Skye Nicolson has been aiming for Amanda Serrano for close to two years now. Unfortunately for Nicolson, landing a Serrano fight is seemingly as elusive a task as landing on Nicolson herself.
“She just refuses to entertain the idea of a fight with me,” Nicolson said in a recent interview with Louis Hart of Boxing Social. “You see her face change when my name gets brought up in media interviews. It doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence that that fight will ever happen. But I never say never, so I don’t want to say the fight will never happen, but obviously I don’t see her and her team ever showing any interest in that fight.”
Nicolson fought in the 2020/2021 Olympics and then entered the paid ranks in 2022. The 29-year-old from Queensland, Australia, won the WBC’s interim featherweight belt in her eighth pro fight.
Serrano, formerly the undisputed champion at featherweight, vacated the WBC’s full title last December when the sanctioning body refused to allow her bouts to include 12 three-minute rounds, as male fighters have, instead of the 10 two-minute rounds that most women’s fights feature.
Nicolson then picked up the vacant belt in April with a wide decision victory over Sarah Mahfoud and defended it in July with a shutout of Dyana Vargas. She is 11-0 (1 KO).
Serrano has since vacated the IBF title as well but still holds the WBA and WBO belts at 126. She hasn’t defended them since an October 2023 win over Danila Ramos. A March fight against Nina Meinke was called off at the last minute due to eye problems caused by a hair product. Serrano, who has hopped up and down from weight class to weight class over her career, returned as a lightweight in July with a quick victory against overmatched Stevie Morgan. And she is scheduled for a rematch with undisputed junior welterweight champion Katie Taylor in November.
“I just feel like the longer it goes on, the less rewarding it is for me,” Nicolson said. “At the end of the day, I want to dethrone champions. I want to prove I’m the best by beating the best. The later that fight happens, if it happens, the more the response will be, ‘Oh, she didn’t fight her in her prime. She was done. She was old. She was this, she was that.’ It’s like, ‘Well, I’ve got the receipts and I’ve been calling her out for two years.’ While it is frustrating, we move on.”
Nicolson complimented Serrano’s accomplishments: “Someone who’s obviously done so much for the sport, has been a trailblazer, has so many records and being a seven-division world champion and the rest of it, and holds belts in my weight division — of course, naturally, that’s the fight I want to chase. But they have made it quite clear that it’s of no interest to them. That’s fine. I will have to stamp my legacy in any other way I can, beating everyone who’s put in front of me and winning as many belts as I can, with or without the Serrano fight.”
That will continue on October 12, when Serrano will defend against Raven Chapman (9-0, 2 KOs). Their bout is on the undercard of the Artur Beterbiev-Dmitriy Bivol fight in Saudi Arabia for the undisputed light heavyweight championship.
Follow David Greisman on Twitter @FightingWords2. His book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.
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