LAURA
The muscles, the skills, the punching power—we all agreed: Laura was no ordinary woman boxer.
After training one night, I am eating sushi with her on First Avenue near her building, home for thirty-five of her thirty-five and a half years. We get to talking about her life before boxing. In the time Laura went from toddler to woman, her Lower East Side transformed from a working-class Polish, Puerto Rican, Ukrainian neighborhood to a dreadful heroin slum to its current incarnation as bohemian theme park, streets thronged with tourists from faraway New Jersey and Japan. Born in 1964, Laura was a child of that first, ethnic Lower East Side. Her Polish-American father and Ukrainian-American mother both grew up in the neighborhood (her father in the same apartment as Laura); they met and married there; her father became a driver for the nascent UPS and her mother an office worker. They lived in an immigrant world of Polish and Ukrainian bars and diners, some still running today, Veselka, Leshko’s, the KGB Bar (former headquarters of the Ukrainian Communist party), primped and made over for the tourists long after the Eastern European voices have disappeared. Laura went to neighborhood schools and played in Tompkins Square Park as it filled with debris and runaways and homeless men with blear faces, the city at the edge of collapse with summer brownouts and spiraling debt in the 1970s.
As Laura talks, she lifts decorative hunks of protein from her plate. Yuppie hamburger. I ask Laura if she was athletic as a youth, expecting yes.
No, she answers.
Not even in high school?
Not even in high school.
This surprises me. Laura tells me she did martial arts, karate, for thirteen years before she started boxing. I ask her how she got started.
I was in an abusive relationship, Laura says.
Physically abusive?
Physically abusive.
I stare as she keeps packing the sushi away. Perhaps Amazons are made, not born, but an abusive relationship? Any man who hit Laura now would be facing an extended hospital stay.
And … I kind of felt trapped, she says. You know, I was very young. In love. And thought, you know . . and he was an alcoholic. I was into playing housewife and cooking and baking. My mom got married when she was very young. I guess I kind of thought that was going to happen to me. My mother was married when she was eighteen. And you know, my friends in high school were out partying and going on ski trips … and I had a boyfriend. I’d run home after school.
Again surprise. Seventeen is a long way from thirty-five, but Laura seems to have traveled farther than most.
The relationship wasn’t a good one, Laura continues. He was an older guy. Eight years older than me? Nine years older maybe. Quite a bit of difference. He was Ukrainian. Ukrainian-American. He was a plumber, a hard worker. And I admired that. He would come home drunk, you know, and complain about this or that, knock me around a little. And then I’d wake up the next day and, you know, feel sorry for him, ’cause I would say, “Oh, it’s not his fault because he’s an alcoholic, he didn’t know what he …” And then he would wake up and apologize. I guess I just wanted to take care of him. We were together three years … or four years. It started when I was a junior in high school. My parents were living in the same building. They were not very happy about it at all. My father would come home and start banging on the door. And you know, “What are you doing to my daughter?” They’d get into arguments. Actually, what made me leave him, he almost got into a fistfight with my father, and the four of us, me, my sisters and my mother, had to hold my father. Had to pull my father off of him. But my father didn’t know he hit me. I tried to hide it. I think my mother
might have known. My middle sister, Lisa, knew. And then when things really got bad, she used to stay with me. Down in the apartment. Because I didn’t want to be alone with him. Finally, I got fed up, and I said, you know, “I’m not going to take this.”
And so I started martial arts to kind of build myself up. And I just loved it, loved the discipline of it. Working out, sweating, it felt so great. I don’t know if I broke up with him first or if I started the karate first, but it all fell along the same, you know, like, “I’m going to take care of myself.” And I just got into this fitness craze. Working out, taking karate three times a day. I’d go in the morning; then I’d go to work. At lunch I’d go and take the afternoon class; then I’d go back to work, and then I’d go again in the evening. I got a black belt eventually.
Before karate, the idea of being athletic had never occurred to Laura as something she might do. Had never been presented to her, perhaps. Wasn’t necessarily an option available to Polish-American girls growing up on the Lower East Side in the seventies.
Got into a little trouble with karate too because I lost too much weight, she continued. I was anorexic for a little while. I just got obsessed with body image. I think one hundred forty-seven was the most I had weighed. It must have been where I dropped down to one hundred fifteen pounds. It actually hurt for me to sit down. ’Cause, like, the bone, in my ass. Like I had no meat on me, whatsoever. I stopped getting my period. I looked like a little boy. Even my legs, my legs, were thin. I mean really. I’m one thirty now. So fifteen pounds lighter. Then one day I passed out. I was lying down on a couch and I got up and I blacked out. And that threw me. So I got up and I had something to eat. That scared me. That really scared me. So I started eating more, and I started putting on the weight. And then I started throwing up my food. I was bulimic, for about a year or two.
And then I think slowly I kind of got out of that stage, Laura says, and again, that was a self-esteem thing, you know. So I think I’m very disciplined, and I think I’m very strong, when I want to be. But I also think I’m self-destructive.
Laura’s next step toward boxing came a decade later in a karate sparring session.
We’d do round-robin sparring, where you move to your left and you fight the next person next to you and they have different levels. So as a black belt, you know, you’re supposed to control who you fight. And
I was boxing—fighting a green belt, and she got angry because … I don’t know. I kicked her to the face, but with control. But she turned around and punched me right in the face. And what do I do? I turn around and look at my instructor, like, what am I supposed to do? And that really bothered me. You know, here I am, a black belt, and I’m getting hit in the face and suddenly I’m defenseless.
“With control” in martial arts means hitting to make contact without causing injury. Yet in a truly dangerous situation, injury will be exactly what your assailant will be trying to cause. And what will keep you from flying out of control? The same dilemma I faced with kung fu after three years confronted Laura with karate after twelve.
In 1990 Laura went to a major karate tournament in England. Unlike most styles, which rely on elaborate point systems and restricted blows, her style, oyama, allows full contact (except to the head). “Which is why I liked it,” Laura says. The tournament featured two weight classes for women, divided at 140 pounds. Laura missed the lower class by 2 pounds.
I ended up fighting this woman who was about one hundred eighty pounds. And it was a full contact tournament. We had no protection on our hands … like bare-fist. It turned into a wrestling match. She was throwing me across the ring.
Fortunately for Laura, such brute antics count for little in karate, with its strict scoring system. In fact, Laura had the better technique and began to build a lead.
I scored a good low kick. I got a half point for it. I was just trying to stay away from her. After that happened and it looked like I was going to win, she came out and deliberately punched me in the face. She broke my nose. There was blood all over the place, and I was hysterical crying. My friend was, like, “Get up! Stop crying! Get up!”
Laura laughs and shakes her head.
And I was, like, “Stop, I’m bleeding.” Hysterical. I used to go crazy when I saw blood. Especially my own blood. I just couldn’t handle it.
Though the woman was disqualified, Laura, a second-degree black belt with a shelf full of trophies, had found herself undone by a single punch.
I belonged to New York Sports Club, and they had this boxing fitness class. I saw this sign for boxing, aerobic boxing, and I thought, “Oh, let me check it out.” And that’s how I really started boxing.
In the early nineties boxing began to gain a following outside its old ghetto walls. What differentiated this from boxing’s mini surge in popularity following the success of U.S. fighters in the ’76 Olympics and the first Rocky film was that the nineties upswing included women and white-collar men. There was aeroboxing, boxing fitness, boxerobics, the first yuppie boxing gyms, the first women amateurs, women’s boxing for the first time as something more than a tank top circus.
The instructor saw me and thought I was great, and he asked me if I’d be interested in teaching. So I started teaching boxing. I went to a fitness seminar at the Hyatt or something. You paid like twenty-five dollars to get in. That’s where I met Michael Olijade.
Michael Olijade,Jr., had been a middleweight contender, losing two title bouts (to Iran Barkley and Frank Tate) before a severe eye injury ended his career. One of the first boxers to recognize the money in white-collar boxing, Olijade (sporting a pirate’s eye patch) designed his own “aerobox” videos and taught classes to models and lawyers at the swank Chelsea Piers sports complex.
They have a beautiful boxing setup there, a nice-size ring. I started teaching some classes with him. And I loved it. He said, “If you’re really serious about this, you should join a boxing gym and quit the karate.” He recommended that I go to Kingsway, which his father owned. You know, I thought, “Let me give it a shot.” I think I was thirty-one. And I thought it was the last year I could fight in the Gloves, but then they raised the age. So I quit karate and I started boxing.
Laura’s conviction that she could do well in the Gloves came from watching one of her students win.
When we found out she had made it to the finals in Gloves, all her boxer friends went down to see her. And she won the Gloves. I remembered her trainer from the Gloves too and thinking that he was really good-looking. And I remembered his name, Milton.
It was 1996, Milton’s banner year in the Gloves. Six finalists, five titles. Like Laura, I sat in the audience at the Garden that night as Milton, banned from corners, stalked outside the ring, screaming instructions.
At Kingsway, Laura started working with Takunbo, Michael Jr.’s younger brother (himself a Golden Gloves champion and now professional). He had her wrap her hands and shadowbox in the din of blows
falling, men’s grunts and whistling breaths, the yammering of the speed bag. She moved under his gaze, and then the bell rang.
Okay, rest, Takunbo said.
She noticed the silence that dropped on the gym with the ringing of the bell.
Rest? Laura said.
Around her, the men who had been brutalizing the heavy bags circled aimlessly or slurped water. The once-chattering speed bag rocked slightly on its swivel.
I remember that clearly because the gym got so quiet for this one minute. And everyone stopped. I was like, “What’s going on?”
I guess Takunbo wasn’t really sure what I knew or how much I knew. We did, like, two rounds of shadowboxing, hit the bag for two rounds, hit the mitts for two rounds, speed bag for two rounds. He was like, “Okay, you’re done.” And I’m like, “That’s it?”
Wanting to spar, Laura was disappointed and decided an explanation was in order.
I’ve been working with your brother, she said. You know, he’s put me in the ring before.
Oh, okay, Takunbo said, and nodded. Let’s go then.
He stepped up to the apron and held the ropes for her to enter.
Okay, he said, and bent over. Get on my shoulders.
What? Laura said.
Get on my shoulders.
Laura straddled his neck and he lifted her in the air.
Okay, he said, I want you to do five sets of sit-ups from this position.
Laura was stunned. I don’t need to do sit-ups with you! she said. That’s not what I wanted to do in the ring! I want to spar!
Sitting across from her in the restaurant, I laugh and Laura shakes her head.
Takunbo was what, seventeen? Sixteen, seventeen. I could have been his mother.
The comedy of the first day marked only the beginning of Laura’s difficulties. The culture of boxing, transmitted orally for the most part, is extremely conservative. Female boxers are common now in the United States, with over fifteen hundred registered amateurs and three hundred pros, but for most trainers in 1996, no paradigm of a woman
fighter existed. I had never seen one before I came to New York, and even there they were all kickboxers, a sport that is more white and suburban, more accepting of women.
At Kingsway, a real boxing gym, Laura found it difficult to move forward. She sparred with two women and threw punches at some of the male fighters. In sparring, however, she encountered an unusual training tic of the burly Michael Olijade, Sr. For some reason, he would allow very few of his clients to spar outright. Instead he had them jab and block. Back and forth across the ring, jabbing and blocking, for rounds, days, weeks, months, while he trundled around the gym, giving instructions in a thick Caribbean accent: “What are you doing, man? I want you to jab-jab, block-block.” Those at Kingsway who knew how to box had learned it somewhere else. It seemed that the only people allowed to move to another stage were teenage boys—that is, the people who might traditionally become fighters.
As Laura stretched one day, she noticed a new trainer, a tall, slender man with a sardonic expression scripted upon his handsome face. The trainer had brought a group of fighters with him, younger men, black and Puerto Rican. The new group made little effort to ingratiate itself with the Kingsway crowd. They whispered and laughed among themselves as they watched the other boxers.
Over the next week, Laura realized that the new trainer was watching her. Soon he found an excuse to approach her, leaning against the wall as she hit the heavy bag, giving her one of his sly, considered gazes.
So this Spanish guy came over to me and said, “You look great,” or something like that. And I said, “Are you referring to my boxing or—” And he said, “Oh, you can hit. But you can’t punch.” And that really bothered me, you know. I got really angry. And I think he said, “Well, who are you?” Or “What’s your name?” And I said, “Well, who are you?” And he said, “Milton.” And I said, “Milton! Did you train Amy Berg?” And he said, “Yeah.” So we started talking, and I thought, “If Amy Berg can go in and win the Gloves, there’s no way that I can’t do it.”
You know, Mike and all the other trainers were coming over to me and saying, “Watch out for this guy. He’s no good. You can’t trust him.”
People would say, “Oh, you know, his style is no good.” And I’d get very defensive. Michael was always watching him, and finally he kicked Milton out.
Milton’s flirtation with Laura may have brought him to the end of the line at Kingsway, but there were plenty of other reasons. He’d already begun preparing the midget gym on 14th in the building he supered, where he’d have to pay no rent and no trainers’ fees. Laura left Kingsway soon afterward, walking the fourteen blocks and three avenues over to Milton’s new gym.
With his collector’s eye, Milton had found himself one of the best female prospects in the city. A women’s division of the Golden Gloves was created in 1995. For the first time, women were able to earn a title men had been awarded since 1927. The small number of female boxers made it relatively easy for women to win. Where a man might have to fight five times to reach the Gloves finals, a woman boxer could arrive there without a single bout. And Milton liked to win. Soon enough, he was bragging crazy on his new girl: She was rock-diesel; just the sight of her flexed biceps would terrify her opponents; she was going to litter the ring with corpses on her way to a victory.
To Laura, however, Milton expressed reservations. She intended to fight at 132, but at that weight she would face Melissa Salamone, sister of the former light heavyweight champion Lou Del Valle and a former kickboxer.
Milton told me that I should drop down to one twenty-five because I could not beat this girl. Being the insecure person that I was and am, hearing that gave me doubts in myself.
Do you think you can get down to one twenty-five? Milton would ask her. At one twenty-five you’ll knock the shit out of everybody.
But I won’t at one thirty-two?
Milton sighed in the way he sighs when confronting those who doubt the truth according to Milton LaCroix. And on it went over the weeks.
Are you under one thirty yet?
No. You still think I should get down to one twenty-five for the Gloves?
Well, if you can make that weight, you should. You’ll have an easier time.
But that girl who won last year at one twenty-five is fighting again.
Yeah, but she’s not that good. You can beat her.
But you don’t think I can beat Melissa Salamone at one thirty-two?
I didn’t say that.
You didn’t say it, but that’s what you think?
Well, she’s better than the girl at one twenty-five, so if you can fight the easier fight, why not do it?
So you don’t think I can beat Melissa?
That’s not what I’m saying.
Well, that’s what I’m hearing.
Laura’s first match came in the semifinals at Holy Cross Church in Brooklyn. After the weigh-in she sat in a little room with her three prospective opponents for the night, one of them being the previous year’s champion. While matches in preliminary rounds are made by U.S. Boxing officials (who in theory try to match opponents by experience), in the semis, bouts are decided by lot.
I was sitting there saying, “I don’t mind fighting this girl, this girl and this girl. I don’t want to fight her.” And sure enough, we pick the pills, and I get her. And I walk out of the room and my face was white. “I got Alicia.” That’s what I said to Milton. And it’s before the fight, and we’re, like, warming up, and I start crying. And Milton freaks out. “What the fuck are you doing?” Yelling, cursing and screaming at me. And I’m like, “I don’t want to fight this girl.” Hysterical crying.
An official called them to the ring and they stepped into the crowded hall. Laura’s friends clustered around, shouting encouragement. She couldn’t look at them, sniffling, her face red.
I lost the fight before I even went in there. I fought with people in my corner more than I fought in the ring. I was arguing with them between every round, just looking for a reason not to go out there and fight.
It was a close fight. It was a 3-2 decision. I wish I had known that, you know. And I would love to—I haven’t seen this fight on tape yet. And I would love to. I came out of the ring and Bill Farrell, from the Daily News, asked me if my left hand was okay. And I looked at him like, “No, my hand is fine. What are you talking about?” And my friend
told me afterward, he’s like, “You didn’t throw your left. So he thought your hand was broken.” All I did was throw my jab and hook.
Milton didn’t come up to me after the fight. He didn’t call for the next couple of days. I think I finally called him. Afterward I keep throwing it in his face that it was his fault, he told me that I couldn’t beat Melissa Salamone, and that started me off on the wrong foot. He said it was my fault because I never told him what happened in my last fight, when I got my nose broken.
Laura went on to win two Gloves titles and her first three professional fights with Milton, clashing with him all the while, even leaving him for months at a time. At thirty-six, she sees herself facing the end of her career.
Melissa Salomone is the IWBF [International Women’s Boxing Federation] champ in my weight class right now. She’s actually very good. And I would love to fight her. But you know, I’m getting tired of it. I run in the morning, I work all day and I go to the gym every night. It’s a lot of hard work. My last birthday was a wake-up call: Where are you and what do you really want? Do you want a family, do you want to settle down, do you want to keep doing the boxing? How much longer can you do it? You know, there are a lot of young girls getting involved in the sport, and I’m jealous. I wish I was twenty-five getting involved in it. I wish I started this ten years ago because I love it, but it’s a lot of discipline.
My friends tell me now that I take this too seriously. You know, “You’ve got to have fun!” But I like the discipline. I like that I’m good at it. So I’d like to try and push it as far as I can. You know, I worry sometimes about getting hurt. I’m like, “Why are you doing this?” But I can’t let that stop me. You risk getting hurt just walking down the street too. Boxing is a big sacrifice. Sometimes I think, you know, “All right, enough of this already. I want a normal life. It’s hard work.” But I want to, you know, give it maybe another year. See if I can get a shot. Get a belt.