THE PURSES PAID to Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano on Friday night will be the two largest ever received by female fighters. Taylor [23-1, 6KOs], whose 140-pound throne will be under siege, will pocket somewhere just north of $6 million. Challenger Serrano [47-2-1, 30KOs], whose promoter Jake Paul is effectively running the show at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, stands to earn somewhere closer to $8m.
The Irishwoman’s purse will be at least twice bigger than her previous best. Serrano’s will be worth between seven and eight times more than her own career-high payday to this point. You need look no further than the headline bout above them, in which Jake Paul will square off with a 58-year-old Mike Tyson, to understand the extent to which money talks in professional boxing.
It tends to speak more than either of the introverts in Friday’s female co-main event, too, but it was doubtless instrumental in their decision to attach themselves to this Paul-Tyson clown act rather than to push for their own headline slot the second time around. Taylor, Serrano and their respective teams understand acutely that the terrain they helped to reshape is beginning to creak and shake. They would have known full well that an alternative plan for their rematch may never have crossed their desks.
So much of boxing’s money, now, is centralised in Saudi Arabia, whose current ‘Chairman of the General Entertainment Authority’, Turki Al-Sheikh, has the sport’s stakeholders on strings.