On the board that is her professional career Chantelle Cameron could see mostly snakes and very few ladders. All the ladders she had once seen had now been pulled up and even the ones still visible were leading to places she was no longer sure she wanted to go.
In fact, were it not for Jake Paul’s MVP (Most Valuable Promotions) dropping a ladder down exactly when it was needed, Cameron, now 34, admits she may have called it a day. Rather than go back to square one, she would have simply got out while the going was still relatively good and blamed her somewhat premature retirement on her inability to remain motivated when opportunities were in short supply.
“I was worrying,” she admitted to Boxing Scene. “The Queensberry [Promotions] deal was coming to an end and I had one fight left with them. They were paying me very well – there’s no complaints there – but I knew that deal wouldn’t have happened again. So I was considering that as my last fight. I’d had some great fights and some great paydays and to go back to a deal that wasn’t as sufficient didn’t appeal to me. I wouldn’t have needed to box because I’ve been paid well enough that I can walk away.”
Given her only professional loss to date came against Katie Taylor, it is fair to say that Cameron’s slow walk away from the sport would have been performed with a heavy heart. Not only that, when one considers that Cameron’s 2023 loss to Taylor was a revenge win for Taylor, and that the pair are currently tied 1-1 in the series, any thoughts pertaining to retirement become all the more maddening.
Not for the want of trying, Cameron, a former world super-lightweight champion, has so far failed to drag Taylor back into the ring for a third fight and has become increasingly disillusioned with both the sport and her career as a result. Even though she has continued winning – outpointing Elhem Mekhaled and Patricia Berghult last year – Cameron has struggled replicating the highs of those two Taylor fights and struggled, more importantly, to secure the sort of fights to potentially take her back there.
“I had great fights [with Queensberry], and I’m very grateful I got those opportunities, but they weren’t really the fights I wanted,” Cameron said. “Without wanting to sound arrogant, it’s kind of hard to get up for those kinds of fights when you know you want the bigger names and the bigger fights. I was glad I got the wins but it didn’t really excite me and I don’t think I was able to give what I wanted to give to Queensberry, which were top, top, contender fights. It was very frustrating for me.
“The year before I was undisputed, I was fighting Katie Taylor twice, and I was right at the very top. Then I had a massive, massive drop and, to be honest, I got fed humble pie. I was humbled hugely. It was definitely a mental challenge for me.
“I just got a bit stuck because I wanted the [Katie Taylor] trilogy fight. We are one win apiece and the trilogy should have happened, but it never did. There’s only one person to blame for that and it’s not me. I made it very clear that I was willing to give her everything she wanted and take a pay cut to get that fight done. But it just didn’t happen and that’s the way it goes sometimes. To be fair, it was a pretty shit year last year. But at least now I’m with MVP.”
Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions has been credited with offering a platform and support to women’s boxing at a time when other promoters – so-called traditional boxing promoters – have started finding it difficult to either pay what the top women want or simply provide them with dates. Besides promoting Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano, which did huge numbers on Netflix, MVP has also acquired a flurry of other elite females, including Cameron and Savannah Marshall, whose signing was announced on Monday.
“My team has been doing a lot of negotiating and Queensberry helped with the deal as well,” said Cameron. “It was very amicable and I’m very grateful to them for helping us get the deal done.
“It was just unfortunate I couldn’t get them the fights they wanted and I wanted. The opponents just weren’t there at the time and the fights weren’t available. But they were brilliant.
“I think MVP will now get the big fights for me and the big names will want to be on that platform. If you’re a woman, it’s where you want to be at the minute. It’s the platform you want.”
Already Cameron has a date and an opponent for her next fight, the details of which will be announced very soon. It is a fight for which she will have no difficulty finding motivation, she says, and one that will soothe some of the frustration she experienced in 2024.
“It was so annoying because I had nowhere to go,” she said of that time. “I was just going through the motions and you can see that in my performances. It was just a rubbish year. I didn’t enjoy the fights and all I wanted was to get revenge on Katie. I’d just suffered a loss and Katie is in the ring talking about a trilogy fight and ‘doing it for women’s boxing’ and I thought that it would happen. Before the Serrano fight, she then said she wanted an easier fight, so the reason for not fighting me was that she wanted to do a mandatory defence and have a so-called easier fight. Good on them, Katie and Amanda, for earning all that money – it’s unbelievable money – but the reality is, she was never going to fight me, regardless of money.”
If it’s true that you never forget your first, it must be even more difficult to forget it when that first, in Cameron’s case, happened to be Katie Taylor in Dublin. The sounds will surely stay with you and so will the disappointment.
“They always say you find out a lot when you suffer your first loss, and Jesus, I really did,” Cameron said. “I found out stuff about the people around me, and how people give up on you. It’s quite brutal really. When you’re winning, your changing room is full. But when you lose, you come back and it’s empty.
“Also, you have the brutality of the fans. You have one loss and you’re ‘rubbish’ and you should retire. You get loads of hate. It wasn’t even like I got battered. But all I was reading were these opinions from people about how I’d been ‘battered’ and was now ‘rubbish’. It’s crazy. You have to have tough skin.
“Now I don’t care about all that stuff. My biggest fear was losing and now that I have taken that loss, what do I have to worry about? My undefeated record has been damaged and I can’t change that, so I’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s boxing. It’s a sport. I’m just going to enjoy it now; the pressure is off my shoulders.
“Also, it’s not like I lost to a nobody. I lost to one of the very best. Then, when she did beat me, she ran away. So I can look at it in a positive way.”
That Taylor ultimately “ran away” from Cameron towards a lucrative fight against Amanda Serrano on Netflix is a bitter pill to swallow but one Cameron swallowed nonetheless. She understands it, in other words. She even understands why Taylor and Serrano are doing it all over again on July 11 in New York, despite the fact Taylor has twice beaten the Puerto Rican.
“It genuinely doesn’t annoy me,” said Cameron. “She’s going to earn massive money again and I have also now accepted the fact that Katie doesn’t want to fight me. She knows that I have already beaten her and she’d rather fight someone she has beaten twice than fight the person who beat her. I’m taking that as a compliment.
“If it was me, I would want to fight someone if I’m one win apiece with them. I would want to settle the score. But I can’t speak for someone else and how they want to carry on with their career.”
Cameron added: “They’ve put on great fights, Katie and Amanda, but I don’t really see the point of this third one. It’s 2-0 and I personally think Amanda has been quite hard done by in both fights. This one will be another close one, but I don’t know who will win. In the last two fights, when you think Amanda has got the decision, they give it the other way. So I wouldn’t be able to judge this next one. You don’t know which way they’ll go.”
Likewise, Cameron, now 20-1 (8), for a while hasn’t known which way to go. At one point she assumed a third fight with Taylor, again in Ireland, was the only way to go, but soon realised this was unlikely and that for any fight to happen both parties had to be willing to make it happen. Then, all of a sudden, she had nowhere to go. “Stuck,” she says, and she is right. She was stuck on the sidelines, she was stuck watching others in fights she wanted for herself, and she was stuck trying to work out how a series as finely poised as hers with Taylor was now in danger of never seeing a resolution.
“The reality is, Katie may not even win her next fight,” Cameron said. “If she does, great, maybe she’ll want to fight me next. Or maybe she doesn’t want to lose again. I’ve just got to see how it all pans out. But it doesn’t really faze me. Obviously, I’d love to become undisputed [super-lightweight champion] again, but I can’t make these fights happen if the opponent doesn’t want to fight me.
“My first fight with Katie was completely different to the second one. Her tactics were good in the rematch; she shut me down. But the referee should have penalised her a bit. She got away with all sorts. I think it ruined the fight and made it a scrappy fight.
“If we had a third fight, though, I would obviously be aware of that and have the chance to make adjustments of my own. That’s why it would be intriguing. That’s why the trilogy makes a lot of sense.”
Indeed, it does. Yet, in boxing, the things that make sense are often secondary to the things that make money.