Now, whoever has courage
and a strong and collected spirit in his breast,
let him come forward, lace on the gloves
and put up his hands.
—Virgil
I have never been to DUMBO, a place so named by Realtors to redeem the grotty area “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass,” and as a sophomore New Yorker, I feel pretty hip knowing about it. Tell the truth, I have barely been to Brooklyn. My second day here, I got confused on the subway and whizzed under the East River to—maybe Borough Hall—and the sound of that word “Brooklyn,” straight from murders in the news and horror stories people love relating when you’re about to move to New York, chilled me rigid. I was scared of the subway platform. Silly me. DUMBO, mind you, is not as cuddly as its name. Take the F train to the first stop in Brooklyn; that’s York Street, Terry said. Walk two blocks and turn right. That’s Gleason’s, on the second floor. Number 75 Front Street. It is the eve of my birthday, a dog day. I love the wet hot air and no sleeves because London would be sixty degrees at best today. I go under the bridge, past barbed wire, vagrant grass in the sidewalks, derelict factory buildings, a broken bar called Between the Bridges, no deli, no lofts, no people. Terry is meeting me up there.
Here it is, in an industrial block called the Gair Building, the letters G, L, E, and so on pasted on the windows, those windows open and leaking the familiar speed-bag digada-digada like a steel stamping machine. Okay, I’m nervous, I’m nervous all over again. Stephan and Juan at Crosby Street, they were visitors in girlworld. Now I’m the imposter in guyworld. I still don’t quite believe that it’s cool for me to go there, that nobody will mind. In fact, I sort of want them to mind. Then I’ll have something to fight. I’m ready for a battle either way.
Up concrete stairs, a heavy heavy door. Opposite the door, an NYPD recruitment poster and the Virgil stanza, surprising, though it speaks in the masculine. On the left, a snack bar papered with centerfolds from boxing magazines. Smell of hot dogs, armpit musk, a treble of liniment. Ahead, a ring, a yard up off the floor, nothing like the futon rings at the Manhattan studios. This place is huge, swarming with bodies, loud with leather thumps, barbells clanging like trolley bells, hisses of boxers exhaling into a forest of bags, a lot of shouting, the bell. In relative silence, two guys spar in the first ring. There are other rings. On the right, there’s a spacious black man sitting at a table. I smile at him.
“And what can I do for you, young lady?” he starts, but then Terry appears and grabs my arm.
“Hey, Calvin, this is Kate,” he says. “Kate, this is Calvin. Calvin is the most important person at Gleason’s. You don’t get past this door if Cal says so.” Calvin is laughing. I love Calvin. Terry says let’s go meet the boss, and I’m going no no no, let’s not bother the owner, but he’s pulling me across the floor past another ring, empty, and to the corner, where there’s a big, shabby office with a scale outside and a sign on the open door—IF YOU CAME HERE TO BITCH YOU HAVE ALREADY USED UP 98% OF YOUR TIME—and an avuncular, forty-something, apple-cheeked white man juggling phones. He makes the international signal for “be right with you,” and I nod and smile and look at the walls. The walls are incredible.
In the center is a huge impressionistic oil in acid primaries of two fighters in a clinch, and all around it, floor to ceiling, is a gallery of every boxer I’ve ever heard of and tons I haven’t (but will)—black-and-white group shots of spiffy men in zoot suits, their names handwritten in white ink; Jersey Joe Walcott and Jack Dempsey in comical woollen trunks; Joe Louis, handsome and mournful; Roberto Duran; Sonny Liston; Joe Frazier looking fierce; Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta grinning; Floyd Patterson doing his peek-a-boo; that famous Neil Leifer bird’s-eye shot of Ali and a prone Cleveland Williams. Mug shots are signed: “To Bruce. My man. Carlos Ortiz.” “To Ira and all at Gleason’s. José Torres.” I peer into every frame. I think if I look hard enough, they will tell me how to box. Terry is beaming. He knew I’d like this. The owner stands, winding up the call.
“Yes, Dave, I do …” His accent is Brooklyn-Jewish. He speaks slowly and has fun in his voice. “What is he? Seven-and-frve? Okay, uh-huh. Then I need an eight-rounder for Ledoux and that’s it…. Yup. Yup. He’ll be about twenty-five…. Two grand. Okay, Dave, I gotta go, I got people here…. Ha ha ha. Okay, bye.”
“Kate, this is Bruce Silverglade. Bruce, Kate. Bruce is the boss-man. Bruce,” says Terry, “is Gleason’s.”
“Very pleased to meet you,” says Bruce. “What d’you think of our place?”
“I love this place,” I say. It’s the truth. In ten minutes I have fallen head over heels.
“You here to work, or just looking?”
“I want to work.”
“You know it,” adds Terry.
“Well, I have quite a few ladies who work out here,” says Bruce. “We were the first gym to have women. Since 1986.”
“Really?” I’m wondering what took me so long.
“So you let me know if you need anything, won’t you?”
Terry points me to the sign LADIES ROOM—LADIES ONLY. In here are no shampoo dispensers or hair dryers, just a pipe the size of a redwood trunk raining onto a mildewed carpet and paint falling off the walls in sheets. There are about two dozen lockers with names handwritten on strips of tape: Katya Bankowsky, Lisa Long, JoEllen VanOuwerkerk, Dee Hamaguchi, someone called Sky’s the Limit, and, yes, Leslie Howe. So she has company. Who are they? Are they tough? Where are they? I go out and lean against one of the rings and start wrapping my hands, acting nonchalant, like I do this every day. Well, I do. By now I own lots of Everlast handwraps and have already replaced my first bag gloves, a red vinyl Lonsdale pair I got in London, with some black leather twelve-ounce Ringside gloves. I have passed some rites of passage. I no longer get the shoulder pain or the shinsplints, but I still scrape raw patches off my knuckles. For some time now, I have been working on the focus mitts, but I can’t do on them what the fighter in the ring is doing. He’s slamming the leather into those pads in four-, five-, six-punch combinations, and bobbing and weaving, ducking and dancing to the gunshot of his glove connecting and the hiss hiss hiss of his breath, he and his trainer sharing a trance, no words. I want to do that. Terry comes over, tells me to start jumping rope, he’s got to speak with his trainer. Who? I ask. There he is, says Terry, over there, that’s his ring. Victor Valle. He says his trainer’s name with pride and with love. Yes, love, I think.
When I got obsessed with softball, I read baseball books; then, my first day in New York, at the doubleheader in Yankee Stadium, though the Yanks were atrocious and the place was so empty it echoed, I was transported. The word made flesh. Now it was boxing books. I would scan their indexes for the names of men I had met. So far, I’d found Juan La Porte, Lonnie Smith, Michael Olajidé, Jr., and his father, Sr., and now Valle was there, training Lou Costello and Gerry Cooney. As I jump rope, I sneak looks at Terry in conference with Victor Valle, frowning, then smiling, punching his arm, shrugging. Until now I have seen Terry and Lonnie and Juan and Stephan only in play clothes, off duty; but here Terry is at work—like on the T-shirt with the picture of a door opening onto an empty ring, and the inscription: “Step Into My Office.” Over there by the far ring, and in the one beside me, I get my first glimpses of the particular trainer-fighter relationship, and it moves me. I want that. It seems to contain the best of masculinity, the fraternal respect that exists between men when the hierarchy is clear, a paternal-filial bond based on an alternative blood tie. In books, on TV, fighters use the first person plural—he is not an “I,” he is a “we”: “We cut off the corners so he had nowhere to run.” The trainer does it too: “We fought hard, but it wasn’t enough tonight.” Trainer and fighter are the most intimate team. All coaches help their athlete to fight fears, to focus, but come second in the triathlon and you go home with a silver medal; come second in a fight, and you leave cut and bruised, humiliated. A trainer shares in that. Here’s Angelo Dundee on the aftermath of Ali’s March 1973 loss to Ken Norton: “Going twelve rounds with that busted jaw, Muhammad had so much courage…. But when we got to the hospital, he’s consoling me. I felt so bad, I was practically crying. But he’s saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be back.’”
I’m sure Terry chose this picturesque time of day deliberately—prime pro training time, before the amateurs and “white-collar boxers” get here. In the shadowboxing mirror, I see me jumping rope surrounded by trainers with their fighters, fighters with their trainers, and I feel at home, forgetting that I am different and that maybe I can’t have that. Presently, I’ll find out where the boxer-trainer frame warps and where it remains solid when the boxer is me; but just now, I’m enjoying the new sights, new possibilities. I never imagined there’d be palpable love here.
Everyone is wobbly, because the mirror, far from being fog-free top-to-toe, is the Mylar funhouse kind, has dried sweat on it, and is duct-taped to the wall in sections, so in this one I’m giraffe, in that one, elephant. Having a fat fit in this thing is impossible. Anyhow, I’m already away on an I’m-a-real-boxer-now trip, since I’m good at jumping rope, turning it with flicks of the wrist, alternating feet, crossing arms, in a loose rope-in-front style I copied from a skinny Rasta who trains at Allstars, the amateur gym I attend in London. Boxers glance my way. Someone says, “You done that before.” I’m glad when Terry reappears and we go into the old Crosby Street routine, which seems inferior now to the boxers’ training sessions, though the gist of it differs not at all.
Like Stephan said, all of boxing is four punches, jab, right, hook, and uppercut. And chess is six pieces, and computing is two digits, one and zero. It’s what you do with them. I shadowbox. Shadowboxing relies on imagination. Your reflection is your opponent, or when you do it in the ring, you raise a phantom opponent to dance in front of you. The boxers whip their torsos side to side, have their heads on springs, catch a punch with a glove, make a rib shield of their elbows, fold themselves down, wrap themselves up, eat the whole ring in one shuffle and step. It looks beautiful. I, by contrast, have glue on my soles and lead in my arms. I feel exposed, the only person here with no clue what an opponent is like. Padwork is better. Terry brings the mitt down for each strike so I sound major, as loud as the guys. I’ve got my guard up, ready to defend against ridicule, but instead a man with an early Beatles moptop comes over and watches intently.
“She notta sa bad,” he tells Terry.
“Kate’s cool,” he agrees, holding the pads for another one-two.
“She gonna fight?”
“We’ll see.”
“I want to,” I add between combinations.
“She oughdda fight. She hit hard.”
I love this guy. He is maybe five-foot-three. His hands, encased in silver tape, look like they’re wearing badly forged medieval armor and he has deep crow’s-feet from his sole facial expression—a smile to melt winter.
“Yeah, woman! You godda fight.” We continue padwork to the bell, but Terry doesn’t introduce us.
The bell is king. At the Manhattan gyms, it was a door-buzzer sound from a red box with little flashing bulbs like a lie detector. Here it’s a bigger box mounted on an iron pillar with a piercing electronic bweep bweep bweep, and three traffic signal lights: green for work, amber for thirty seconds to go, and red heralding the one-minute rest. Everything, but everything, in professional boxing occurs in three-minute increments. Everything, that is, except women’s bouts, where the bell goes after two minutes. (Amateur boxing also differs—from one-minute rounds for juniors to three minutes for the open category.) After three rounds of padwork, I move on to the heavybag, or I try to. They are all in use, pummeled till they swing like corpses on their chains, half a dozen slim leather cylinders, a fat canvas one, and an obese black one called SuperBag. When my turn comes, Terry stands beside me and tells me what punches to throw in what order, and again I feel uncomfortably green. Hey, I scold myself, these are pro boxers, not competition; learn from them. I use them as patterns on the double-end bag and the speed bag, getting more from them than from Terry. He’s training me a little differently now, the emphasis more on form than aerobic conditioning, and I am grateful for the close attention and proud to be the first and only female he’s brought to Gleason’s, but I can’t help noticing he is distracted. What he is here, after all, is a boxer.
“Terry, will I be able to spar soon?” I ask.
“I think we can do that,” he says.
“Who will I spar with?”
“We’ll find you someone.”
I can’t admit this to Terry, but I still don’t fully understand what sparring is. At least I know it’s practice fighting, but I don’t get how you gauge how far to go, how hard to hit, or how the trainers regulate the action, and the action here isn’t making it any clearer. Three rings—the fourth belongs to Johnny Rodz’s Unpredictable School of Pro Wresding—are alive with the sounds of sparring: guttural exhalations, slapped leather, stentorian admonitions from the ropes. It’s the first time I’ve seen fighting up close, and the noises are squishy and snuffly, nothing like the clear metallic cracks on movie soundtracks. When someone connects with an uppercut, there’s a muted splash. A blow to the head clicks on the headgear, or is a wet rag on the face. Patterns form in the breath whenever a punch derails it from the engine regularity—whiffle begets snort, pchew-pchew begets hmph—and their satin trunks swish and their boots bang through the canvas and make a blunt drum of the hollow ring. “Get him back, Jemique!” “Body! Body! BODEEE!” Trainers are furious spouses, taking it personally when their fighter does a dumb move. Then one session will suddenly pull the whole gym around it like a birthday cake, and the yelling keeps climbing to higher registers, the pace escalates, every punch spraying a sweat fountain; someone bleeds; everyone screams advice; until a Latino guy with a walking stick—his name is Sinbad—just lets rip, topping out the racket: “Ayeeeee! Ayeeeee! Ayeeeee!”
When a session is done, the combatants embrace. Even if it looked like war, they do this, and the pack dissolves and the next pair steps in. I am thrilled by the whole thing. It doesn’t strike me as violent. I see it as an abstruse language that I know slightly, as if I were in Tokyo after a year of Japanese lessons—my accent is convincing, I smile and nod, but, frankly, I haven’t a clue what they’re going on about. It is clear that the only way to get the subtleties of sparring is to spar, but even then, the rules may bend for me. I want no special treatment. In London, I learned to play pool to burst the ennui of pub blokes when a girl stepped up to the table—the way they wouldn’t even bother watching a girl’s shots. I thought beating them at their own game struck a blow for all women, and I thought so all over again with Sam and my softball swing, and with Sam not wanting to be “pussy-whipped.” Now I’m thinking it again. Let me spar, let me learn, let me show what women can do. This is funny, because nobody’s telling me I can’t.
Gleason’s is the oldest continuously operating fight gym in the United States, which—along with the fact that it has produced eighty-eight champions (and counting)—qualifies it to stand here as envoy for today’s boxing world. Other places may be slummier (Front Street, Philly), flashier (Blue Velvet, Manhattan), smaller (the Kronk, Detroit), larger (L.A. Boxing Gym), but Gleason’s is the most famous, certainly in the States, and probably in the world. Gleason’s knows this, and Bruce Silverglade is friendly to all media. Since running a fight gym, even the world’s most famous, doesn’t pay, Bruce has other irons in the fire. He owns two more Gleason’s, in Amsterdam and Liverpool (and in 1996, he would open a third, a Gleason’s “lite” at the Chelsea Piers Sports Center in Manhattan, catering, as he put it, “to the business person”). He is also an international boxing agent, a matchmaker—that’s what he was doing on the phone the day I arrived, and what he has done on the phone every day since. Bruce books the opponents. In other words, he finds the loser. When film crews need the famous fight gym for atmosphere, he collects a location fee, and in my first few weeks here, I see HBO interviewing Kevin Kelley; LL Cool J shooting a video; a dozen photography students (they get in free); an infomercial crew with Christie Brinkley and Chuck Norris; and a shoot for Cartier diamond jewelry. What they all want is gorgeous grit. And apart from cash, that’s what everyone wants from boxing.
I suppose that includes me. There is no doubt that part of what I’m falling in love with is the thing my very presence here will help subvert; that is, boxing as it used to seem—an arcane testosterone ghetto, photogenic and romantic, adoringly treated in black-and-white by Scorsese in Raging Bull or Bruce Weber in Broken Noses. I’m basking in the glamorous idea of myself in concert with the peeling walls, the ancient equipment, the intensity and ritual of this place, because I haven’t yet fully entered it. My first weeks here remind me of how I felt when I was briefly the “phone girl” in a highclass Manhattan brothel, a job I took because I thought it would be interesting to get to know the girls. Instead, I felt a sort of shame for not doing it, for seeming to hold myself above the whores, for being the one who gave out their rates and rules on the phone (“Yes, we have wrestling mats.” “No, no fisting”), vetted clients via entry video and buzzed them in (“Dude coming!”), but didn’t get my hands dirty (“Yes, I am British. No, I’m not available”). Even my overdeveloped sense of curiosity gave me no wish to discover how selling my body might feel. Here at Gleason’s, though, I do want to pay my dues. Into this society of outsiders, I—congenital outsider myself—want to be accepted. No straight man would desire to penetrate the ritual of a whorehouse, to be brought into the fold without special rules. His masculinity would be mocked. My wish to sink deep into the fight gym, however, does not threaten my femininity at all; it might even enhance it. What this says about the polarity of the genders, I am not yet sure, nor am I clear about what it means that boxing, the prototypically male sport, seems primed to germinate a female division.
The seeds of the distaff division—of this round, at least—were planted in 1986, when Bruce Silverglade allowed women through the doors for the first time three evenings a week. That year, the Mets won the World Series, and Michael Jordan became the first player since Wilt Chamberlain to top 3,000 points, in his third NBA season. Boxing was holding its own—Larry Holmes and Roberto Duran were among the world’s champions, and Cus D’Amato was training a promising teenaged protégé named Mike Tyson—but it was hardly having its heyday. Yet back in 1937, when cab driver and fight manager Bobby Gagliardi founded Gleason’s in the Bronx, boxing mattered. The sport was run by the Irish then, which is why Gagliardi eschewed his own name—ironic, because the mob was taking over, and the first two champs to come out of Gleason’s were as Italian as linguini: Phil Terranova and Jake LaMotta. At that time, there was a far more famous boxing gym (itself founded in 1920 to rival Grupp’s Gym in Harlem), the legendary Stillman’s, at 919 Eighth Avenue, where every champion trained, retired champs hung out—Jack Johnson was always there—and crowds paid a quarter to gawk at the show and at the movie stars who sat among them. In the forties, every weekday had its fight night somewhere in New York, culminating in the Bronx Coliseum Fridays and Madison Square Garden Saturdays. Boxing was huge. Then, in 1959, the professionally bad-tempered Lou Stillman sold the gym, an event that made the front page of The New York Times.
“There’s no more tough guys around, not enough slums,” Stillman told the Times. “That’s why I’m getting out of the business. The racket’s dead. These fighters today are all sissies.” Well, not all—that year, Cassius Clay from Louisville became the national 178-pound amateur champion—but perhaps the neighborhood “flatnosed, tough kids, prideful as hell” (as trainer Ted Walker described the sparring hopefuls), were getting thin on the ground.
The sissies and champs decamped to Gleason’s. It became the hot New York gym, raising its profile higher when it moved from the Bronx to near the old Madison Square Garden in 1975. The price of a spectator’s ticket was a dollar now, and that dollar bought ringside seats for the sparring sessions of Emile Griffith, Roberto Duran, Vito Antuofermo, and Larry Holmes. By the time Tim Witherspoon, Hector Camacho, and Michael Spinks were working in the two rings a decade or so later, boxing’s star had dipped. The lease expired, the rent skyrocketed, and Gleason’s crossed the East River to Brooklyn.
In 1985, Bruce Silverglade needed a change. His marriage over, sick of his job, he had been introduced to the beloved owner of Gleason’s, Ira Becker, through his extracuricular work as president of the Metropolitan Amateur Boxing Federation, and through his father, who was the Olympic boxing team’s manager. Becker was looking for a partner to buy the gym, so Bruce bought it—on credit cards (“I wasn’t credit manager at Sears for ten years for nothing”). So audacious was this method of financing in the early eighties, Fortune magazine ran a profile on him. These were heady days, a minirevival. When the gym moved to Brooklyn, Becker and Silverglade staged popular monthly cards, featuring sparring as well as amateur and exhibition bouts in Gleason’s Arena, a ring they installed in a parking lot down the block. Bob Jackson and Al Gavin’s famous Gramercy Gym, where Rocky Marciano, José Torres, and Floyd Patterson trained, closed up shop and moved into Gleason’s (where it still lives). While it was still in Manhattan, the door marked LADIES ROOM—LADIES ONLY attracted an interesting little crowd, including choreographer Twyla Tharpe, who based her next season’s work on the sweet science, society fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, who did the famous wrap dress (not inspired by handwraps but by boxers’ robes, remembers Bruce), and prolific author Joyce Carol Oates, who did much of the research for her still-in-print On Boxing there.
Oates’s book has been criticized as pretentious, and maybe it is, but I have my own particular quarrel with it. Oates, who acquired her taste for boxing from her father, claims that “Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects”—except for the fact that life is lived by people of two genders. Oates’s seat by the ring at Gleason’s (she didn’t train) offered a grandstand view of a handful of pioneering female fighters, and yet she considers herself uniquely immune to what she terms “women’s characteristic repugnance for boxing.”
“Boxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world,” she claims in On Boxing.
Men fighting men to determine worth (i.e., masculinity) excludes women as completely as the female experience of childbirth excludes men. And is there, perhaps, some connection?
In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women. (The female boxer violates this stereotype and cannot be taken seriously—she is parody, she is cartoon, she is monstrous. Had she an ideology, she is likely to be a feminist.) … Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men….
Even then, nine years before the first sanctioned amateur female bout, Oates was (dismissively) snubbing a small but determined coterie of female professional boxers. Most of these sparred in the rings at Gleason’s, and at least one trained there every day: Marion “The Lady Tyger” Trimiar, who, along with Cathy “Cat” Davis, and Jackie “The Female Ali” Tonawanda, dragged the New York State Athletic Commission to court to win the right to fight at home. (In the end, it was Gladys “Bam Bam” Smith and Toni “Leatherneck” Tucker who fought the first professional bout, duking it out on a Manhattan undercard in July 1979, for a female promoter.) The three New York boxers fought hard all through the seventies, winning far more notoriety than purses, since the competition was thin and the public skeptical. Tonawanda racked up a 35-1 record, fought two men, knocked one out, and landed a job as Muhammad Ali’s bodyguard. Tyger Trimiar broke the ban in several states, and sparred with the soon-to-be middleweight champ Vito Antuofermo in a ring outside a Little Italy café during the Feast of San Gennaro. Evidently, Oates-style distaste was the prevailing attitude at the time, and Cat Davis, the most public relations–savvy of the fighters, got a slating in The Village Voice:
“Cat Davis is a kinky media phenomenon, a product of the Great American Hype Machine,” wrote Jack Newfield in October 1978. “Her manager-boyfriend stands accused of trying to fix her fights, of controlling a fake ‘commission’ that regulates boxing, and of using phoney names for her opponents. …”
All true, probably all true. But whether or not the scene was corrupt, it staggered on, fending off “foxy boxing” associations set up by the porn industry in the seventies (although the cause wasn’t helped by fighters with names like Squeaky Bayardo, Cha Cha Wright, Gumdrop Miller, Flory “Nonstop” Goldberg, and Shirley Temple). By the mid-eighties, the sport was running out of steam.
“There was nobody to fight back then, nothing going on,” remembers Dora Webber, who, after turning pro in 1985, racked up eight wins and promptly ran out of opponents. But women’s boxing had merely gone underground, where it would gather strength for the main event yet to come. Down in West Virginia in 1987, “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Christy Martin, inadvertently fought her pro debut by entering a “toughwoman contest,” where she beat up some chain-smoking barflies and won a thousand bucks. She liked it so much, she did it again the next two years, then learned to box, and did it some more. In 1993, she signed to Don King and three years later brought women’s boxing its largest audience ever by decisioning the talented Deirdre Gogarty on the Tyson-Bruno undercard.
Underground is where the entire history of female boxing has unfolded—and there is a history. Women have been boxing in public since the eighteenth century (discounting probable ancient Greek action), and my hometown, London, is where it all began. The London Daily Post of October 7, 1728, carried this reply by Elisabeth Stokes, “styled the European championess,” to the challenge issued by Ann Field of Stoke Newington, an ass driver by trade: “As the famous Stoke Newington ass woman dares me to fight her for 10 pounds, I do assure her I will not fail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows which I shall present her with will be more difficult for her to digest than any she ever gave her asses.”
Six years before, claimed Elisabeth Stokes, she’d beaten “the famous boxing woman of Billingsgate” in nine minutes, making 1722 the earliest recorded girls’ bout. Accounts also exist of the match between Elizabeth Wilkinson and Hannah Hyfield, who fought bare-fisted on Putney Heath in 1728, and there were, no doubt, many others who bled unrecorded. Remember, the very sport of boxing was in its infancy then, just beginning to be led out of the dark era of backroom bare-knuckle fighting by “the father of pugilism,” James Figg. Male or female, there was nothing reputable about boxing.
By Victorian days, as you’d expect of that era, the tone of the commentators changed from an awestruck prurience to a hypocritical prurience: the London Times of March 24, 1807, noted that the sight of Betty Dyson and Mary Mahoney “hideously disfigured by hard blows … afforded the most disgust,” nor did it shrink from reporting how the Irish Martha Flaharty downed a pint of gin at dawn before beating Peg Carey to a bloody pulp. In fact, the Victorian British newspaper of record had far more comprehensive coverage of these girls’ brawls than today’s do, on either continent. It was not until 1888 that the first American women’s fight was reported, when Mrs. Hattie Leslie (who claimed a record of 34-0; 29 KOs) met Miss Alice Leary (52-0; 47 by knockout) in Buffalo, New York, in what was, according to Boxing Illustrated, a fierce brawl. Leary broke Leslie’s nose and floored her for two eight-counts; Leslie, her left eye almost closed, came back in the sixth to take Leary down twice, finally knocking her out in the seventh with a right to the jaw. For the Victorian woman, who couldn’t even vote, merely being seen without her stays was quite risqué, so women’s boxing would continue to masquerade as cheesecake through the nineteenth century, spending its final decade, says Boxing Illustrated, as “a popular form of entertainment in saloons, brothels, and a star attraction on the vaudeville circuit.”
Women’s boxing staggered on into the twentieth century. In the teens and twenties, Flint, Michigan, had its own subculture of stenographer-pugilists—the “Busters Club,” banned from the YWCA—while in Europe, from the twenties to the forties, women’s boxing lessons similar to today’s aerobic classes were all the rage, and carnival boxing booths often featured a female challenger. A couple of these gained considerable fame, like the Irish girl Polly Burns (the subject of the documentary film My Grandmother Was a Boxer), and the French slugger Jeanne La Mar, who, in 1911, defeated the German champion, Steffi Bernet (who went on to form the Berlin Women’s Boxing Club in 1928), then came to the U.S. in an unsuccessful search for challengers. A prefigurement of today’s situation was available in Mexico during the twenties, when promoters were all but obliged to include a women’s bout on the undercard, such was the public demand, and in Europe and the U.S., there was a vogue for girls’ boxing troupes, like the one formed in 1935 by Mickey Walker (“The Toy Bulldog”), the crowd-pulling welterweight and middleweight champ from New Jersey, in his retirement.
Out of this half-sideshow, half-sport, one boxer stood out from the crowd, a tiny girl from a small town in Yorkshire, England, later the first woman to be inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame: Barbara Buttrick. In 1945, fifteen years old and standing four-foot-six, Barbara liked to play cricket and soccer with the local lads, then beat them up. One day, wiping her muddy shoes with a sheet of newspaper after a soccer game, a story jumped out at her, headlined POLLY THE CHAMP—a piece about the then-sixty-five-year-old Polly Burns. That was it. Barbara mounted a campaign to be a boxer that took her from Yorkshire to London and on to the boxing booths of southwest England and France. At twenty-two, the Brit, now ninety pounds and almost five feet tall, left Europe with her husband-trainer for the United States, where she metamorposed into the “The Mighty Atom,” Battling Barbara Buttrick, Fly and Bantamweight Champion of the World, and improved her record to 30-1. Both in the U.S. and in her native land, Buttrick had a second career fighting laws and bans, though most who actually saw her box were converted.
“Mickey Riley, veteran Dallas fight manager and old-time boxer, said she was the neatest fighting machine he’d seen. He thought she could handle most men her weight in the ring,” reported The Dallas Morning News when Buttrick arrived in town in 1955. Among the schemes that never came off were most exhibition bouts with male fighters, including an attempt to spar in public with the actor Richard Attenborough. Barbara had had to go solo for her boxing debut. The English Variety Artists’ Federation having banned her, she topped the bill at a London music hall called the Kilburn Empire, where she skipped, shadowboxed, and hit a heavy-bag in a green spotlight, a weird idea that got very good reviews.
Photos of Buttrick’s American bouts look like odd movie stills—the opponents resemble Jane Wyman and Veronica Lake trapped in a parallel universe, big blondes in full makeup with salon hair, startled at the attack of the small Barbara. The most surreal shot records her sole defeat, at the hands of the seven-inches-taller, thirty-pounds-heavier featherweight champion JoAnn Hagan from Indiana.
“In those days, women’s boxing was frowned upon and ridiculed,” JoAnn Hagan’s then-boyfriend, a retired boxer himself, wrote me recently.
“It wasn’t the boxers you got pressure from,” says Buttrick, “it was mainly the commissioners. They didn’t like to see it.”
Twenty years later, they still didn’t like to see it, except in Nevada, where the State Athletic Commission became the first to set the ball rolling in the modern era, by granting Caroline Svendsen a license to box in 1975.
“I felt like it was Christmas day,” said Svendsen at the time. “I could hardly wait to open my presents.”
Twenty years later, the twenty-two women who entered the first New York Golden Gloves would feel the same way.
At first, the owners of the lockers in the ladies’ room are as invisible to me as Svendsen, Buttrick, Trimiar, and Tonawanda, but since Terry and I converge at Gleason’s at a variety of times, they soon start to materialize, a motley collection of every color, size, and class. What I’m seeking among them is kindred attitude. Katharine Dunn, the boxing writer and novelist, has characterized the timbre of the fight game backstage as: “men being kind to each other”—and the female version is what I hope to find in the locker room, as relief from the look-you-up-and-down rivalry of the Manhattan gyms. I am, of course, a hypocrite, because my own heart is none too generous. I judge the women I see here: Is she a talent or a dilettante? Is she here to box or to flirt? I am suspicious of the uncoordinated evening women in tight shorts and little bra tops. I scowl at them and align myself with the boxers, wearing what they wear—baggy shorts, a tank top with the straps taped together in back, a bandanna—and working as hard as they. I wonder if the men discern any difference between me and the dilettantes, or whether none of us is taken seriously.
Perhaps to deflect criticism, my first locker-room pal fails to take herself seriously. Sky Hosoya trains over lunchtime, when Terry and I often converge after his morning session (he’s training hard for a bout) and before my classes at NYU. “Sky’s the Limit” was the wrestling handle of this gravel-voiced glamourpuss who recently defected from Johnny Rodz’s ring, and who possesses grand Hollywood muscles. She looks thoroughly pugilistic, but Sky is correct in claiming that she moves like Godzilla (“We’re both from Tokyo,” she points out), and she’s on the receiving end of a lot of bitchy criticism, something I refuse to partake in—insurance against it being directed back my way. There is a vast discrepancy between Sky’s boxing ability and her popularity. “She can’t box,” say the men, smiling condescendingly. But I, too, am being watched. I feel the eyes all the time. I see Terry over there, talking about me with someone, I’m sure—with the small smiling man, whose name is Domenico Menacho, and who is becoming my fast friend, and with John Toliaferro, a friendly young trainer, good with beginners, and Sky’s trainer, Reggie Forde, a top-ranked middleweight in his day, and even Victor Valle and Hector Roca, the most famous trainers here. I tell myself it’s more flattering to be derided than ignored, in case that’s the word on me. Half pleased, half embarrassed by my half skills, I’m probably my own harshest critic, slotting myself low down in the athletes’ pecking order I’ve drawn up. It goes: 1, Champions; 2, Professionals; 3, Amateurs; 4, Black and Latino Boxers; 5, White Boxers; 6, People Who Spar; 7, Good Fitness Boxers; 8, Bad Fitness Boxers. I believe it is my own inner list, not one that really exists, but if it does exist for others, I truly hope they’ve not added a ninth category: Women.
There are additional women I see rarely or not at all, lurking around corners of time—in the morning, I hear, there’s Leslie Howe, Lisa Long from Staten Island, Dee Hamaguchi, who has a black belt in judo, and Bruce Silverglade’s girlfriend (now his wife), JoEllen VanOuwerkerk. Sometimes the impressive and friendly Tanya Dean drops in from Bed-Stuy Gym looking for sparring, and there’s the mysterious Katya Bankowsky, whom I haven’t met but who—so Bruce tells me—is my weight and wants to spar. Sparring is still a mystery. We women don’t do it, not with each other. Sky, Dee, Tanya, they do it with guys their trainers procure, usually someone under his tuition, and then there’s Dennis, a keen, pudgy “white-collar boxer” who gets in with any girl, and always gets his nose bloodied, but among ourselves, there’s a stand-off. Like at a bad singles mixer, none of us quite matches another; if we’re here at the same time, our weights diverge too far, or our abilities don’t mesh. The fitness boxers, uninterested in and unequipped for sparring, are not even in the running.
One of those is Terry’s girlfriend. I know her from SoHo Training, a lovely person in perfect shape, but no boxer. When Terry’s fight comes around, I meet her at the Westbury Music Fair, on Long Island, where the bout is taking place. It’s my first live fight. (I do watch on TV. With Sam, I saw Stephan Johnson win a decision without using his right hand. I don’t know which of us was more impressed by the fact that I knew him.) Terry has no nerves. In the gym lately he’s been gently cocky, shrugging, saying, “I don’t think he’ll give us any trouble.” I guess he knows something about the opponent, picked by Bruce in tandem with Dennis Rappaport, a Long Island promoter with a strong resemblance to Hugh Hefner. The bout is a ten-rounder, two before the main event, which is Melvin Foster versus Trevor Berbick, and he’s billed as a prospect to watch. Unlike Terry, I have nerves, but as soon as he steps in the ring, disrobes, dances, flashing his gaptoothed smile, they quiet down. He owns the ring. His opponent, a thickset brawler named Kenny Baysmore, charges him like a bull, grasping him in too many clinches, while Terry snatches himself away, zapping round the ropes like a crab on amphetamines, smooth as his moniker (“The Panther”). In round six he fells the bull with a flurry of uppercuts and a hook to the head. Afterwards, he shines in his red tracksuit, modestly accepting congratulations. He is so gracious he even introduces me to people (“Kate’s my female boxer”). If Terry’s mother were here, she could not be prouder than I.
Back in the gym, my itch to spar is now unignorable. What’s the point in perfecting combinations I’m never going to throw at a human? Maybe Terry just likes the idea of training me. He has, after all, taught me no defense. Ritchie, his only other student here, has recently started sparring. He is a guy. (And is there not, Joyce Carol Oates might ask, perhaps some connection?) Outside Gleason’s, Terry trains James Truman, editorial director of Condé Nast, the publishers of Vogue and other insidious dictators of female thought, and the running joke between us, that I’m going to beat him up, is getting stale. What if Terry’s holding me off from sparring forever, like he held off the bull opponent, sidestepping to avoid getting caught? So I ask again:
“Terry,” I say, “when can I spar?”
“I think we’re ready.”
“Really this time?”
“You know it.”
“Who with?”
“Dennis.” The pudgy white-collar guy.
“But I don’t want charity sparring,” I whine.
“Nah! Dennis is good. He goes hard. We’ll start there, then we’ll see.”
The next day, I take out my plastic mouthguard, long since boiled and formed to my top teeth, but still a virgin. Terry is ready with headgear and Vaseline, which he smears all over my face—to help blows slide off. I’m a kid with a birthday, but a big exam on the birthday. Ritchie, when he came out panting and happy after his inaugural three rounds, said he wished he hadn’t been so hyped and gone in so fast and run out of gas. He said I shouldn’t do that. There’s a lot more time in there than you think, he said. This was my most concrete advice.
Terry laces me tight into his own sparring gloves and tapes the laces.
“How far do we go, Terry? Is this a fight?”
“No, you just working.”
“Working how?”
“You’ll see.”
“How will I see?”
“You’ll know when you’re in there.”
“But what do I do?”
“You work”
“Just get in there, girl.”
And I take the corner, my first corner, and wait for the bell. It goes. I stride across the ring, but slowly, heeding Ritchie, and there’s little Dennis, crouched up behind his fists, frowning, looking as fierce as the mild-mannered can. I poke out a jab, stopping short of his face, and another, landing slack on his padded forehead. Shit, I’m supposed to hit him. Weird. I step to the right, as if he were holding up focus mitts, and I guess I look down, because—slap-bam!—I’m hit, twice, on the bone above my eye. It doesn’t hurt, but my neck was snapped back and I’m appalled, simply shocked. He hit me! He bloody hit me. But of course he did. That is what we are doing here.
“Git to work, Kate,” says Terry, laughing. Laughing! I’ll show him. I run in on Dennis, his fierce face, and stick a jab in there, on his nose, and another and another, but he doesn’t counter, so I get confused and back off.
“Git back, Kate,” says Terry, and I get back and jab again (set the combination up with the jab, Terry says—as Stephan said, as Juan said—everything behind the jab), and I intend a right hand, but Dennis’s in first with a glove in my face. It’s soft, dammit. He’s pulling his punches. That annoys me. I can take this, don’t you know? Adrenaline kicks in. I want to show them all, even in the full knowledge that this sparring is pretend. So he’s not going to hit me, huh? Well, that gives me license to hit him. So he thinks I’m delicate, huh? I’ll show him. He seems incapable of fielding my punches, and this annoys me further. Does he want to be hit? Okay, fine, I’ll hit. But the three minutes is felling me, my lungs start to rasp, Terry’s gloves feel like lead. Dennis keeps going ptew-ptew with the left in my face like a fly that I swat away, the only defense I know. When the bell goes, I turn to Terry with a bunch of feelings I’ve never kept in one place before: furious humiliation at the certitude that men are humoring me; exhilaration because this is FUN; humility at having so much to learn; pride at this being, so far, so very, very easy; and, above all, relief that I have broken the ban. I have made it to the ring.
In the second round, I hit more and harder, and I bloody Dennis’s nose. I back off, gloves out questioningly, and he nods his head, so I keep hitting. His flabby belly yields spongily when I connect, feeling revoltingly human, so I concentrate on the nose, which is nice and solid. The blood upsets me not at all. I’m rather proud of my handiwork. By the end of three rounds, I am speckled with scarlet, drenched in sweat, and cock-a-hoop.
“You see?” says Terry. “That wa’nt so bad.”
“Well, of course not. He wasn’t hitting me.” Dennis comes round, wet, stained T-shirt stuck to his convex midriff, and I ask myself who looks more like a boxer and who won.
“I wasn’t holding back, you know,” he says, unbuckling his headgear. “You did really well.”
“You know it. You did good, girl,” adds Terry.
“Yeah, well, I guess it was okay for the first time,” I mutter, angry and pleased. If he’s not lying about holding back, I must be pretty good at this, but I reckon he is lying in a habitual, kind-to-the-little-lady way. Now I’ve had a taste of sparring—or “sparring”—I see I’m starting all over again, and I’m hungry to learn. But who at Gleason’s is man enough to hit me? Maybe a real boxer; maybe only a woman.
In the locker room we keep away from the subject of sparring, and the gap left by that silence is wide. I know what I think: that we are all scared to admit we’re not yet gen-you-wine boxers. We’ve got to keep up appearances. I try to protect even myself from the knowledge that what I do is Disney sparring, and I find my tiny social firework goes off with a bigger bang when I come over all mysterious at dinner, saying, as Leslie did, I don’t know about fighting. But I spar. And I do spar most days now—with Dennis and his bloody nose, with Domenico Menacho and his medieval duct tape, or with Terry, on whom I can’t lay a glove. Domenico is by far the most satisfying because he coaches me, underscoring my mistakes by whacking me—hard. A lot of sparring is counterintuitive. My natural response to being punched in the eye, for instance, is to turn my face away, which of course leaves me blind. Dennis will pause if I do that, and Terry will tell me not to turn away, but Domenico will keep popping me until I manage to compose myself and hit back. I’m learning.
Some three weeks later, Terry is all smiles. He’s got a surprise for me, he says. He’s found a girl for me to spar. Cool! I say, catching my breath. A jolt in my stomach informs me how my desire to progress has not been entirely sincere. I’ve been enjoying the boasting opportunities of this complacent, easy sparring, as well as its other side effect: Sam has developed a brand-new crush on me. It dates from one night when I showed him a jab. “You just stopped it half an inch from my face,” he keeps saying. “You would have knocked me down. I thought your boxing was cute until then.” This sudden admiration has brought interesting repercussions in bed, and I am drinking it in, a victory in my fight to prove that women are not inferior athletes. Yet, I secretly know, it is undeserved. Well, now I have to put my money where my mouth is, and face a woman, someone who will not hold back, who is the same as me, yet who might wish to crush me, or whom I might wish to crush. I can’t predict how this will be. The prospect looks very different than it did before Gleason’s. Denuded now of personal and horrible subtexts, it has become simply the real thing.
“Who is it, Terry?”
“You’ll see.”
“No, tell me. Is she my weight? Is she good?”
“Yeah, I’d say you’re about the same.”
“What? Both?”
“Yeah, she’s a good match.”
“But who is she? Do I know her?”
“Yeah, you know her.” He’s been grinning throughout. I suspect foul play.
“Why won’t you tell me who she is, then?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
So the next day, I turn up early, and I’m all warmed up, mouthguard in pocket, my new Reyes sparring gloves Terry helped me select already laced up, shadowboxing in excited anticipation, trepidation, even elation, when she walks in with her trainer.