A bloodied and bruised Katie Taylor achieved her long-held goal of unifying the world lightweight championship with a wildly entertaining majority-decision win over Belgium’s Delfine Persoon at Madison Square Garden.
Taylor (14-0, 6 KOs), who entered with the WBA, WBO and IBF titles at 135lbs, survived her toughest moments as a professional to add Persoon’s WBC strap on the undercard of Saturday’s heavyweight title fight between Anthony Joshua and Andy Ruiz Jr. Ringside judges John Poturaj and Allen Nace scored it 96-94 for Taylor while Don Trella scored it 95-95, as did the Guardian.
“It was a very, very close fight,” an exhausted Taylor said afterward. “I felt like I won the earlier rounds and she came on strong at the end. But I feel like I did enough to win that fight.”
Persoon (43-2, 18 KOs), a former kickboxer fighting on US soil for the first time, went off as a 10-1 underdog but made it immediately clear she wasn’t there to lay down. The 34-year-old from Belgium skipped right over the feeling-out process and charged right into the pocket, leaving Taylor to fight off the back foot and try to catch her fast-closing opponent on the way in with counters.
Taylor, 32, was able score under duress in the first round but the longer, taller Persoon redoubled her efforts in the second and third, closing the distance relentlessly, letting her hands go and using roughhouse tactics, largely overlooked by referee Sparkle Lee, to bully her opponent in the clinch. Taylor absorbed one flush shot after another as the partisan crowd exhorted her forward with chants of “Ka-tie! Ka-tie!”
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The Bray fighter suffered a bad cut on her forehead in the fourth then spent most of the fifth on fighting off the ropes, but giving back good as she was getting. When Persoon stepped back to admire one particularly crunching blow upstairs, Taylor motioned with her glove as if to say bring it.
It was unclear how long Persoon could sustain the frenetic pace and by the sixth it appeared she was beginning to tire, allowing Taylor to land a series of counters upstairs and making Persoon miss wildly with her balletic footwork.
Persoon hit back in the eighth as Taylor appeared to fade, stopping the crowd favorite in her tracks with a crunching right hand to win the round on all three judges’ cards. But Taylor roared back in the ninth, lighting up Persoon and whipping the crowd into a frenzy with blinding combinations upstairs.
The final round was a hurricane of two-way action as the fighters traded hellfire in the center of the ring.
“That’s my problem sometimes,” said Taylor, who landed 103 of 410 blows (25.1%) according to CompuBox’s punch statistics, compared to 116 of 586 for Persoon (19.8%). “I like a fight a bit too much sometimes. I probably should’ve fought on the outside a bit more sometimes. But then I just needed to dig deep and get that win.”
The official verdict left Persoon in tears as she retreated with her seconds into the tunnel, but Taylor said afterward she would be happy to play it back.
“I am definitely happy to give Delfine a rematch,” Taylor said. “There are big fights out there for me. There’s Amanda Serrano and I think that fight should be next but I am really happy to fight whoever.”