Mikaela Mayer: “I don’t want any easy fights at this point in my career. I am in my prime, I want to take on the best and I want to do it now.”

Mikaela Mayer: “I don’t want any easy fights at this point in my career. I am in my prime, I want to take on the best and I want to do it now.”

I last spoke to Mikaela Mayer in November, and it was a different Mayer from the one I have been accustomed to in our multiple interviews over the last few years. She was still a little fragile, a fighter still trying to process her emotions, still trying to deal with what she describes as her grief following her controversial and bitterly disputed loss to Alycia Baumgardner the previous month that cost Mayer her unbeaten record and those precious unified world super-featherweight titles that she held prior to that historic all-female card in London. But time heals most things, Mayer has seemingly repaired most of those damaged emotions, you know that defeat still cuts deep, and you know she wants revenge. And badly.

But in boxing sometimes you just have to move on, Mayer has. At least for now. A morning on the track had just been completed, the first of the day’s training sessions, honing the body back into fighting shape. Life in training camp has begun again for Mayer who is back on the road to redemption. The now-former world champion growls at anyone who dares to label her return a comeback, she insists it’s nothing of the kind. Mayer hasn’t gone anywhere. She isn’t likely to anytime soon. That lucrative Top Rank contract still has three years to run and with the old Mayer now back in full flow with those patented million-dollar quotes, Mayer is fully intent on getting those legacy-making fights.

Over Zoom, Mayer tells me the life of being back in camp and looking ahead to her next fight has helped in getting her back to somewhere near her old self:

“I’m doing a lot better, it definitely took some time. It just takes time but I am feeling a lot better now. I have a fight, I have an opponent I am back in camp and I am feeling like my old self again. Those months in between camps are a lot easier when you are coming off a win.”

Mayer has lost many times in her boxing career before including at the 2016 Olympics, but nothing has hit her harder than that loss to her fellow American. A win would have put her on the brink of going undisputed and within touching distance of a fight with Katie Taylor, and the importance of the fight was why it hit her so hard Mayer told me:

“There was so much more on the line this time. I always say the Olympics are a little rough because they are a lot of work for little reward. You are fighting all those years between the Olympics and nobody really gets to see these fights. In 2016 I was still young, I was 26 but I only had my first fight when I was 18 so I was still coming up. But now I am 15 years into the sport and I felt I had finally got to the level I always wanted to get to. People were watching and women’s boxing was at a whole new height and there was so much on the line, all my belts, everything that I had worked for. It was my first really big rivalry and just the whole magnitude of that fight. I had worked so hard to get to that point and then it slipped through my fingers and then it all felt as though it was for nothing for a minute. But then I started to realise nothing had really changed, I still had everything I had before that loss. I still have my contract, and I’m still set to fight multiple times this year.”

They say every setback makes you stronger, win or learn, a line that gets randomly thrown around a little too easily in the modern-day age of quick fixes for self-help. Mayer in time will be that stronger person because of what happened in London, but you sense she isn’t quite there just yet:

“I’m still learning, I feel what I actually learned from it hasn’t hit me yet. I’m still powering through but I get moments in training camp during the hard parts of training camp, it’s definitely easier when you are the champ pushing through those moments rather than coming off a loss.

“I’m no stranger to perseverance, that was the first tattoo I got.” Mayer showed me the words perseverance tattooed on her left arm. “That has always been my life and my career. It sucks that it has happened like this, but I still feel I am one of the best female boxers out there. I am still in my prime and I still have so much more to prove. I have just got to suck it up and persevere once again and keep going. Everyone keeps telling me you will come out of this stronger and everything happens for a reason. But no, I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. I do think something good can from every situation. You can always find good in a negative. But sometimes things just happen.”

Judges are paid to render the correct decision. Too often they don’t and they get to hide behind excuses of subjectivity or it’s a case of what you like, or that was a fight that could have gone either way. If anything tells you that scoring a fight needs an overall it’s the never-ending lines that are passed around too easily and unchallenged after any controversial decision is rendered. And the ongoing issues around scoring a fight that never gets resolved do have an effect on a fighter. Mayer believes she boxed the perfect fight and that she was denied her rightful victory, but the first reversal of her professional career has put doubts in her mind about future strategies:

“I think I fought a very smart fight and we had a strategy that we thought was working. But if I’d have known what the judges were thinking I would have pressed her more and pushed on to a higher gear. It doesn’t question my fighting ability, skills, my coach or my boxing IQ, it doesn’t question anything around that. It does make me feel that I will never let that happen again. I don’t care if I think I am winning by a mile I am going to continue to put my foot on the gas. It is a reminder that you never know what the judges are seeing. I am going into this next fight hungrier and wiser.”

The thirst for revenge over Baumgardner will likely never leave her body, but the immediate target is the lightweight division. A new division with fresh challengers awaits the former unified world super-featherweight champion. Mayer is clearly relishing not only a return to action which will in some small way act as a kind of therapy from what happened in October and Mayer’s perceived injustice in her previous fight but as she talked about not having to cut muscle and train through as severe a calorie deficit a smile appeared and a little bit more of the old Mayer was on display as she relayed her obvious excitement for her ring return:

“I’m just excited to see how my body feels. I planned on moving to 135 a couple of years ago but I was stuck on my goal of being undisputed at 130. I’ve moved up later than I expected to but my body is definitely ready for it and I think I’ll look really good at the weight.”

Christina Linardatou will be the first opponent for Mayer at her new weight, the only fighter to defeat Baumgardner, an obvious choice in the ongoing mind games between the two rivals, a rivalry that is unlikely to fizzle out anytime soon. But Mayer wants the big fights and the exciting fights, for her and in many ways, Linardatou is the perfect opponent:

“I don’t want any easy fights at this point in my career. I am in my prime, I want to take on the best and I want to do it now. Linardatou is a tough opponent she has been in with a lot of the top contenders her only defeats are to Katie Taylor and Delfine Persoon. We tried to do the Persoon fight but that fell through because she is obligated to have two fights in Dubai. So we went to the second-best option, which was the girl who beat Baumgardner. I think that is a fun way to keep the rivalry alive but regardless of that Linardatou is a tough opponent and it will be an exciting fight and that is all we want to do is put on exciting fights.”

Mayer is already planning ahead, a win over Linardatou and the chase for the bigger fights will begin to take shape soon after. Making herself the mandatory challenger for Katie Taylor is an obvious option, but there are options elsewhere including a possible undisputed fight at 140 against Chantelle Cameron:

“I’m already in the lightweight rankings at number 3, so we’ll see what’s next, maybe a mandatory. I’ve got to see how the rankings work and combine that with the politics of boxing. It’s no secret I want the fight with Katie, I think it would happen a lot sooner if she was onboard. But I don’t know what her plans are, I know she has the Amanda Serrano rematch so I see myself taking another opponent after Linardatou, maybe even a few opponents at 135 before I can start campaigning to fight Katie.

“I am about taking the big fights. As much as I want to stay close to 130 for the possible rematch, but if Baumgardner doesn’t want to capitalise on our rivalry I will go where the big fights are, I will not sit around and wait. If the big fights are at 140, then I will go there. I definitely see a fight with Chantelle Cameron in the future. But we’ll see what happens, I’ve got 3 years left, but I am a threat in any division from 130 to 147. I can do it all, I can do all those divisions.”

One person has been a constant presence throughout Mayer’s top-flight amateur and professional career, her coach Al Mitchell. There is that rare special unbreakable bond between the pair. They have been together 13 years, but Mitchell only expected their partnership to last a few weeks. The veteran trainer needed convincing if his time working with Mayer would be worth it, she more than proved her worth. The loss to Baumgardner hurt Coach Al, as Mayer always respectfully refers to him, as much as it did his fighter. Mitchell has watched that fight multiple times, always reaching the same conclusion that Mayer won. Despite some absurd suggestions from a small minority to leave her long-time coach, Mayer has vowed to never leave him and the importance of the part Mitchell has played in her career isn’t lost on the fighter:

“Coach Al has been everything to my career. It’s our 13th year together since I hopped on that plane and flew to Michigan from LA, sunny LA to the frozen North Pole where I am right now. It was a big decision for me but the best decision that I ever made. We have been through so much together and I couldn’t imagine finishing my career with anyone else. Nobody could have gotten me to this position, this quick.”

Mayer is ambitious, as most fighters are, but she goes beyond normal and reasonable levels of ambition. While rivals may come and go, with Mayer I feel the biggest opponent she faces is herself. The American wants to satisfy those internal ambitions and create a long-lasting legacy, and that would have formed much of her grief after the loss to Baumgardner last year. The fighter I saw the morning after her shattering heartbreaking loss to her most heated rival was a broken one, and the healing process was a long one, and I did wonder if it would come. And while tiny remnants of the pain remain, in truth, those pieces of hurt may never leave her mind, Mayer is looking ahead albeit with one eye on the past, and there are big fights out there for her at multiple different weights. Mayer will be just fine.

The first steps on that road to recovery and beyond will be in March and Mayer is looking to make that statement and remind everyone of her talents. Christina Linardatou is very much the start of that new beginning and Linardatou might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time fighting an opponent who is likely to unleash all her recent frustrations on her.