Stephan Johnson is dead. A routine right cross to the chin put him into a coma from which the man who taught me and thousands of New Yorkers how to punch never awoke. Stephan entered the November 20, 1999, Atlantic City bout knowing it was his final chance at a title shot. His record of 27-9-1 was that of a journeyman. After the gurney left for the emergency room, his trainer-manager spoke to the press.
“Stephan understood what his role was in boxing these days,” he said. “He knew he was just the opponent, but he was trying hard to get back into contention, to make the big money…. He is such a gladiator. He was always one fight away from hitting the big time.”
Stephan was Gleason’s first fatality. Some thousand people crammed into the gym for his memorial gathering—family, fighters, friends, and fitness boxers from Equinox Health Club. I never did read the short stories he wrote about the boxing world. He would remember to bring them next time, he said. Now that Stephan is dead, it is harder to believe what the statistics tell us, that boxing, as dangerous sports go, is relatively safe. It lies at the bottom of the mortality league, below horse racing (which claims 128 lives per thousand participants), hang gliding (56 deaths per thousand), and scuba diving (11). Even college football (3 deaths per thousand players) is more likely to kill you than pugilism. A mere 1.3 boxers per thousand die in the ring, yet death by the glove is a horrifying prospect. A public execution.
Stephan died on December 5, 1999—two years to the day since my Scranton fight. The boxing scene has changed radically during those two years—the women’s boxing scene, that is. The men have been slugging on: Oscar De La Hoya lost his crown; Roy Jones, Jr., is still unbeatable; Zab Judah looks to be joining him; sundry lawsuits are pending; and now there is this tragedy. With the men it is a case of plus ça change. But in the female ranks, events have been unrolling, some of them casting the infant sport in an unflattering Barnum and Bailey light, others garnering for it the legitimacy lacking in the masculine big-money ring.
In England, three months after my bout, the British-born welterweight champion Jane Couch won another fight—a sex-discrimination case at an industrial tribunal against the British Boxing Board of Control. The BBBC had hitherto turned down Couch’s applications for a license to box on her home turf because it claimed she would be “emotionally unstable” during her periods and more prone to accidents. Women, said the BBBC, were more susceptible than men to bruising and therefore to brain damage. A woman, it worried, might also inadvertently box while pregnant.
The evidence was “incontrovertible,” declared the tribunal, that Couch had suffered sex discrimination in the workplace, that she had been a victim of “gender-based stereotypes and assumptions.” Since then, Britain—at least the beer-swilling segment of it—has clasped Couch warmly to its bosom. Lippy and cheeky, she is a chat-show regular, has published her autobiography (titled Jane Couch), and pens a weekly advice column in The Sunday Sport, the tabloid with a higher nipple count than Hustler.
On the subject of nipples, the December 1997 Playboy won women’s boxing some of its widest coverage yet (so to speak) in an excellent, thoughtful eight-page feature story by Amy Handelsman, who did her research at the 1997 inaugural Women’s Nationals in Augusta and at two Brooklyn gyms, Gleason’s and Bed-Stuy. Though not in the least bit prurient, the piece must have struck a chord with the magazine’s teenage-boy readership, because two years later, in November 1999, Playboy reprised the subject. This time, however, the subtext had been exposed. On the cover stood a girl smiling broadly in red satin hotpants, holding her bare breasts with Everlast gloves. I.B.A. FEATHERWEIGHT CHAMPION MIA ST. JOHN NUDE, screamed the headline. Mia St. John had recently under-whelmed millions of pay-per-view fight fans as the warm-up act for Oscar De La Hoya’s loss to Felix Trinidad on September 18. It depressed me to watch that bout, because it was boring and therefore bad PR for the sport, and because the commentators kept repeating how we would soon be seeing Mia St. John stripped.
“Most female boxers hate me,” St. John claimed in her eight-page photo spread. “They’re jealous, but I don’t care. My posing can only help give women’s boxing the recognition it deserves.”
Whatever recognition women’s boxing deserves, this is not it. Neither is it a New York Times story from June 1998, headlined: FIGHTER SCRATCHED FROM BOUT: SHE’S 21 WEEKS PREGNANT, about Maria Nieves Garcia (2-1), the WIBF lightweight champion, who was so nonplussed at the revelation she insisted on two further pregnancy tests: both positive. I mean, this is good comedy, but the belittling of female boxers is getting tiresome. Around now—in mid-1998—the excitement that accompanied the early women’s bouts was running dry. Though female boxers were no longer a novelty, there still weren’t enough to go around, and mismatches were legion. We needed a big bout. Christy Martin was still the only very famous female boxer, so it had to be Christy; Christy versus Kathy Collins; or, better still, Christy versus Lucia Rijker. Kathy muscled in on one of Christy’s publicity jaunts before a Madison Square Garden undercard appearance. Hey, it’s my hometown, said Kathy. I want her. She’s just trying to steal my thunder, said Christy, refusing the challenge. Lucia’s manager, Stan Hoffman, also attempted to make the match. Christy kept turning them down, as the purse got fatter and fatter. It grew to $750,000, but Christy still wasn’t biting. Okay, said Lucia, you don’t think it’s enough? Then we’ll make it winner-takes-all. Christy, her credibility flat on the canvas, sidestepped that one, too.
As for me, I left Colin. We never recovered from that bout. We stayed friends, though, and now among his trainees are the 2000 women’s national amateur featherweight champion and a fitness boxer who’s making quite a name for herself as the manager of fighters—Andrew Murray among them. I myself turned down a few fight offers, including one last-minute substitution with a big four-figure payday. That’s when I noticed how unkeen I was to fight again. I trained alone. Then I switched to Baby—that’s Victor Babilonia, from Colombia—then, when Baby disappeared, to Hector Roca. I got reinspired. New girls arrived, including several impressively skilled athletes: Yelena Binder, aged sixteen; Chika Nakamura; Jill Emery, now the international Jr Middleweight champ. We sparred; it was heaven. I took a job. I couldn’t get to the gym as much.
Two more Golden Gloves; two more Women’s Nationals; the same winners—Veronica Simmons, Evelyn Rodriguez, Alicia Ashley, Patricia Alcivar. Just about everyone turned pro … with varying success. Evelyn was knocked out by Vienna Williams in her debut. Denise Moraetes (née Lutrick), Leona Brown, Alicia Ashley, Laura Kielczewski, and Melissa Salamone are all doing well, especially Salamone (17-0), who has also been campaigning unsuccessfully for Christy. Dee Hamaguchi and Bridgette Robinson fought their pro debuts (a draw and a win respectively). Veronica Simmons could not resist winning yet another pair of Golden Gloves and another national title (she has broken the record for amateur titles in different weight classes, male or female) but has now taken the irreversible step into the professional ring. Nobody wants to fight her. Kathy Collins (14-1-3) now has four belts—and a workout video. Jill Matthews at 8-3-0 has been a little less active lately. Lucia Rijker (14-0) has still been taken the distance by only one fighter, Dora Webber. Angela Reiss lost her second bout. She retired and switched to training others. (She got really mad when her first fighter was disqualified from the New York Metro Championships by failing the pregnancy test.) Then, in Seattle, October 1999, a boxer named Margaret MacGregor did the thing I once thought I wanted to do and took on a man. She defeated Loi Chow in a four-round unanimous decision.
And now it’s fall 2000. Shadow Boxers won prizes at six film festivals and is a hit in theaters. On the Ropes, which features the story of Tyrene Manson, Jill Matthews’s sparring partner, was nominated for an Oscar in 2000. (Tyrene, on work release from Riker’s Island, attended the Oscar ceremony.) Sometime Gleason’s habitué Karyn Kusama made a moving feature film debut about a female boxer, Girlfight, that won the Jury Prize at Sundance 2000 and made a huge splash on its September US release. Everywhere you turn, there’s a pair of women in a ring—with the notable exception of the Sydney Olympics. However, the movement (led by Denise Moraetes) to achieve the critical mass of amateurs necessary for female boxers to reach the 2004 or 2008 games is growing. We are going to need teams from twenty countries. A preview will be available in 2001 at the Worlds Tournament to be held in the United States; the U.S. team will be drawn from a slightly widened net, as the age limit was raised by a year, to thirty-four, in October 1999, to bring it in line with an International Boxing Association ruling. At the same time, the medical requirements for the Masters (over thirty-four) were drastically relaxed, paving the way for any old girls who resisted the bait I took and remain eligible for the amateurs.
Still, in all this movement, it’s the professional ranks that garner the most media coverage. The biggest news in women’s boxing since Christy Martin first fought on TV has been the rise of the fighters’ daughters: especially Laila Ali—eight wins—and Jacqui Frazier Lyde (the same Jacqui Frazier who congratulated me at the Blue Horizon). Frazier fought her debut in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her manager: Don Elbaum. John Toliaferro was there. He said the reason they stopped the bout in the first round is that it was so embarrassingly awful. But of course it was; Frazier Lyde, a lawyer, mother of three, five-nine, 186 pounds, thirty-eight years old, was making her pro debut in public before she was ready, just like I did. Just like so many women still do. Laila Ali did the same thing. I met her in May 1999. She had just started to train and was not ready to spar; she couldn’t even make the speed bag thunder yet. Her handlers swore they wouldn’t let her step into the ring for a long, long time, that they’d do right by her, that she’d probably start with the amateurs. Five months later, she knocked out an overweight twenty-seven-year-old divorced mother of two in thirty-one seconds. KID GLOVES said the New York Post headline. BRING ON ALI’S KID, SAYS JOE FRAZIER’S DAUGHTER. This is not what women’s boxing deserves. Ali is beginning to fulfill her potential, though. She is training right, and, with seven wins to her credit at the time of writing, may soon be meeting some genuine boxers. Perhaps she will take the challenge from the one who lacks her notoriety but would upset her in the ring: Laila Ali versus Veronica Simmons is the match I want to see.
I still go to Gleason’s; it’s still my second home. Now I walk from the York Street F train station in the company of hip young artists who have colonized the neighborhood in the past few years, whose annual open studio is attended by the entire Manhattan art world. Should they wish to buy a place to live around here, they would need a Mary Boone endorsement and several dot-com billionaire patrons, since a loft in DUMBO costs, what, around $1 million minimum. The Between the Bridges bar is not broken-down now. It does a roaring trade, as does its neighbor, Superfine, a restaurant serving dishes like grilled sardines with baby bok choy. In summer, there is a permanent line for the sidewalk tables. There are 112 women registered at Gleason’s—that’s fourteen percent of the membership—many of whom fight, or intend to fight. It is time for Jill Matthews to be outta here. Boxing for women is normal.