Persoon driven by thirst for revenge in seismic rematch with Katie Taylor
Katie Taylor’s toughest foe wants to correct the record this Saturday
ANGER is a word easily associated with Delfine Persoon. The circumstances in which an Irish audience became acquainted with her, particularly in the aftermath of her loss to Katie Taylor in New York 14 months ago, left her furious.
But she was also heartbroken, frustrated, and seemed worn out. Persoon really seemed convinced she had defeated Taylor over 10 rounds — an opinion shared by a great many expert observers, it should be said.
A global pandemic has now facilitated an improbable re-match — and Persoon must now try and find an outlet for her anger on Saturday night.
The US boxing media were fascinated by the fact that Persoon was a serving police officer before the first Taylor fight. And when they heard she spent almost the first decade of her police career on the beat, they reacted with amazement.
‘The Belgium police are not like the American police. If you punch someone, it’s a big ordeal,’ said Persoon, showing an acute understanding of aspects of American policing.
‘It’s important to talk with people, to negotiate. If they attack you, then you can defend yourself,’ she said, later confirming she had been obliged to do so.
But the fact that she combines her police career with one as an elite boxer is a fact that Persoon has been happy to play up ahead of the fights with Taylor.
‘Katie was lucky,’ she said last year. ‘I saw in the papers she got €40,000 per year from Ireland, while I go working and I don’t get that kind of money.
‘That’s the difference in this fight. For her, it’s a job. For me, it’s my passion.’
The reference to €40,000 relates to Taylor’s amateur career, when she was in receipt of State funding.
And that Persoon continues her working career could be partly explained by the fact that Taylor’s profile in the sport is high; she is the best-known women’s fighter of all time, and on Saturday night she will become the best-paid in the history of the sport. No women’s boxer has ever been paid $1million for a fight, which is Taylor’s reputed purse.
Persoon will never earn that kind of money for a bout. And the veteran was happy to play up her comparatively modest preparations before they fought in Madison Square Garden.
‘My trainer is my promoter. I have my manager, my agent. We have someone who helps with the sponsors, someone to do the media and another person with the mail. They deserve to be paid something,’ she said.
Taylor’s manager, Brian Peters, made an observation that wouldn’t have improved Persoon’s mood in the days after last June’s fraught fight. The subject was the possibility of a re-match, and Peters’ views illustrated the relatively low profile that the Belgian has outside of her own country. ‘Persoon needs to build her profile,’ said Peters.
‘She’s had 42 fights in Belgium, one in Switzerland and one in America. They’ve got to do their part, it can’t all be left to Katie.’
However, Persoon actually did the opposite in the months after her loss to Taylor. Her desire for a quick rematch went unfulfilled and she instead redirected her attention to the Olympics. She took part in the ill-fated Olympic qualifying tournament in London in March, but lost her first bout as she struggled with an arm injury.
She had been due to fight in another qualifying tournament in Paris in May, before sport succumbed to Covid-19. It was only when the planned fight between Taylor and Amanda Serrano fell apart that she was signed up for Saturday.
That bout was originally fixed for March, but cancelled because of the pandemic. Plans to reschedule it as part of Eddie Hearns’s promotion this weekend fell apart, with Serrano’s side citing fears over Covid-19, and the boxer herself then complaining they were unhappy with the terms offered by Hearns.
It gave Persoon an unexpected return to the limelight — and she arrived with chippiness.
‘I didn’t think she’d take a second fight, the risk of a fight against me,’ said Persoon of Taylor. ‘She knows it’s a dangerous fight to fight me. I thought she is going to take other opponents that she is sure she can defeat them with her fight plan. The luck for me was corona — the Covid gave me this chance.’ Hearn claims to have spent £5million, between set-up costs and the fighters’ purses, on Saturday’s event. The fighters on the schedule are quarantined in a hotel in Essex, near Hearns’s mansion where the fights are being held. The main event is the heavyweight
fight between Dillian Whyte and Alexander Povetkin, but the Taylor-Persoon renewal is attracting enormous attention.
A crowd of 20,000 watched that first meeting, which proved controversial as Persoon left the ring in tears, furious at two of the three judges giving the fight to Taylor, with a third calling it a draw. Her anger increased when it was discovered the final round was 11 seconds short — but not the 30 claimed by Persoon and her husband and manager, Filiep Tampere.
Persoon is a scrapper, a tough, strong boxer whose understands she doesn’t have the technical strengths upon which Taylor can call.
But her motivation can be easily guessed at on Saturday: she feels hard done by.
And she wants revenge.
“I didn’t think
she would take a second fight”