PRESTONPANS is a small fishing town eight miles east of Edinburgh. It is renowned as the site of the battle fought near there in 1745 between the Jacobite forces of pretender to the British throne, Charles Edward Stuart, and the government forces of Hanoverian Redcoats, led by Sir John Cope. 

It was the first battle of the ill-fated Jacobite uprising of the same year and ended after 30 minutes with the Hanoverian forces being routed in the face of the famous Highland charge.

Prestonpans’s most famous son today is Josh Taylor, a boxer who fights for nobody’s throne but his own. This weekend he steps into the ring to face California’s likewise undefeated Jose Ramirez in Las Vegas for the right to be considered the undisputed king of the light welterweight division. 

He will enter this contest with the sense of destiny common to those who achieve greatness yet who, given the point from where they began, had no right to do so. Indeed, all it takes is a quick look at his record, the manner in which Taylor has blazed a path through the division to arrive at the very summit of the sport after just 17 fights, to understand that this is a fighter who’s all about destiny. 

From the start of his pro career to now, he has fought every opponent like a man with a fiver in his wallet and a landlord breathing down his neck. Not once since first becoming world champion in 2019 against Ivan Baranchyk, before unifying the title later that year in an epic 12-round war with Regis Prograis, has the former Olympian and Commonwealth Games gold medallist evinced any sign of taking the proverbial foot off the gas.

If anything, the 30-year old’s determination and hunger has been fuelled rather than weakened by success. This is a rare quality in someone plying their trade in the hurt business, because as Marvin Hagler once famously pointed out: “It’s tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you’re sleeping in silk pyjamas.”

However, like Floyd Mayweather Jnr before him, Taylor is that rare exception to Hagler’s rule. Every door he walks through has only instilled an even more profound and fierce hunger to walk through the next one and the one after that.

This weekend brings him to the verge of becoming an undisputed king of the light welterweights, holder of all four belts, the first Scot to achieve this mantle and thus injecting the added incentive of making history, just as Ken Buchanan did before him. And just like Buchanan, Taylor’s reach for greatness is taking place on foreign soil.

This won’t faze him. By now Taylor is more than accustomed to fighting overseas, something he did throughout his storied amateur career representing Scotland and also Team GB. Further still, unlike Buchanan before him, social media has made the world a far smaller place, allowing fighters like Taylor to remain in touch with home no matter where they are in a way Buchanan could never have imagined when he flew to Panama to face the formidable Ismael Laguna and defeat him over a murderous 15 rounds in over 100 degrees heat.

Even so, the task facing Taylor in Vegas remains considerable — the most considerable of his career thus far, as he himself acknowledges. “It’s humongous, it’s colossal,” he declared in a recent interview. “It’s a massive fight, one for the history books.”

Ramirez is something of an unknown quantity this side of the pond. Apart from one outing in Macao, every one of his 26 fights have taken place in the US. He possesses the teak-toughness synonymous with fighters with Mexican blood coursing through their veins and, having had nine more rights than Taylor on his record, carries more experience than the Scottish champion.

When it comes to toughness, though, Taylor is more than the equal of any in and around the weight. Despite possessing range over most of the men he’s fought thus far, he prefers to work at mid and close range. He likes to get in the pocket and grind it out and despite at 5’10” being tall at the weight, he’s developed into a ferocious body puncher. 

The challenge against Ramirez, who stands at the same height, will be in dealing with the kind of long jab he hasn’t been presented with so far.

Under new coach Ben Davison, Taylor appears to have flourished. Davison possesses a knowledge of the game way beyond his years, and he can read a fight and fighter like few others can. The recent announcement of his link-up with US lightweight WBC champion Devin Haney confirms that his reputation has grown accordingly. 

It will be intriguing to see what game plan Davison has come up with to overcome Ramirez. Whatever it is at a certain point, given the stakes and given the pride both fighters carry, skill will give way to will. In this particular department, ever since this writer used to watch him spar as an amateur at Lochend Boxing Club in Edinburgh years ago, Taylor hasn’t changed a bit. His will to win remains as fierce now as it was then.

Of course, since then he’s developed and acquired a skill set that makes him formidable in every department. It dictates that while there may be no Highland charge in Vegas, Taylor will go about his work harnessing the spirit of those men of a bygone age. This in itself is a scary prospect for any opponent, including Ramirez, to contemplate.

Returning to Davison, in the aftermath of Billy Joe Saunders’s defeat to Canelo Alvarez, a spat has erupted between him and Saunders’s trainer for the fight, Mark Tibbs. It revolves around who said what and who influenced the decision to pull Saunders out after the eighth round, when Saunders returned to his corner with what turned out to be a fractured orbital.

Both men have issued statements giving their version of what transpired prior to Tibbs turning and indicating to the referee that the fight was over. Davison claims that as soon as Saunders got back to the corner, Tibbs told his fighter: “I’m giving you one more round,” before Davison overrode him, telling Saunders: “This fight’s being pulled.”

Whatever happened, the resulting spat between both trainers suggests that all was not right in Saunders’s camp going in. But even if Saunders’s camp had been perfect, and he at his very best on the night, Canelo operates on an entirely different plane than every other fighter in and around super middleweight and the result would have been the same.

Saunders’s lack of power sufficient to get the Mexican’s attention, and Canelo’s uncommon ferocity in this department, dictated that the stoppage was only a matter of time. The brutal nature of it though, a shattered cheekbone, concentrates the mind when it comes to the reality of a sport in which one punch really can be life-changing for all the right and wrong reasons. 

Saunders came in for heavy criticism after the fight, many pointing out that he’d been among the most critical when Daniel Dubois took a knee against Joe Joyce upon sustaining the exact same injury when they met last November. It’s just as they say: “Experience is the best teacher, and the worst experiences teach the best lessons.”

Whatever the truth regarding who said what and when in his corner, Saunders is home and recovering after undergoing successful surgery on his injury. This, ultimately, is all that matters.