Matchroom promoter, Eddie Hearn, has worked with plenty of larger than life personalities during his time in the sport, however, there is one current world champion who sticks out as the most ‘terrifying’ person he has ever come across.
Although the days of characters like Mike Tyson, Sonny Liston and Ron Lyle seem to be gone, there remains a few current champions whose aura alone would intimidate most if they came face-to-face. Names such as serial knockout-artist, Artur Beterbiev and pound-for-pound great, Terence Crawford spring to mind.
However, Eddie Hearn told The Overlap that the inspirational Katie Taylor trumps every fighter that he has met in that metric.
“Katie is one of the most fearsome people, inside and outside of the ring. She scares the life out of me. She’s the most terrifying person that I’ve ever met in my life, because she’s so pleasant and then all of a sudden [she switches].”
“She’s in her mid-thirties now and sometimes I’ll say to her ‘how many fights have you got left?’ and she’ll look at me like she’s going to kill me. She just loves it. I remember seeing her win gold at London [2012] and the crowd was unbelievable, so just out of respect I said I’d have a meeting, but I didn’t see a future for women’s boxing.”
“She came into my office and I was mesmerised, I’ve never met anyone that determined. When you think about what she did, female boxing was banned in Ireland, she was ‘K. Taylor’ in the [amateur] competitions. She’d walk into Bray Boxing Club, they’d tuck her ponytail into her head guard and she would walk into the gym with it on, to train and fight and pretend she was a boy.”
Taylor rematches Chantelle Cameron on November 25th in Dublin, as she attempts to avenge the first defeat of her professional career.