When did you start boxing? I am asked. Depends, I say. Do you mean when I first threw a jab in the first aerobic boxing class at Crosby Street Studios where it all began—both women’s boxing and my boxing—in New York? Or do you mean when Lonnie “Lightning” Smith got in the ring with me, and me oh-so-cool and thinking, Hey, I’ve got the boxing thing down, except Lonnie was water, and I could not land a finger? Or do you mean when I first sparred with a girl? Or when I first got hit so bad that it hurt, or when I saw the black dots in my eyes, or when my knees buckled, or when my nose broke, or when I was first afraid of what I had set in motion? Or do you mean when I first stepped through the ropes for money, or back when Stephan Johnson and Juan La Porte taught me my first footwork and I felt the hunger in my body to know this thing, to be this thing, an actual boxer?
It began in 1992. There were no women boxing in 1992. There had once been women boxers, but the world and I were not aware of them. Even the boxing community (I use the term approximately) barely bothered remembering Cat Davis or Marion “The Lady Tyger” Trimiar or Jackie “The Female Ali” Tonawanda (who was briefly the male Ali’s bodyguard), or even, say, the Webber twins, Dora and Cora, even though the twins were still in the boxing community, and, it turned out, would fight again—and win—after turning forty. I had given not a moment’s thought to the existence of female boxers, because I did not like boxing. When the Scorsese movie Raging Bull played on television, in about ’85, I switched it off. I couldn’t stomach the sound of the punches, not only in the ring but also in the apartment—the male-bull, the wife-victim, the violence …
I dislike violence. Nevertheless, the first time ever I threw a punch, I was hooked. Nowadays, thousands and thousands of women who work out know how that feels, since the boxing class is a fixture on every city gym schedule. When she hears I box, a stranger usually counters with her own experience: “I took a boxing class at my gym,” she might say. “I loved it! I hurt for days! And I run thirty miles a week.” She usually has a friend who boxes, though doesn’t spar, is hazy about the difference between kickboxing and the straight-up sort, and probably changed her own allegiance to Tae-Bo in 1998. Yes, the concept of the aerobic boxing class long ago became pretty unsurprising, verging on dull, but the fact of women fighting for real has teetered on the edge of the mainstream since 1995.
That was the year the Golden Gloves—the principal amateur boxing competition in the United States—created the first female divisions. The Gloves is not the only route into the sport for men in this country, but it is the popular and sensible one. Success there wins a fighter a shot at the Nationals, and at international competition leading to the Olympics, or, for the impatient, better management for a professional debut. A woman boxer’s path is less clear, and as polymorphic as the athletes themselves. Even now, with the sport having taken off to some extent, the 2004 Olympics may or may not sprout a distaff ring, and a Gloves entrant in, say, Portland, Oregon, may or may not find an opponent in her weight class, and could conceivably win a coveted pair of diamond-studded twenty-four-karat-gold-plated boxing gloves on a walkover. In other words, there are female Golden Gloves champions who have never fought. Even odder, there are professional female boxers who enter the ring without having fought—a reckless leap, like going straight from the bunny slopes to a ski-jumping competition. I am one of these.
Let’s get clear from the start that this is no champ’s “as told to” autobiography. My record is small. The story of how I acquired it is better. If I have cared too little for the fight itself and too much for dissecting how boxing makes me feel, how it changes and challenges me, and what my gender means in this context, I’m happy. I fought to shake things up, to play with the world. And if I—sometime bookworm, singer in a band, Londoner, magazine editor, fiction writer, travel and food critic, softball addict, Caucasian of mixed heritage, pony-mad child, expatriate—could become a convincing pugilist, then anything under the sun is possible.
I wonder myself what set this obsession in motion. I suppose it’s rooted in childhood, in growing up a tomboy; and it must have something to do with following a decidedly nonlinear career in which I rarely felt I quite fitted in the world. I have to assume I am playing with my damaged parts. If I had stopped, as the majority of women do, at training, I would not think that. Training to box is one of the toughest physical challenges you can set yourself, and it is clean. But once you step through the ropes, a dimension rears up that is not pure at all. To compete as a runner, a swimmer, a player of tennis, golf, basketball, football—any noncombat sport—what you do is an extension of what you did in training, only more intense; but to compete as a boxer, your aims are suddenly quite distinct from those of your training sessions. You hope to inflict so much pain on your opponents that they fall over and can’t get up.
Nobody boxes who doesn’t have to, goes the adage, but what does “have to” mean? I used to assume the obvious, that it’s about fighting your way out of the ghetto, until I found that nothing was more alive for me than fighting my way with all my heart into one particular ghetto. I didn’t have to box for the money, but I did “have to” box, and I’m not the only one. All the boxers who appear in these pages have to, and yet the best female boxers I know all had other fish to fry. Jill Matthews (12-1-2), holder of the unified featherweight belt, is a rabbi’s daughter, hairdresser, and singer. She is a hyperkinetic motormouth who hammers out self-deprecating one-liners that Sandra Bernhardt would envy and claims to hate half the world, although everyone loves her. Veronica Simmons (22-0-0), the middleweight world amateur champion, is sleek, big, taciturn, and unfathomable—not unfriendly, not warm. She is a federal corrections officer and was an all-state college basketball champion. Lucia Rijker (14-0-0), often called the best female boxer in the world, is the charismatic life-and-soul anywhere she goes. You’d think her absolutely ego-driven, except that she’s a devoted Buddhist. Rijker was already the world kickboxing champion, and now she’s being courted for major Hollywood roles, like the lead in The Matrix, which she turned down because the filming would have coincided with her first world-title fight. Aside from boxing, it doesn’t matter what these three and I have in common, there is an affinity, a fellowship. I believe the common theme, the hunger to box, is hidden deep and can be located only by its owner. I believe the fuel for the fight derives not from what we have done, but from how we ourselves view what we have done, and from hidden things we can’t talk about easily. I believe it is related to the drive found in all athletes but that it has a distinctive flavor, and that it may not be so different in a man, except that women share discrete areas of additional pressure in this culture. When I look into my own past and heart, I see clues that suggest how any woman might understand the need to fight.
Show me a female boxer who wasn’t a tomboy and I’ll show you a liar. Not that tomboyhood is restricted to embryo pugilists; far from it. Tomboys are everywhere, and they are normal, and they are expected to grow out of it, though many, like me, never quite do. It is not the same for little boys, for whom displaying feminine behavior (not to mention wearing girls’ clothes) is taboo. This contradiction implies that qualities customarily associated with masculinity (aggression, drive, forthrightness, ebullience) are useful, whereas those generally tagged feminine (gentleness, kindness, self-deprecation, concern with appearance) are dispensable, verging on undesirable. But that notion is way outdated. A girl child today has role models—rock chicks, Xena, Oprah, Venus and Serena—who synthesize tomboyhood and femininity. Girlpower wasn’t available to my generation. For women my age and a decade on either side, being a tomboy was a rebellion against what seemed the weak position; it was a brand of defiance. Personally, I have not finished kicking against a prescribed female role that restricts us. Doors have opened, sure, but what makes me mad is that it’s still okay for girls to grow up believing what they weigh and wear is more important than what they know and read, say and do. Sports can cure that. I am fighting stereotypes.
I cannot speak for all female boxers. Often, the reasons for fighting remain unconscious, and since a boxer with doubts makes a fighter with flaws, it’s probably better that way. Women who fight do so in the boxing world—a pretty reactionary microcosm. At its worst, it is an organized crime syndicate founded on a mercenary and fear-based power structure, in which women are usually found half-naked in stilettos, displaying the round number. Women who enter this world in boxing boots are not necessarily fighting for anything more than attention. Take Christy Martin, for instance, the first famous female professional boxer, who signed with Don King and appeared in satin trunks, not a swimsuit, on the cover of Sports Illustrated after fighting on a nationally televised Mike Tyson undercard. She flatly rejects feminism: “I’m not out to make a statement about women in boxing, or even women in sports …” she said in that SI piece (titled “Gritty Woman”). “This is about Christy Martin.”
Some women who run the show don’t want to mess with the status quo either, like boxing publicist Kathy Duva, widow of the famous promoter Dan Duva (whose father was the legendary trainer Lou Duva). She has said: “I don’t want to deny any woman the right to do what she wants, but I don’t really want to promote it. Maleness is a vital component of boxing. To do it, you have to act like a guy, and that bothers me.”
But what, exactly, is “acting like a guy”? It is not a question of mere aggression, although that’s what Kathy Duva presumably means. It is not about clothes, although Christy Martin hedges her bets on that one, sporting pink trunks in the ring and leather miniskirts to meet the press. In fact, clothes are potent symbols, as well as sexual signifiers. For me they have always been a litmus test, signaling my comfort level in any situation (and who has not felt the misery of being dressed wrongly?). When I was a child, I dressed like a boy in order to play like a boy. As a teenager, when not wearing school uniform, I tried on different identities. In my twenties, conscious of sexual politics, experiments became deliberate. How I looked and the shape of my body seemed to shape my experience rather than the other way around. Some seeds of fighting lie there.
As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t a girl. I hated dolls and pink, climbed trees, and coveted my cousin’s toy guns. I crocheted well but swam better; I could throw but not dance. My first best friend was Candy, who would get sent home from nursery school for wearing trousers under her dress. She was an athletic genius who won horse shows and piano competitions. I envied her prowess. Then my best friend was Cha, who had fourteen guinea pigs and could paint but not read. We were inseperable until wrenched apart at eleven, when she was kept back and I was sent to an academic girls’ high school in a Jacobean mansion in Hammersmith. There my best friend for a couple of years was Fiona. She was a Cockney with a foul mouth, spiderleg eyelashes, orange feathercut hair, and a boyfriend named Shane. She told me about oral sex. “It tastes like ice cream,” she claimed. I hadn’t a clue what she meant. I was still mad about ponies, and had a crush on Donny Osmond. My journal recorded my moods in code, and, in obsessive detail, the scores of the intramural games in which I was team captain. Moods and scores were linked.
At school we wore a uniform topped by a gray flannel blazer adorned with the school motto: Francha Leale Toge, Old Cornish for “Loyal and free go I.” Loyal to what? Free from what? I wondered. Certainly not from the restraints of fashion, especially not after ninth grade, when we dropped uniform and met boys, when having a thin body in the right jeans became the key to success. Uniforms have their uses; they delay the time when clothes become a divisive source of anxiety. On the other hand, it was a uniform that helped me form a low opinion of sports that persisted for years and did me no good. It was what we wore for the eurhythmies called “Dance” we endured in sixth grade. That uniform consisted of baggy gray knickers— British panties—and white vests, or tank tops. Since some of us, including me, were sprouting little breasts and menstruating, this state of undress was humiliating, and however satirically Fiona and I pranced, I felt painfully exposed and thigh-conscious among child bodies and fat girls (was I one?). “Dance” was supposed to teach little girls form and grace (thanks a bunch, Isadora Duncan), through movements like wringing, where we twisted our arms wrist over wrist like baby housewives squeezing water from wet clothes, and dabbing, where we prodded the air, plink, plink, plink, as if bursting tiny fairy bubbles. This was what we got instead of gym, Little League, basketball, track, swim team. I regret that. I regret that to my seventies teenage tomboy mind, sports were more about “Dance” than anything cool, and I therefore dropped them one by one. First went the ice skating, my mother’s only sport. She who grew up in Silesia, skiing to school and skating along the river. (It was so cold then, she says, they would cry because of it, and the tears would freeze.) Then my parents, worrying about homework, made me quit my extracurricular swim team. Hockey went south next, and volleyball, netball (sad basketball), and rounders, an anemic version of softball played by British girls that is nowadays being replaced in Britain by true softball—the game that would bring me back to sports, rescuing me from aerobics a decade later.
Ninth grade marked a big change, not so much because we dropped sports and all uniforms but because we discovered our brother school. From then on, that neighboring all-boys school joined ours for after-hours dramatic activities, like murdering Shakespeare’s comedies and getting sick on cheap white wine at parties and making out. The boys were glamorous. They played rugby and rowed crew on the Thames. We wore rugby shirts as fashion. I wondered why we didn’t get to row, since our school was almost as near to the Thames. Of course we did not compete with the boys. I say “we,” but I did not belong to any of the cliques at the cliquiest school in London. They were different from the American high school sort—no cheerleaders and homecoming queens, no jocks, no geeks, no stoners and freaks. Instead, there was the drama clique (one of those boys was Hugh Grant); the art room clique; the trio known as Charlie’s Angels because they were simply perfect; the debutante set; the boy magnets; and the rest of us. The rest of us didn’t gel. Fiona was expelled. I was lonely. I read all the time. I became an amateur anthropologist and watched my classmates jockeying for status, resenting and hugging my outsiderhood.
The summer term of ninth grade a new girl arrived.
“You must all be kind to her,” said the teacher. “She will seem strange because she had a serious accident and her brain was damaged. She nearly died and is healing very slowly.”
The new girl was Candy. She had been thrown from her horse and her hat had fallen off, which was presented to us as a morality tale, as if being properly dressed were the necessary prophylactic against harm (which does not obtain, I later learned, in the boxing ring). This Candy was a stranger. Her motor skills had returned before her intellect, and I would glimpse her on the playing fields, captaining the hockey team, serving aces, skinny and childlike with legs that bowed backwards like parentheses. We never spoke again.
Meanwhile, Cha had been sent to a progressive, coed school where bullies had knives, where she outgrew our rolled-up Levis and backyard menagerie and games of Chinese jump rope and leap-frog. After my first trip to Europe sans parents, at age sixteen, joining Cha and her new stepfamily for one perfect week on the Peloponnesus, watching the sunrise wrapped in our bedsheets, drinking tea (I have a photograph); after my seventeenth summer, when my father died; after I had left for college and embarked on a three-year voyage over the edge—I got a phone call. Cha had killed herself. She was found by her mother one morning, hanging. I didn’t go to the funeral.
It left an odd impression, all my friends dematerializing. Nothing seemed solid, least of all identity. I could be anybody. I had a virulent strain of the soul disease endemic among teenagers—that nobody understands feeling—and assumed the trendy girls at school found me boring. I decided I was fat, and that this disqualified me from participating in the punk wave that hit London in 1977. To be a punk you had to look wasted and not go to a good school, so I compromised: I listened religiously to alternative DJ-god John Peel’s late show under the covers every night and scoured Portobello Market for peculiar vintage clothes. Privately, I aligned myself with Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, but I was stuck indoors, with my expatriate parents, a good girl with bad thoughts and an encyclopedic knowledge of the oeuvre of Stiff Little Fingers and XTC. I went to parties with the glamorous boys and occasionally “got off with” one of them, and cycled precariously home at two A.M., back to the sanctuary of home, and remained a virgin and went to Stranglers and Ian Drury and Clash gigs and Rock Against Racism festivals and waited for my life to start.
I was not a boxing fan, but I do remember being aware and in awe of several boxers, I think because my mother never resisted making disparaging comments when Ali was mouthing off on some chat show, or when ’Enry Cooper appeared on the aftershave adverts, endorsing the “grea’ smell uv Brut.” Henry Cooper was a British hero, though mainly remembered elsewhere for flooring Cassius Clay in the fourth in Wembley Stadium in ’64 (then losing, by TKO, in the fifth). John Conteh had less charisma but won more, a lot more. He held the WBA light heavyweight belt from 1968 to ’74, and the WBC belt from ’75 to ’77, and was therefore on TV a good deal. I remember being impressed by how nice he seemed, and even discussing this with my mother. Ali’s jubilant arrogance was beyond the pale for her, so I rooted automatically for him. I wasn’t against my mother, just the way she mistrusted anyone arrogant and physical—and Ali was proudly, almost cartoonishly, both. Though it’s hard to credit now, many people despised the most famous of boxers, especially in England, including in my home, where humility was a loud virtue. My father didn’t despise Ali. He was, in fact, immune to him, as he was to all athletes because he was blind to sports. He preferred opera, history, and wine. Boxers were the furthest possible people from my people at this point. I do have a sister eleven years my senior whom I worshiped, but did so from the other side of London, because she had moved out when I was seven. She didn’t like sports either and, as she recently told me, thinks boxers are “belligerent and nasty.”
I didn’t think that. I thought Ali and Conteh and Cooper were fascinating, yet I failed to watch their actual bouts. Had there been female combatants, it might have been different, but in the mid-seventies, I suppose women were too busy fighting for rights to fight in rings. In the U.S., there was Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine; in the U.K., we had Germaine Greer and the far more radical (and inaccessible to teens) Spare Rib. The early-seventies hippie, free sex, marijuana thing gave way to a politicized piety that presaged the dour political correctness of the eighties, while the Beatles and Stones gave way to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and other grandiose white bands for white boys. Instead of Dylan and Bowie, I listened to Top 20 hits on the radio (“Seasons in the Sun”! “Crocodile Rock”!); and, tragically, instead of Spare Rib, I listened to Cosmopolitan. That was where my first impression of the adult female world came from. I believed Cosmopolitan had my best interests at heart and I believed everything it said about how orgasms and diets are extremely important and easy to succeed in. The latter became my hobby. It caused me to gain weight and learn a style of self-loathing that today’s increasingly sophisticated magazine industry, its putative ideals ever compromised by its advertisers’ desires, still disseminates—if anything, more so on this side of the Atlantic. By the time I’d traded Cosmo for the New Musical Express, and the Top 20 for the New Wave, and Laura Ashley dresses for drainpipe jeans and vast men’s shirts and ties (a fashion moment nobody wants to revive), damage had been done. I did not enjoy the high school years.
What I learned in school: to be a good sport. To swallow my pride. Not to speak up. French, German, Spanish, Eng. Lit., Math. To count calories under my breath, all day long. To watch. That this was not my prime. Optimism.
Fall 1979, everything changed. My father had a heart attack and died that summer, just before my eighteenth birthday. By then he was skin and bone, his flesh the color of iodine and covered in an infernal itching rash from pancreatic cancer. The doctors had lied to us, telling us that he would make it, or had at least advised my mother to lie to me, at least during A Levels—the big exams that would decide my future. I loved him so much I believed the lie, despite the evidence that he was wasting away. My father had always been overweight and was forever being put on thousand-calorie diets that I watched with interest, and later joined, devouring his calorie charts while he groused and counted days to the return of cheese. To me, he was gentle, self-contained, and lenient, and it is because of him that I trust men. I got special treatment. With my mother he was demanding and condescending, which drove her to hysterics. Rather than fight back, she would blame herself for everything, and I learned to parrot my father and sister and accuse her of martyrdom, which would cause high-decibel shouting storms in the apartment, and conflict in me.
Five years after he died, I learned my father had been Jewish. I knew some of his biography—born rich in Vienna, emigrated at age fifteen, went to technical school instead of university, fought for England in World War II—but there were gaping holes in the story that, when filled in, made some sense of the war-zone aspect of home that led to my habits of solitude. When my father was thirteen, it turned out, his father had killed himself. Not because of Kristallnacht, which hadn’t happened yet, but because the economic depression had killed his hat-trimmings business and he despaired. My father had heard the news from “friends” at school who’d taunted him—Your father’s dead!—just as they’d taunted him about being a “Jew boy.” In 1935 his mother managed to get his younger sister to London on a Kinder-transport. Two months later, by the skin of his teeth (after a bout of appendicitis and the eventual intercession of an uncle already in England), he was sent too, with his mother following shortly afterwards. His twelve-year-old sister was sent to boarding school, but since there was absolutely no money, he, at just fifteen, had to make his own way. So he learned English and trained as an electrician. Soon, he took communion in secret in the Methodist Church. My mother was raised Lutheran in Germany. Her father was a Nazi sympathizer. Her brother trained—reluctantly—as an officer in the Kriegsmarine. When my mother was seventeen, her father abandoned her mother and ran off with his secretary, her brother drowned in his first U-boat operation, and her mother, defeated, killed herself.
A lot was repressed at home. There was much love, but it was not until I was fighting that I could feel any link between my parents’ pasts and my childhood and me now. The operative word here is “feel.” I’d figured out that to have as parents a converted, ashamed Jew and a Nazi-once-removed (though she herself was anything but a fascist) living in postwar, German-hating Britain, each carrying the grief and guilt of parental suicide, was a shaky foundation, but there is a gulf between knowing and understanding. When my father died, I went crazy. I left home for Manchester University, joined a band, dropped out of school, and discovered sex. I didn’t see a connection between my bereavement (double, if you count Cha) and my behavior, though for three years I didn’t cry, didn’t sleep (much), and medicated myself in and out of extreme moods via every street drug up to and including heroin. I never shot up, but did cut my arms experimentally, to see how I’d feel. I felt nothing.
But I was getting kicks at last. The rebel I’d been training since tomboy days, who’d gone to ground for years, surfaced. My secret music dream came true and my band was big around town. I still listened to the New Wave godfather, John Peel, but now we did sessions for him, and he loved us, and I often sat with him as he broadcast the show. My Portobello Road clothes looked great with my half-bleached hair and everyone knew me, and I got thin from amphetamines. My mother was distraught. My sister found me sullen and delinquent. However I spun it, that didn’t sit well with me, and I had the sensation of falling, and of unreality, and beneath the high times I was depressed. In ’81, I moved back to London with the band. We set up a record company, recorded a single, did another Peel Session, and a year later, just as four hip alternative labels (they still existed) were courting us, we split up.
And I moved to a big house with friends I still have, and I went back to school and got a degree and stopped the drugs, and lived with my boyfriend, then with the next, and I swam laps every day and started to write and gained weight, and got mired in that obsession again, and read Fat Is a Feminist Issue, and discovered a thing called an “aerobics class,” very new to London, and I liked it. Once, I went to a jazz club with my boyfriend and a bully stole my seat. He didn’t really want the seat; he was cruising for a bruising with my big boyfriend, who, contrary to his appearance, had never had a fight in his life. The arrogance of the bully got my goat, but what really killed me was the way he ignored me, though it was my seat he took, assuming that my man would do my fighting. Now, I was fit and I was big and strong, and I was angry. My heart was pounding, so badly did I want to sock the guy. I wanted him to think women worthy of attention, to think again. But my boyfriend, a friendly sort, defused the situation and, before I knew it, was headed to the bar with the guy to bond over a beer, leaving me to admire him for his grace, but still fuming. From that moment, I ached to know whether I had what it takes to have hurt the guy. I was muscular (a mixed blessing, though one I was now enjoying intermittently), but I didn’t know if I could use my strength. In the back of my mind, from then on, was always the question: Can I throw a good punch?