Taylor Starling sat on a plane from Miami to Charlotte bandaged and swollen. Even behind a face mask and sunglasses, it was apparent she’d not just been in a fight, but a war. Her right cheek puffed up beneath her glasses, and her hands were twice the size they normally were.

She wasn’t yet aware that she’d made headlines on websites, tabloids and newspapers across the world for her extraordinary bare-knuckle fight against Charisa Sigala, or that her number of Instagram followers had already doubled.

"Did I really do that? Was that really me?" she asked her coach, who confirmed that she was not hallucinating. She had indeed gone five rounds in a bare-knuckle fight that can only be described as one of the most brutal combat sports contests of the decade.

Overnight, Starling had become a viral sensation, receiving attention that spanned shock, outrage, but mostly, admiration and newfound fandom. A day earlier, as she was standing on the steps waiting to walk to the ring “sh-ting bricks,” she could have never imagined this.

During a week in which Stephen A. Smith, the biggest celebrity in sports media, stirred up controversy by saying he didn’t “want to see women punching each other in the face,” Friday night’s Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship event felt like the ultimate act of defiance.

BKFC, an upstart American bare-knuckle boxing outfit which has been registering big numbers on YouTube, took its biggest leap of faith yet in staging a Super Bowl weekend event titled Knucklemania in Lakeland, Florida (not far from the Super Bowl itself). And it did so on the backs of its women’s stars.

The card was headlined by former UFC star Paige VanZant, who was making her bare-knuckle boxing debut, and pro boxer/bare knuckle fighter Britain Hart. Hart stole the thunder of the debutant, outpointing VanZant over five entertaining rounds.

But the show itself was stolen by the fight between Starling and Sigala. The two combined to throw over 500 punches and landed 137 of them. All but 14 shots landed to the head, producing a bloodbath of a fight and grotesque swelling on both fighters’ faces.

Starling dropped Sigala twice in the first round on counter right hands and it looked like the night would end early. Instead, Sigala got up and not only took Starling’s best shots for the next four rounds, but actually threw more punches than her, leading to a thrilling back-and-forth fight down the stretch. In the end, the judges scored a unanimous decision in Starling’s favor, producing a standing ovation from the crowd in the RP Funding Center in Lakeland.

Almost immediately, the organization posted a clip of a bloodied Starling landing a right hand on a crimson masked Sigala and tagged Smith.

“I didn't even know about that until after my fight, someone brought it up to me and was like yeah, Stephen A. Smith, f--- that guy and I looked it up, and I was shocked,” said Starling. “Being a female fighter as long as I have, there have been times when I've been at the fights in the back and people told me I didn't deserve to be there and women don't need to fight, it's stupid for women to fight, I've dealt with that. So, to hear someone with such a big name say something like, I'm like dude, you have no idea.”

“The best part for me is not knowing that that was even a thing and then going in there and fighting like I did, and then hearing about it after, it was kind of like, well f--- you.”

The 24-year old Starling is the latest in a wave of fighters who have found themselves on the fringes of pro boxing and MMA before finding instant gratification and notoriety in BKFC. Prior to her bare-knuckle debut, she was 1-1 in pro boxing and 1-1 in MMA, struggling to find consistency in her career. Starling says that she had wanted to try bare knuckle long ago, but her previous coach advised against it. Unsure of where to go next, and not wanting to return to MMA, she and her new coach reached out to BKFC and had a series of negotiations that didn’t pan out.

Suddenly, on Christmas morning, a contract appeared in her inbox for a fight on Super Bowl weekend, and an overjoyed Starling signed and sent it back instantly.

A bare-knuckle boxing event sponsored by a kratom company taking place during a pandemic would seem like it would be as far away from the mainstream as it could possibly be. However, the event—and Starling and Sigala’s fight in particular—dominated mainstream coverage of combat sports over the weekend, and even had a grip on boxing Twitter on Friday night.

Even Starling’s peers, fellow bare-knuckle fighters, perhaps the most hardened people in the planet, were in awe, showering her with praise when she came back through the curtain following her fight.

“I was just thinking oh, I just went and put on a normal show, and I came back and people were like that was the f---ing fight of the night, that sh-- was crazy, and I was like, really? I was like oh really, thank you. I just went in and fought hard, and I guess me being hard on myself, I was like it was a good fight, but I didn't know it was that good. Then when I watched it, I was like oh sh--, maybe it was that good,” said Starling.

After battering one another for fifteen minutes straight, Starling and Sigala wound up in the same room immediately afterwards on neighboring tables, getting stitched up by on-site doctors. Sigala couldn’t stay long before heading to the hospital, but the two formed a bond over what they’d just endured from one another.

“I went up to her and I was like, that sh-- was really f---ing hard. I let her know that she's really tough, and I actually told her that she has really nice boobs,” joked Starling.

With the existence of BKFC’s women’s division and its greater reliance upon it with the big dollar signing of VanZant in particular, the possibility that fighting could one day become Starling’s primary—if not only--profession has increased.

The fact that women headlined Knucklemania is still a rarity in the boxing space. The first time it happened was in 2001 when Laila Ali fought Jacqui Frazier. Women have headlined shows with increasing frequency in recent years, but never on linear pay-per-view, a feat which Claressa Shields and Marie-Eve Dicare will reach in March.

Women do headline UFC events. But it can’t be ignored that the biggest star on the organization’s broadcaster, ESPN, recently made regressive comments about women’s fighting.

“When I think about pugilistic sports, I don’t like to see women involved in that at all. I just don’t like it. I wouldn’t pass, I wouldn’t promote legislating laws to prohibit them from doing so, but I don’t want to see women punching each other in the face. I don’t want to see women fighting in the octagon and stuff like that. That’s just me," said Stephen A. Smith on Larry Wilmore’s Black on the Air podcast.

Critics like Smith use the rickety crutch of these views being “their opinion,” and don the cloak of being a protector of women while in actuality infantilizing them and delegitimizing their career outlets. Smith’s discomfort is not with “pugilistic sports” in general, but with women entering an arena historically occupied exclusively by men. He is not bothered by men hurting one another, only women.

When a broadcaster as famous as Smith expresses disapproval of women’s fighting, it’s not just a throw away opinion. His words have weight and potential consequences for women’s careers.

Opportunities for fighters like Starling in gloved boxing are slim. According to BoxRec, there are only nine registered women’s fighters in the United States in the super bantamweight division where she fights. As Starling has experienced, it is very hard to get out of the starting blocks on the local scene when opponents, and as a result, opportunities and money, are scarce.

“I work really hard. The dream of fighting, I know other fighters feel this, it's a back and forth like, is it worth it? Should I keep going? How am I gonna do this? I've always somehow found a way to make it work because I just love it so much and it's what I want to do. I really so desperately wish that I could afford to train full-time all day every day and pay my bills and do everything I need to do just with fighting, but unfortunately it's not that easy,” said Starling.

“My everyday life is hard. It's hard as f---. I work a full-time job from 9-6 every day. I work a part-time job at a bakery. I have two boys, a three and a four-year old, that's tough. Me and their Dad are separated, so that's really, really hard. The past few years we've been going through our divorce and handling that but making sure that everything's okay with the boys and that they have everything they need, plus me trying to fight on top of that. So it's hard. It's easy for people to go on social media and say things. That's the thing about social media, people only post the good stuff, nobody knows what's going on in people's day to day lives. My day to day life is insane. I wake up at 4 AM, and I probably don't go to bed until midnight, and that's every day. Every single day.”

When Starling Googled her name on Saturday afternoon to see if there were any photos of her fight that she could share on social media, she couldn’t believe the amount of results in her newsfeed. After years of feeling invisible in the fight scene, she was the one getting headlines instead of VanZant.

As she drove back to her home in Clover, SC., preparing for another week of 20-hour days, Starling had to stop herself from crying. Not tears of dread or despair, but of amazement and hope.

“I've had people ask me 'if your kids didn't want you to do it, would you still do it?' Or, if they didn't enjoy it, would you still do it? I think it's hard to tell them to go for their dreams if I'm not going for mine, and giving them the example that they need,” said Starling. “It’s worth it. It’s absolutely worth it.”