrano eventually traded leather at Madison Square Garden. That was the fight that made Amanda Serrano a millionaire.

Fate insisted that the Irish icon and the Puerto Rican great would meet in the middle from the moment Taylor turned pro in the aftermath of her Rio Olympic exit.

To some extent, Serrano was to professional boxing what Taylor was to the amateurs: highly decorated, already legendary, and virtually unpaid.

‘The Real Deal’ had been on the road since 2009. She became a four-weight world champion a month before Taylor made her professional debut. Serrano recently revealed that one of her young protégées earned more money for her own professional debut than Serrano did for that four-weight triumph over Alexandra Lázár, which took place in a hotel in the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan. Serrano wiped out Lázár in just 44 seconds to earn her 30th professional victory.

Promoter Eddie Hearn first explored the prospect of a showdown between Taylor and Serrano as early as 2017. He believed Serrano to be among the only live threats to his boxer, whose elite amateur background was already starting to prove her leagues apart from the majority of her new peers.

The reality is that the 2017 version of Taylor would have beaten Serrano soundly, just as she would have Delfine Persoon or Chantelle Cameron.

Maldonado and Serrano suspected as much, which is part of the reason why they kept the bout at arm’s length in those early years. The idea of Taylor waltzing onto Serrano’s terrain and soundly outpointing her within a handful of pro fights would be palatable only if the Puerto Rican was compensated to a life-changing degree.

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Serrano and Maldonado’s reluctance to engage over the first couple of years was of great frustration to the Irish side of the equation. After Hearn negotiated for Taylor to meet older sister Cindy Serrano at Boston’s TD Garden with the intention of building a narrative towards the fight he and Taylor really wanted, Amanda announced that she had achieved all she wanted in boxing and that she was joining a mixed martial arts promotion to seek greater financial spoils.

Taylor told this writer that she believed Serrano, by then a five-weight world champion, to be “mentally fragile at times”.

“That’s what her biggest problem is, really,” Taylor added. “I don’t think she wants the big fights. Maybe she’s afraid to lose.”

Those comments didn’t sit well with Amanda Serrano or Jordan Maldonado. As the trainer-manager tended to his defeated wife, Cindy Serrano, following Taylor’s facile victory over the older sibling in Boston in October 2018, Maldonado shouted at Taylor from across the ring: “Don’t worry! Amanda is going to knock you out next time!”

He and Taylor’s trainer, Ross Enamait, almost came to blows as a result.

“I heard that and I heard him throughout the whole fight,” Taylor said afterwards. “He was saying terrible things and it was his wife who was in the ring.

“He was saying, ‘You picked the weaker Serrano’. That’s a terrible thing to say. At least give your wife some encouragement. That was ridiculous of him.”

Three months later, in January 2019, Amanda Serrano laid plain her own issue with Taylor in an interview with BoxingScene.

“I’ve been fighting for 12 years and I’ve been a pro for 10 years, and now that Katie Taylor’s in the sport, now people want to open their minds and their pockets for female fighters,” she said. “It’s not fair.

The sport of female boxing isn’t Katie Taylor. We’ve been around here for so long and now that’s all they want to talk about. I don’t want all my sacrifices to be defined by a Katie Taylor. I sacrificed my body and I put my life on hold for my career and for myself. Everybody’s talking about Katie Taylor, and she’s just another girl.

Later that year, Serrano signed a three-fight deal with Matchroom, whose CEO Eddie Hearn tentatively locked her into a contract at the end of which she would square off with the Bray woman.

Serrano and Maldonado, though, kicked up a fuss over money around the second fight of that arrangement.

Taylor, by this stage the undisputed champion at lightweight, bided her time by defeating Christina Linardatou to become a two-weight world champion.

Serrano claimed that Taylor had “fled the whole division completely”.

“I’m not going to sit around and wait for Katie Taylor,” she added. “Katie Taylor needs me — I don’t need Katie Taylor. I’ve left my legacy in the sport of boxing and I’m not just going to continue to be put on the shelf or be sitting waiting for just one fighter.”

Serrano and Matchroom eventually made amends. They tore up the original three-fight contract and agreed to a new one: Serrano would finally square off with Taylor on 2 May, 2020, in the chief-support bout to a heavyweight headliner between Dillian Whyte and Alexander Povetkin at the Manchester Arena. The Real Deal got a good deal, worth $300,000, while the undoubted A-side Taylor would be paid three times as much.

But you might recall that not much happened in May 2020 on account of the novel coronavirus that had begun to sweep the planet.

Matchroom initially rescheduled the card for 4 July but Covid was going nowhere, and neither was Serrano.

When Taylor was confirmed to fight on 22 August at ‘Fight Camp’, a series of shows that would take place without fans on the grounds of Eddie Hearn’s mansion in Brentwood, Essex, she was notably listed without an opponent.

Maldonado claimed that for the third date in August, Serrano had been offered only half of her previously agreed-upon purse of $300,000 as Matchroom sought to mitigate against the loss of gate revenue.

As such, Serrano instead accepted an invitation to compete on ‘Exatlón’, a Survivor-style reality TV show on the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo. The prize for the winner was $200,000.

Hearn was furious. Citing his right to reschedule Taylor-Serrano for a date of Matchroom’s choosing by way of the force majeure clause in Serrano’s fight contract, he sent legal letters to both Serrano and her longtime promoter Lou DiBella. He also verbally issued a cease-and-desist to Telemundo, whom he informed of her existing contractual obligation with Matchroom. Serrano was subsequently pulled from the reality show.

Taylor, whose initial $900,000 purse was also reduced due to the lack of gate in Essex, agreed to equally absorb Serrano’s pay cut.

Hearn reissued to Serrano the full $300,000 offer, with Taylor applying additional pressure with a rare tweet.

“We both signed contracts, all financial barriers have been removed and any training/travel issues are the same for both of us as I’m also training in the US,” she fired at Serrano. “No more excuses, this is a fight to elevate the sport. August 22 is our time to make history. You in?”

But Serrano was out.

Her explanation was that she didn’t want to fight in the literal backyard of Taylor’s promoter. She also claimed she couldn’t adequately train for the fight while gyms remained shut in her home state of New York, whereas Taylor had the use of a gym in the basement of her new Connecticut home, not to mention the nearby private premises belonging to her trainer, Ross Enamait. It didn’t help the Puerto Rican’s cause, mind, that she had been posting to her Instagram page training footage from gyms across New York all summer.

That she would have to quarantine for a fortnight upon her entry to the UK was also moot because, as Taylor suggested in her tweet, she also lived in the States and would be forced to do the same thing.

In reality, Covid was good to Serrano and Maldonado, who knew exactly what they were doing.

The longer they waited, the more valuable the fight would become. Taylor, in her mid-30s, was also beginning to wane athletically. Their plan was brazen but admirable.

Joining forces with Jake Paul, then, was a masterstroke. Throughout 2021, the YouTuber-turned-boxer who, for some reason, is one of the most famous people on the planet, championed Serrano at every corner.

The explosive southpaw was well paid to compete under Paul’s promotional banner and by the time she returned to the table with Matchroom in the backend of 2021, her commercial value had skyrocketed to the point that she commanded seven figures, not six.

Before Taylor had her hand raised on that legendary night at Madison Square Garden, Maldonado, who four years earlier had spat venom in her direction, walked towards her beaming.

“We earned every dollar, baby,” he told Taylor. He kissed her on the forehead and repeated it.

The “we” to whom he referred included Taylor, in fairness, who pocketed somewhere in the region of $2.5m for that seminal night in New York, whereas Serrano’s fee was somewhere north of a million dollars.

Serrano and Maldonado’s long game continues to pay off. Two and a half years on from Madison Square Garden, and after another pullout along the way (Serrano, not Chantelle Cameron, was initially contracted to face Taylor in her first Dublin homecoming bout), the Puerto Rican challenger will be paid closer to $8m as she seeks to avenge her defeat in the co-main event to Jake Paul’s heavyweight fight with Mike Tyson tonight.

Light-welterweight champion Taylor, the ‘away’ fighter for the first time in her professional career in that Paul, and not Eddie Hearn, is promoting the event, stands to earn just over $6m.

As the longtime rivals stared each other down at last night’s weigh-in, each of them safely under the 138-pound catchweight, Serrano began to nod. “This is our time,” she told Taylor. “We’ll do it again.”

“Yep, absolutely,” came the response from the Bray woman. “Absolutely.”

It might not be the last time, either.