Katie Taylor's Emotional Farewell Fight at Croke Park
Four days out from Katie Taylor’s long goodbye at Croke Park and her camp is already living in the afterglow. The fight hasn’t happened yet, but emotionally, they’re halfway through the lap of honour.
Tuesday’s press conference felt like a replay of June’s announcement, only with a change of venue. The Hogan Stand premium level was swapped for the Helix Theatre in DCU, a short stroll from undergraduates who barely looked up from their phones, oblivious that Ireland’s most decorated fighter was in the building.
Inside, it was a different world. GAA reporters rubbed shoulders with Matchroom and DAZN staff, the latter easily picked out by sharp suits and sharper Cockney accents. Over it all, that familiar tin whistle loop from Croke Park droned away, the pre-match soundtrack of a thousand All-Ireland Sundays, now repurposed for a boxer from Bray.
The anxiety that hung over June’s launch had vanished. No more talk of risk, no more whispered doubts about whether Croke Park was a step too far. The numbers killed that conversation stone dead. Half of the 80,000 tickets went in pre-sale. The rest disappeared in 17 minutes on 28 July. Croke Park, sold out for a women’s boxing main event. No caveats. No asterisks.
Taylor will be the first boxer to headline there since Muhammad Ali in 1972. Her long-time manager Brian Peters is only half-joking when he suggests that, in this company, it’s Ali who should feel flattered. Back then, only about 18,000 turned up to see Ali face Al “Blue” Lewis, and the GAA hierarchy tore strips off the promoter for pricing the event out of reach. This time, demand outstripped supply before anyone could even start complaining.
The business of the fight has become a story of its own.
In a cramped dressing room behind the stage, 18 reporters were wedged in shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Eddie Hearn to be wheeled in for the latest chapter of the Katie Taylor Origin Story.
“Wow, blimey! This is small!” he burst out as he ducked through the door, playing the room like a man who has never knowingly under-sold a moment.
Talk quickly turned to the ticket frenzy and the promoter’s one nagging regret: they didn’t do Croke Park sooner.
Over the years, Hearn’s relationship with Croke Park officials has veered between matey and mildly exasperated. In June, he was all “Peter, me old mate, me old mucca!” with stadium director Peter McKenna. On Tuesday, he revisited the darker bits of the negotiation, the bits where he felt the venue’s caution almost killed the dream.
“People can sort of deflate your spirit, which is quite unusual for me,” Hearn said. “They did deflate my spirit a bit over the years. They made me question whether we could do it or whether it would actually work.
“I’m disappointed with myself that I allowed that to happen because maybe we could have done it earlier.
“If Croker had originally gone, ‘Yes, this is going to be massive!’, we would have done it.
“But they was like, ‘Hmm... I dunno’. And it was like, well blimey, if they’re not sure, do we really want to be gambling with these costs?
“Listen, they [Croke Park] helped out as well, they were fantastic in the end.”
The promoter then rolled out a familiar favourite: the tale of Taylor and Peters arriving at his office after the disappointment of Rio 2016, selling him on a future that, back then, only they could see. Hearn Jr, like his father Barry, knows how to tell a story and when to punch the big lines.
Barry Hearn, of course, was the man behind one of the great Irish boxing nights, when Chris Eubank came to Millstreet to fight Steve Collins in 1995, having been convinced the venue was “just around the corner” from Cork Airport. It wasn’t. But the myth made the night.
Barry, though, never saw Taylor coming as a commercial force.
“We decided to headline her in November [in 2016],” Eddie recalled. “I think we paid her – she’s still having a go at me about this – six grand for her debut. For a four rounder.
“Which at the time, in women’s boxing by the way, was a lot of money.
“I said to my Dad, I’m going to put Katie Taylor on last. And he’s like, ‘What? A women’s fight?’
“I was like, ‘yeah, dad, like she’s unbelievable. You’ve got to watch her.’
“He said, ‘No one’s interested in women’s boxing, son.’ It’s the same sort of thing Frank Warren would say – or anyone from that era. And he [Barry Hearn] watched her and went ‘oh my God!’”
That conversion moment has become part of the Taylor folklore, retold as often as any of her world title wins. This week, though, the mythology felt almost bigger than the fight itself.
The press conference had the air of a corporate victory lap. Less “Rocky”, more “Art of the Deal”. The language of risk, cost, and logistics sat side by side with talk of legacy and history. The business had been done. The stadium was full. The deal-makers wanted their flowers.
At the top table, promoter Peter Aiken batted away praise for the sellout, insisting that the equation was simple.
“She sold the tickets,” he said, nodding towards Taylor.
Peters, more controlled than in June but no less animated, went a step further. He called Taylor the greatest Irish sportsperson of all time, pausing only to throw a playful nod at Roy Keane – “No disrespect to Roy Keane, you get a good second.” He even found time to tip Barry Keoghan for an Oscar for his turn in the promo and claimed, with a showman’s wink, that he’d arranged with “God almighty” for no rain after 5 o’clock on fight night.
The opponent, as is often the way in these farewell tours, drifted in almost as an afterthought.
Flora Pili walked onto the stage to polite applause, her dreadlocks painted in the colours of the French tricolour. For the wider public, she might as well be called “AN Other”, but those around Taylor were keen to stress this is not a ceremonial stroll.
“This is a real fight,” Hearn and others repeated, a line dropped into the conversation often enough to sound like a quiet warning.
Pili’s history in Dublin is modest but telling. Back in the spring of 2017, she boxed in a low-key international round-robin at the National Stadium, losing to Kellie Harrington and Italy’s Irma Testa. Since turning professional, she has built a 12-0 record and arrives as the reigning IBO super lightweight champion, a belt Taylor vacated in late 2025. She is not a star, but she is not a tourist either.
Taylor herself did not sit with the press pack, but her words still carried the room when she spoke from the stage.
“I’m not sure there’s another country in the world where 80,000 people would turn up for a female athlete,” she said, thanking the public again for turning her farewell into a national event.
As she looked back, the steel softened. She recalled sneaking into boxing gyms disguised as a boy, just to be allowed to spar. She remembered the sniggers, the side glances, the dismissive laughs.
“I was walking into some boxing gyms as a young girl, being sniggered at and laughed at. Who’s this girl trying to be a boxer? I had to earn people’s respect along the way.
“I’m so delighted that these young girls coming through now don’t have to go through the same struggles and adversity that I had to go through. The door is actually opened for them.
“You walk into every boxing gym now and it’s packed with female fighters. That to me is the greatest part about this legacy.”
For all the talk of ticket sales, negotiations and stadium politics, that was the line that cut through the noise. On Saturday night, 80,000 people will pack into Croke Park to watch Katie Taylor fight one last time. The real measure of the occasion might be counted, years from now, in how many of those young girls in packed gyms decide they want to walk out under their own lights.
