On Saturday night, in Stockton, Skye Nicolson again proved that she isn’t the worst boxer in the world, this time by beating Yuliahn Luna over 10 rounds to claim the WBC interim title at super-bantamweight. That was, in fact, the 15th win of Nicolson’s professional career, meaning there are now 15 bits of evidence – 17 if you include her new belt, plus the WBC title she once won at featherweight – to indicate that the Australian isn’t anything close to the worst boxer in the world.
Then again, Devin Haney only claimed that she was the worst fighter he had ever seen. Maybe there are worse boxers in the world than Skye Nicolson, but Haney, judge and jury, just hasn’t got around to watching them yet. Or maybe when Haney tweeted, “Skye Nicolson is the worst fighter I’ve ever seen omg,” he was just being petty, immature, cruel. Yeah, maybe that’s it.
Whatever the impetus for it, Haney’s comment arrived shortly after Nicolson’s promoter, Eddie Hearn, had criticised Haney’s latest win – a decision over Brian Norman on November 22 – and therefore came as no surprise. It was, on the face of it, just one more example of a female getting caught in the crossfire as two men draw pistols, compare penises, and in the process reveal the extent of their inadequacies. For Hearn, the promoter, that meant besmirching the reputation of a man he once loved, while Haney, responding in kind, was just being rude, retaliatory, unkind. He would have felt hurt by Hearn’s betrayal, having worked with him in the past, but that was still no reason to use Nicolson, an easy target, to get back at his old promoter or somehow make a point.
All it achieved on that front was to have Nicolson disable her Twitter/X account and take the moral high ground. It made an elusive fighter even more elusive, in other words.
“I really don’t care,” Nicolson told an outlet called The Boxing Mob ahead of her fight last week. “I feel like everyone is entitled to their opinion. If you don’t like me, you don’t like me. I can’t be everyone’s favourite. I think he’s [Haney] a great fighter, so it’s a shame it’s not a mutual feeling, but that’s all right. I’m off Twitter for that reason. I don’t care about people’s negative opinions. I feel like Twitter is just full of negative criticism you don’t need to read. So I stay away from that.”
By expressing her stance on the matter Nicolson’s aim was not to elicit sympathy or force either an apology or a retraction from Haney. She was instead just answering a question the only way she knows how to answer a question: respectfully, honestly, without ego. Besides, Haney’s tweet had by then already been deleted, with Haney either told to delete it or doing so of his own volition. As far as Nicolson was concerned, the battle was over, the case closed.
In fact, if Nicolson’s recent interviews served to do anything, all they have done is drag up something she would perhaps rather be buried, ignored, forgotten. In many ways, too, I am, by writing this column, part of the problem. Yet, truth be told, I have only chosen to do so because of a couple of comments I saw regarding Nicolson’s video interview on December 12. The first of these comments, “Damn, I feel bad,” was, it seemed, a sentiment shared by many of the people who watched the video of Nicolson explaining her reaction to Haney’s words during fight week. But it was then in the second comment that I found even more insight. This one, written by Devin Haney of all people, said, “I do too… I was wrong.”
Now, of course, given the limitations of the format, as well as the limitations of the individual, it is hard to know for sure whether Haney was being sincere with that post or merely trying to capitalise on the moment for attention. But if we take him at face value, and give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Nicolson can do the same too. Perhaps she can take a shred of comfort from knowing that Haney has not only deleted the original message but has since had a change of heart.
You wonder then what it was that caused Haney’s about-turn. It could have just been guilt, I suppose. That would make sense. Or maybe he has simply calmed down and, by calming down, managed to now extract his emotions from his spat with Eddie Hearn, making Nicolson no longer required as a stick with which to beat his old promoter. Or maybe Haney has, since watching Nicolson, watched other fighters he deems to be “worse” than a 15-1 female with one and a half world titles to her name, thus concluding that “boring” and “bad” are not the same thing. Maybe in doing so he realised he and Nicolson are not so different and that rather than bring her down, as he did a couple of weeks ago, he should instead lift her up and celebrate her skills.
Clearly, when Nicolson states that she is a fan of Devin Haney, that is what she is trying to do. She sees the sense in appreciating fighters like Haney – pure boxers who follow the hit-and-don’t-get-hit code – and knows that you should back your own in times of division and debate. In this particular debate, Nicolson and Haney have more than just Eddie Hearn in common. They also share an approach and attitude to the sport, plus an aversion to negativity and criticism. And yet, of the two of them only one appears to understand this commonality. Only Nicolson understands that to run down one of your own is analogous to self-harm; at best, projecting.
It was, after all, only ever about entertainment, this fight. It started with a promoter accusing Haney of failing to provide any and that then led to Haney in turn making a punchline of Nicolson, whom he felt was the least entertaining fighter on the Matchroom roster. She was never the “worst”, though, was she? The truth is, there are too many wins on the Nicolson record for her to ever be that and for Haney to have seen just one of those wins, which he must have done to judge, would be enough to contradict his opinion. If, in the end, he was somehow unable to see and acknowledge this, we can only assume that whenever Devin Haney has watched Skye Nicolson in the ring his eyes were not open but closed omg.
