The recent fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, streamed live on Netflix, was the most-streamed sporting event ever according to Netflix, with 108 million global viewers. The consensus was the fight, in which Paul defeated the 58-year-old former World Heavyweight Champion, was lackluster.
What clearly wasn’t lackluster was the co-event fight between Amanda Serrano and Katie Taylor, which Netflix reports had 74 million live global viewers. If the numbers are accurate, it was the most-watched women’s sporting event ever in the U.S. with 47 million viewers. While the fight, won by Taylor, has garnered its share of controversy, it was a lot of exposure and the biggest payday either of the women have seen.
Writer Malissa Smith grew up watching boxing and has written extensively about women in the sport. Her latest book,“The Promise of Women’s Boxing: A Momentous New Era for the Sweet Science,” was published earlier this year. It details the period from the 2012 Olympics to recent fights of the 2020s. Two-time Olympic gold medalist Claressa Shields wrote the foreword.
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“Boxing was something I really came to love,” said Smith, whose first book, “A History of Women’s Boxing,” was published in 2014. “I loved the science of it. I loved the technique. … Boxing you think of as a highly gendered sport, hyper-masculine, yet when women perform it, it becomes very confusing from that perspective. At other times it’s accepted.
“The Olympics made a change, not initially…but after the 2016 Olympics, fighters such as Claressa Shields in the United States, Katie Taylor in Ireland and Nicola Adams in the UK…became professional and their professional trajectories were much, much different than women who had been boxing all along,” she added.
In “The Promise of Women’s Boxing,” Smith details the growth of the sport, while also noting the challenges women still face. At the recent espnW summit, Shields, who has held world championships in five weight classes, noted how much smaller her paydays are than men in the sport. On the upside, a movie about Shields’s life, “The Fire Inside,” opens on Christmas day.
“[Shields] has only had million-dollar paydays a couple of times,” Smith noted. “She had to go to MMA to earn money. … My hope is [my book] inspires the opportunity for people to learn about a sport they know nothing of and to celebrate the incredible effort and work that these women put in to be able to succeed in a sport that really doesn’t want them there.”