“Oh my God,” I reply.
“Told you you’d know her,” says Terry, as delighted as a yenta matchmaker. Leslie’s trainer, a compact Latino guy, starts to wrap her hands, and I start to feel shaky. Leslie has at least two years’ more sparring under her belt and I have usurped her sport. This is not Crosby Street. She has not come to teach me.
“I’m amazed I never run into you here,” I say, reaching for contact.
“Oh, no, I left a while ago. This place is so fake. I’m training up in the Bronx. With the Lady Tyger—you know?”
“She’s a trainer?”
“Yeah, she’s intense. She couldn’t make it today, though.”
“She fight still?”
Leslie laughs.
“Oh, no. She gained about a hundred pounds.”
Her hands wrapped, Leslie goes to warm up, and I ask Terry the same questions as before: How far do we go? What if it gets out of hand? He says relax. Since I started sparring, Terry is more interested in me, even though he has a way of being completely charming, then disappearing abruptly behind a scrim. On insecure days, I imagine him silently ridiculing me, stupid white girl, but as I get better at boxing, and with all these men asking when am I going to fight and saying shame to put all that talent to waste, I’m beginning to trust that he’s engaged, and I’m beginning to need to, because I think I might fight soon. Terry teaches in fits and starts, watching and watching and then imparting some small gem that repairs a fault or leads to a quartz moment of understanding. He shows me a feint and a roll. “You never do this without a reason,” he says. “You do something at the end,” and I get what the pretty move is for, how you pop up with your weight distributed differently, ready to surprise the guy with a hook perhaps. With every new piece in my repertoire, I wonder how many more there can be. I love that this sport made of nothing but four punches—jab, right, hook, uppercut—is layered like the rock of a mountain. I feel the moves being tamped down inside me, one on top of another, learned, fixed, and owned. Like food into flesh, I consume a move, chew, and digest it until it, too, becomes part of me.
Leslie returns to Victor Valle’s ring and we take our corners. Now I’m more curious than nervous since Leslie is not a vicious gangsta streetfighter, and because I am cocky. At the bell, we advance and circle for what seems a long time, until one of us—I forget which—essays a jab and the other counters. The softness of her glove is irritating, until I realize that my jab, too, is pulled. I’m a bit relieved, but more disappointed. I don’t want to be polite. When Leslie taught me the speed bag, she said if you think, you can’t do it, but I bet she’s thinking now. I know I am. I remember Leslie’s jab in aerobics over a year ago, and that phrase “But I’m sparring,” and I remember wondering who she was sparring with and how it felt and—well, now I know. She’s sparring with me.
Nothing, however, happens. Between rounds, I ask Terry if it’s okay to go harder, and he says keep it steady. It’s confusing, because what we seem to be doing is dancing. I’m no masochist, but I crave the hit to make this real, I want a little chaos. What I’m feeling like is a big cat in a circus, primed to pounce yet sparing the prey, until at last, in the third round, Leslie gets one in, a beautiful hook that catches me on the cheekbone. I feel it sharply without pain and I love how it feels—or rather, I love how I can take it so easily.
“Thorry,” she lisps through the mouthguard.
“No,” I say, annoyed, “’s fine.”
“You okay?”
“Course I am. Box.”
My cheek stings but, unlike with Dennis, being hit doesn’t make me want to retaliate. I seem to have some overriding sister reflex, and the rules of sparring are opaque as ever. Surely I should hit her now? But the brakes on my fists stay locked. The notion that I might not be able to get a shot in doesn’t occur to me.
After four rounds we call it quits. I’m tired, and unsatisfied like I didn’t come. Terry unlaces my gloves, says I did fine, the bored little crowd peels off, and Leslie and her trainer depart. That evening, I’m examining the mouse under my eye, my very first, very own battle bruise, when the phone rings. It’s Leslie.
“That was cool,” she says. “Let’s definitely spar some more.”
“Sure,” I say, surprised that she wants to.
“I like the controlled sparring,” she explains. “I sparred with this woman up in the Bronx the other week. It was horrible. She was this huge brute. She just got me in the corner and laid into me. I couldn’t get out.”
“Why didn’t you stop the sparring?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t believe it was happening. It was like I was standing outside the ring watching myself getting beat up.”
Although that hasn’t happened to me, I understand how it would be; how I might also submit to the mismatch. In my spurious gym hierarchy, the huge vicious woman would have more right to the Bronx ring. But in the same system, Leslie and I have equal claim to the ring, even though she has been boxing longer; and, therefore, being cast in the role of teddy bear is an irritation. Leslie proceeds to rub salt in the wound.
“You know, I’m really sorry about that shot,” she says. “Are you okay?”
“Like I said. Of course. It’s nothing,” I snap, sounding like I’m putting on a brave face.
“No, ’cause I really wasn’t trying to hit hard, you know.”
“Look, it’s sparring. Don’t worry about it.”
We chat for a while, about the rumor that the Golden Gloves is taking girls next year, about her new job as director of Barneys Gym, and after I put the phone down I notice I am fuming. Was she crowing? Why did I hold back? Now she thinks I’m easy. Maybe the coiled-power thing was mere delusion. I’ve got to get back in the ring; I’ve got to find out more.
I’m alternating Gleason’s with Terry’s other place, SoHo Training, where he’s been hired because he is now the Manhattan boxing trainer du moment. He has also gone into business as Panther Fitness, manufacturing speed ropes in beautiful packages with sexy graphics. More and more, I only like Gleason’s. At SoHo Training I see Mad Dog Luke, he of the gold tooth, and he rants about how Terry’s a crap trainer and Gleason’s is a pussy gym and women can’t box, and yet I laugh—he’s just sore I ditched him. When he adds that Terry told him he doesn’t give a shit about training people but doesn’t mind taking their money, I laugh more feebly. Terry doesn’t seem mercenary at all, but Luke has given voice to the very thing I’ve been fearing, and the words reverberate on the days I’m feeling inept and slow. One of those days, I speak up.
“Terry, I want you to tell me if I’m wasting my time and yours wanting to fight. I want you to be honest.”
“I am,” he says, and explains how he wouldn’t even bring me to Gleason’s if I wasn’t serious because it would reflect badly on him. He says there are plenty of people who beg him to take them here, people he wouldn’t bring even once, and that nobody would talk to me if I wasn’t any good, and haven’t I seen women here getting completely blanked? He wouldn’t have put me in with Leslie, he says, if I wasn’t up to it. Leslie, he tells me, was really nervous about sparring. She thought I might be too strong. I think of the big Bronx woman and understand that I wasn’t cast in the warm and cuddly role after all, and I feel better. Victor Valle, Terry continues, would certainly not have taken the trouble to watch me on the bag and give his thoughts. That’s really something, he swears.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he says. “We spar on a regular basis. Then, in February, the Gloves start. So in late December, we decide if you want to enter.”
“The Gloves? So there are women’s Golden Gloves?”
“Well, sure there are.”
And he is right, as a headline in the Daily News, the newspaper that has staged the famous tournament for sixty-seven years, soon affirms: NEW KIND OF RING FOR LITTLE WOMAN. The article below quotes Pete Brodsky, president of USA Boxing Metro, the New York arm of amateur boxing’s governing body, who claims: “We thought there would be women competing last year, but apparently there wasn’t that much interest.” But “Interest certainly exists this year,” the article’s author continues. “Bruce Silverglade of Gleason’s Gym said yesterday there are already seven women working out at his gym and he expects the number to increase.” Then Bruce speaks up: “The women we’ve seen are all highly motivated, well conditioned athletes who are looking for competition. They have the right to compete.”
Well, all the women except me and Leslie Howe do. A rumor is afoot: USA Boxing and the Daily News might be lowering the age limit for the first women’s Gloves—to thirty-two and under instead of the men’s limit of thirty-four. Leslie, at thirty-six, is out in any case, but I, four months into my thirty-third year, am borderline. Lying is out of the question, because since that talk with Terry, I have become the proud possessor of a brand-new official USA Boxing license. Still, I am optimistic. It’s not as if there was a line round the block of thirty-two-to thirty-three-year-old female boxers. Actually, I believe I’m the only woman in New York whom the extra two years would affect.
Just in case, I’m hedging my bets with another scheme, a fight involving my mysterious potential sparring partner, Katya Bankowsky, whom I finally meet in the locker room. She is indeed about my size, if an inch smaller in every direction except biceps, a feminine Dolph Lundgren with a Yale degree, a career as a freelance producer of commercials, and a dry wit. We hit it off the day we meet, but not in the ring, because—and I’m not clear how this happens—we immediately get caught up in one of Bruce’s, as Katya puts it, harebrained schemes and consent to meet each other in a December undercard bout in Georgetown, Guyana. If this were a professional bout, we’d be disbarred from the Gloves and all amateur competition, so Bruce is trying to get it demoted to an exhibition; but in my mind it’s already fake, because Katya has been training here way longer than I, is a supercoordinated athlete who packs a punch like an ox, and she’s someone whom I like enormously. I have nil desire kill her, nor she me (I think). But nothing is quite clear.
“You know,” Katya says to me, “I’m not so sure about this. Perhaps we shouldn’t fight.”
“Oh go on, let’s do it,” I counter. “We needn’t go all out.”
“Well, that’s easy to say, but whatever we think, it can get out of hand in there.”
“Look, all we need do is decide to hold back.”
“But then you’ll hit me and I’ll get mad, and I’ll hit harder and then … You can’t necessarily control it. It could get ugly.”
Katya knows more than I about actual combat, since she recently took a fight I balked at, a last-minute substitution for a non-sanctioned amateur four-rounder at the Police versus Firefighters annual smoker for charity (the firefighter dropped out). I was there with Sam. Bruce Silverglade and Domenico Menacho were there. Katya’s cameraman was there. The reason was the same for all of us: to witness the first Gleason’s female fight outside the gym. The camera would record it for the inaugural scene of Katya’s movie, a feature-length documentary to be shot on expensive celluloid and financed on credit cards (just like Gleason’s). It already had a title, Shadow Boxers, and was about women’s boxing, whatever that might turn out to be. Shadow Boxers would consume five years, six figures, and half its director-producer’s sanity, as it metamorphosed into several different animals, ending up—well, you’ll see. But tonight’s shoot carried an irresistible “Hey, kids, let’s do the show right here” spirit, a good match for the hall throbbing with loud, partisan cops and firefighters, awash with beer. I was nervous, far more so than I had been for Terry; after all, Katya was my surrogate. Now, backstage in the opponents’ room, she was poker-faced but twitchy as Bruce stood by, avuncular, apprehensive, stoical.
“I’ve seen the police girl,” I said. “She’s small.”
“No problem, woman!” said Domenico, wrapping Katya’s hands. “You beat her easy!”
“It doesn’t matter what she’s like,” said Bruce. “You’ll do great.” I had lied. The cop had the strut of a bodybuilder and was spotted by Sam slapping large men on the back. When she stepped through the ropes and revealed the arms of Popeye, my heart both sank and sang. This was no walkover. I’d get to see my opponent, or co-boxer, in an all-action preview. Since I’d passed up the opportunity to get in the ring myself, I was secretly glad she wouldn’t have it too easy, and that I had a ringside seat.
Katya was magnificent. Never losing her head, she countered everything the cop threw, stalking her and sticking her with stiff jabs, working the body, doing it all by the book. The cop was too muscle-bound to move much or hit hard, but she was well trained and could take a punch. When the announcer declared Katya the winner and the girls’ bout the fight of the night, five hundred drunken law enforcers rose to their feet and cheered. Bruce and Domenico were proud as new dads.
At Gleason’s, Terry is all ears about the fight. He has taken to spying on Katya, leaching information for when he’ll work my corner in Guyana. He thinks it’s hilarious the way Katya and I are hanging out, “philosophizing.” He says he’s fought a lot of friends and that they keep their distance from the moment they know until the decision. When I tell him it’s different for girls and that this was why I’d wanted to fight men, he gets suddenly serious and says, What do you mean? Why? I say I’m more competitive with men, but that’s not quite right. Really, I’m not all that clear about my attitude toward fighting Katya. Watching the cop bout told me all I needed to know about her performance in the ring; now what I want to know is how it felt.
When the date is set for December 27 and I learn we’ll have to be in Georgetown over Christmas, I call it off. I couldn’t do that to my mother. As soon as the pressure’s released, I see there would have been no faking the fight, and the idea of beating up my new friend seems all the more absurd. I make friends fast, try to remain open-hearted, believe nobody on earth is a stranger—so where is the line to be drawn? Who could I hurt? Not Katya, and not Leslie. I wonder about boundaries. Is there a grain of truth in Joyce Carol Oates’s ravings? Does the fact that my body can integrate another body during sex or pregnancy make me more permeable, and therefore more vulnerable, than a man? Or have my qualms nothing to do with antique gender assumptions? This so-called noble art requires suspension of normal rules of etiquette and respect, so that in the gym, honor is attached to something I would normally find abhorrent. Had I hurt Leslie, the spectators would have been impressed, but I might have found it a Pyrrhic victory. On the other hand, I might have found it liberating in some unforeseeable way. From closer up, fighting is frightening me in different places than I thought it would, and this makes me want to do it all the more. Go into what you fear, I say.
The Guyana fight canned, I load my hopes back onto the Gloves for the five minutes it takes for the age rumor to prove true. The Daily News is intractable, despite pleading phone calls from me and from Bruce, and despite the article—entitled GOLDEN GIRLS WILL LACE UP GLOVES—that I read on the plane to London for Christmas. Its two photos are captioned: “STRIKING FIGHTING POSE: Kate Sekules works with trainer Terry Southerland” and “IN THIS CORNER is Kate Sekules of Manhattan, who will be on Golden Gloves team representing Gleason’s Gym.”
“Everyone here is very excited,” Katya has told the reporter. “Let’s face it, the Golden Gloves is a major event.”
But not for me.
After a Christmas marinating in chocolate and naps, I stayed in London on and off through April, writing a travel guide to the city. In the wrong place at the wrong time, I trained, with a sinking feeling of regression, at Allstars, an amateur gym in a deconsecrated church. In my hometown, women’s boxing was nowhere, despite Allstars’ pioneering two-hour Boxer’s Workout—led by the gym’s boss, Isola Akay—which was popular with Sunday soccer players and cool Notting Hill girls who played in bands and wore vintage sweats. It would be almost another three years before the Amateur Boxing Association of England sanctioned female amateurs, and an additional year before welterweight Jane Couch would take the British Boxing Board of Control to court and win the right to fight professionally on her home turf—a victory that the British Medical Association called “a demented extension of equal opportunities.” Now, in early 1995, the ABA would have closed down Akay’s gym if it had found me training there alongside the guys, an antifeminist sentiment the boxers seemed to share. In deep contrast with the scene at Gleason’s, I was persona non grata, weathering scowls from the laconic trainer as we worked the bags and he corrected everyone but me. But I kept going, and Akay continued to champion my illegal presence and give me padwork, and I sparred with the Scottish heavyweight pro, and the chilly climate gradually warmed up, and by the time I shipped myself back to New York, I had another second home in Allstars. Yet, as I was more tolerated there as an eccentric than accepted as an equal, I was feeling less like a bona fide boxer than ever.
Meanwhile, Katya Bankowsky, Dee Hamaguchi, and Lisa Long had undergone the rite of passage and become real combatants: the Golden Gloves finals had just finished at Madison Square Garden’s Paramount, the arena that (as the Felt Forum) had once been the fight game’s epicenter. I got back to the gym just in time for the victory party, at which Bruce made a speech and a vast cake with Congratulations Golden Gloves Champs in green icing was devoured. Only Dee had made it out of the first round—and all the way to the finals, which is only fitting, seeing as it was Dee who worked with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project to compel USA Boxing to sanction female amateurs in the first place. Her final-round vanquisher, Jill Matthews, the hairdresser and mature student, punkrock singer and rabbi’s daughter, child gymnast and hyperkinetic Roadrunner boxer, left the ring to face a phalanx of cameras, including that of Katya Bankowsky, who was filming the news crews filming Jill for a scene in Shadow Boxers.
“D’you realize you just made history, and if so, how d’you feel? Were you thinking of that going in the ring?” the CBS reporter asks her.
“Of course,” shrugs Jill.
“The question most men have, and I have,” he continues, “is … why?”
“Why d’you want to be part of history in the making?” mugs Jill. “Err. Figure it out.”
“What did you do to prepare?” another reporter asks.
“Got a manicure and a pedicure,” she explains.
“The men here,” continues the CBS reporter, “they fight Golden Gloves because they have dreams of being world champion one day and making big money. Where do you go from here?”
Jill pauses a beat.
“To a bar.”
Katya was free to shoot, having lost in the first round to twenty-three-year-old Long Islander Kathy Collins, who had taken up boxing to lose weight, lost 104 pounds in six months, lost the Gloves to Denise Lutrick, and immediately announced she intended to turn pro. That fight was weird, said Katya. Unlike in her cop bout, she had felt detached in the ring, and had allowed Collins to hit her almost without retaliating. She wasn’t sure why this had happened. Lisa Long, the world champion in escrima, a Philippine martial art, had also lost—in the first-ever round of female boxing in the Gloves—but her fight had been a shock of a more literal, visceral kind. It was horrible, she said, really nightmarish to be caught in an all-out brawl with Taneasha Harris, a tenth-grader form Mount Vernon High School, when she’d come prepared to box. Not hearing the crowd screaming for her—yell-ow, yell-ow—not by name but by the color she wore, she had nodded at the ref when he wanted to stop the bout in the third round, and she could not forgive herself. Years later, Lisa showed me a photo of what Harris had wrought that night; it was a mug shot of a torture victim, both eyes closed, her face covered in blood and welts. Yet the shame of quitting still haunted her. Of the four Gleason’s women, only Sky Hosoya was wearing a pair of gold, diamond-studded gloves to the party. She had won them without fighting, being the sole welterweight among twenty-two female entrants. Had the age limit not been lowered for women, Sky would have found an opponent: me. I expect my congratulations rang hollow.
Not that I would have been in any shape to fight. It wasn’t physical condition I lacked—my Allstars routine had kept the muscles and cardio system in good order—but desire. As Bruce likes to say, boxing is 90 percent mental, and in England my mental picture of me-the-boxer had slid further into fiction. This spring I was dragging my carcass into the gym, where I would desultorily punch bags and Dennis, roundly bemoaning my ineptitude, as if Gleason’s were a sentence I was serving. Terry, though cheerful as ever, was losing patience. “Don’t worry about the work,” he said sympathetically one day, as I beat myself up, “people all over the world are starving to death.” Terry was increasingly hard to pin down. As president of Panther Fitness, he was branching out all over, into health club consultation and bigger “boxercise” ventures, not to mention further fights of his own. At the same time, I was craving a deeper trainer relationship. I wanted someone to be there more, both literally and in spirit. My relationship with boxing itself had gone stale—like that point in any relationship when you need a damn good fight and a heart-to-heart to clear the air and begin a new phase. As I had sometimes done with boyfriends, I resisted the shake-up, preferring, I suppose, to take umbrage with boxing.
So when Bruce offered me my second opportunity to fight professionally, I passed. The bout was to be billed as the first female pro fight in New York. The challenger was Katya’s Gloves opponent, the winner of the runner-up ruby-studded silver gloves in the 139-pound weight class that she’d worked so hard to join, Kathy Collins. It was in an arena I knew, Long Island’s Westbury Music Fair, the place where Terry Southerland had beaten Kevin the bull. It was Collins’s home turf. She had wasted no time in making good her vow to be the first female professional out of the Gloves gate—the fight was in three weeks’ time. Nor did it take Bruce long to find a woman to step into the breach, another superannuated distaff boxer banned from the Gloves and curious to know how a fight felt: Leslie Howe.
The day of the fight, The New York Times printed a piece by Robert Lipsyte under the heading: FOR THESE WOMEN, A HEAVY RIGHT IS MORE POWERFUL THAN SISTERHOOD.
“It’s a few rounds early to declare a trend beyond the recent upsurge of upscale women aerobicizing through bloodless sparring,” wrote Lipsyte, “but it’s never too early to pontificate on gender matters.” Lipsyte had interviewed both Howe and Collins, and Leslie’s quote about tonight’s fight opened the piece:
“Some people will find it evil and weird, and some will find it a turn-on,” she said. “It’s a subjective reaction. There are ramifications…. Boxing feeds your ego, your sense of grandiosity.” (“Howe tends to intellectualize her sport,” opines Lipsyte). Kathy Collins recalled how she felt during her bout with Katya Bankowsky: “Everything worked, I was slipping punches, my jab. … I felt so empowered. I felt like a machine. And not a bump on me.” She told him that in her three Gloves fights “I learned a lot about aggression. … Women think of themselves as ladies, there’s the whole friendship and sisterhood thing. If boxing is going to work for us, we have to have the eye of the tiger.” How right she is, I thought, having been caught up in versions of the friendship and sisterhood thing with the very same two opponents. Of tonight’s fight, Collins said, “I don’t want to be part of some kind of novelty. If this is a sexual freak show, I’m out of here.”
Arriving early for “The War at Westbury II: Guys and Dolls”—another spectacle staged by Dennis Rappaport, the tuxedoed Hugh Hefner of Long Island who could milk razzmatazz from a greenmarket—it looked like Collins’s worry about the “sexual freak show” may have been on the money. Rappaport was busy living up to his own hype (“Where Boxing Meets Broadway”), posing outside with a chorus line of blondes in satin shorts and big red gloves. “While many boxing promoters make empty promises, Dennis Rappaport turns promises into accomplished realities,” it said in the program. “Tonight Long Island will enjoy the excitement of ladies professional boxing at the Westbury Music Fair. History in the making!”
History was going to be made at the lowest spot on the undercard, six bouts before the main event, and four before “Electrifying Lightweight”Terry Southerland would try to improve his 18-2 record. This time I was not there for Terry. At 7:30 P.M., the crowd still sparse, I took a seat alone in front of a pocket of beer-swilling fight fans in acid-washed jeans. They rated the parade of card girls according to breast size. I composed withering ripostes for when they did the same to Howe and Collins and, by the time the female four-rounder was announced, I was ready to try out my new fists on these guys—like I hadn’t in the jazz club ten years ago. I also had the “coulda bin me” feeling again, stronger than when Katya had fought. Now here came Leslie, dressed in a leopard-print hooded robe and matching trunks, head bowed, trotting the gangway with her gloves on the Lady Tyger’s shoulders, her cut man following with bucket and stool. She climbed into the ring and as she shuffled and shadow-boxed in her corner I thought I’d throw up with nerves. It couldn’t have been me! No way could I stand this. Leslie looked so cool, her inscrutable face, her sculpted legs. I was so proud of her—and at the same time, despite my vicarious terror, envious as hell. Then, after several hours it seemed, the announcer welcomed the local girl, Kathy Collins, making a big deal of her, as if she’d won belts and belts, not forgetting to mention (neither did the program) how she was fat a year ago, then took up boxing and lost over a hundred pounds. And in she came, jogging with intent, climbed through the ropes, took her corner, and raised her fists as if she’d already won. This was the one who Katya said had been a crazy person in the ring, flying at her, winging relentlessly, the one who, presumably, had learned to watch through the eye of the tiger. Sure enough, I could see her glaring at Leslie as if she hated her when they met in the middle for the referee’s talk, and I wondered how my former teacher would deal with that, knowing only her dignified side, remembering her polite sparring, the way she “tends to intellectualize her sport.” My heart was in my throat. Was she up to this?
At the bell, Collins cocked her fists, sprinted across the ring, and started in, tripling her jab, throwing wild roundhouse rights and bunches of uppercuts in a flurry more suited to the closing seconds of the final round. Howe, thank goodness, kept her head, stepping away, looking for openings. A counterpunching style looked natural on her (not that she had any choice), her defense was elegant, and I thought those punches that connected didn’t look too loaded. Still, the action was relentless, and the two-minute round seemed to last an eon. In the break, it occurred to me that none of my startling insults had been needed, so I snuck a look behind me and there sat the good old boys, meek as churchgoers, passively awaiting the next round in silence.
The bell went for the second round, and again Collins roared out of her corner, windmilling arms, fists everywhere, and again Leslie dealt with it, threw shots when she could, blocked a lot of potential damage. Who was winning was anyone’s guess. If this had been an amateur bout, Collins would have been ahead by sheer punch quantity. Amateur fights are scored on a points system. Each legal blow landed counts as one-third of a point and there is no extra merit in a hard blow. Each boxer starts each round with twenty points and at the end of each round, the blows are tallied up and the difference is deducted from the weaker performer’s score. But this was not the amateurs; this was a professional bout, and those are scored quite differently. Four criteria are taken into account by judges in a pro fight: clean hitting, effective aggressiveness, defense, and “ring generalship.” At the end of each round, the dominant boxer gets ten points, and the weaker fighter nine, eight, or seven, according to how great the discrepancy. Clearly, Kathy was way up on the aggressiveness scale tonight, and the shots of hers that landed landed clean, but Leslie certainly had the edge in defense (well, she was the only one who had any), and her ring generalship (meaning coping with situations, taking advantage of opportunities, adapting quickly to a style, neutralizing the opponent’s attack—in short, smart behavior) was impressive.
Since nothing changed in the second half of the bout—neither fighter tired or changed tactics, neither threw anything staggering or backed down—my scorecard was one big question mark. However, after the final bell, when the half-capacity crowd stood up and applauded nicely as if for an enjoyable Broadway musical, I knew who had won. Kathy Collins was the home team, the fiery fun fighter, the hungry one. I thought on aggression alone, especially since this was the “first ladies fight,” she had got it. The way she was hugging her trainer and grinning and pumping the air, she knew she had won too. The ref gathered the pair into the middle and held their arms and we waited for the announcer to come on and—hell, I was wrong. Since both ladies put in such a strong performance, he said, the judges had scored it equally. The fight was a draw.
Clearly, Kathy Collins would have taken the rematch right there. While Leslie hugged the Lady Tyger and beamed, Kathy stalked off, her face a mask of fury. I thought, Damn, you didn’t lose, what’s the fuss about? But this woman was on the warpath (literally, as it soon transpired). The mood in the arena seemed subdued, as if nobody had exactly understood the plot of the good Broadway musical. Behind me the boys exhaled. “That was okay,” said one. “They can fight,” said another. Two hours later, Terry Southerland won again.
After the excitement of the Gloves and Westbury—other people’s excitement—I, too, lost the plot. Someone in Gleason’s locker room told me a story about Dennis, how he had offered her a stipend to spar with him in private because he enjoyed being beaten up by women, and how she’d said she was flattered but had to decline. She said he was so gracious and honest that it didn’t seem gross. But I thought of Dennis’s ineffectual defense all those times I’d sparred with him, the way his blood was always showing, and I felt queasy. We’d been duped, all of us, inadvertently getting him off in the name of sport. I felt more foolish that I hadn’t caught on than angry at our misuse. Of course someone was bound to eroticize male-female sparring; how strenuously I’d ignored that scenario. What denial. I’d auditioned as an athlete and won the part of an S&M porn star. Worse, the matching masochistic drive in Sam, awakened by the feint I’d jokingly thrown at him, was getting stronger. It was exacerbated by distance, since he moved to L.A. in April and we were no longer officially together, but he still had a “thing” about my “physicality,” as he called it. He was ashamed, appalled, and entranced by it. Though he used to be my boyfriend, Sam’s new fetishization of me felt strangely like Dennis’s. This whole business was unclean. To adopt willingly the dominant position is one thing, but to be placed there against one’s will is abuse. I began to think that what I wanted was to relinquish control, to capitulate completely—in bed, yes, but also in general to a man who was strong enough—even though capitulation was precisely what I had always fought. And, obviously, in the ring capitulation is catastrophic.
Instead of working it all out in the gym, I went traveling for three months and lost boxing. I was doing the opposite of boxing: assessing the top hotels and restaurants in the western half of the United States for their Mobil five-star ratings. It was the reward for my conscientious, underpaid guidebook efforts, and anybody’s idea of a dream job. I came a bit unglued that summer, visiting friends and borrowing others’ friends in Santa Fe, L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans, Oregon, Arizona, Vancouver. In L.A., my proximity made Sam so angry I couldn’t deal with him and broke off all contact. On my privileged travels, all the confusion about sex and power I’d sublimated into the daily work of boxing resurfaced, so that by the time I returned I was hungry for the gym like never before.
The women’s locker room wears an aura of renewed vigor, and that isn’t just my projection. There are new girls, good girls, especially Bridgette Robinson and Veronica Simmons, and, fresh from her historic Gloves victory, Gleason’s new female professional, Jill Matthews. If there had ever been a ninth category (women) in that athletes’ pecking order, these three blow it away. You can tell, because the white noise of the gym commentators tunes into a definite signal from time to time, and I hear them criticized. I take this as a sign that we are being taken seriously, that the Dennis days are over. Merely watching Bridgette work the mitts with her trainer, Reggie Forde, would stop any fetish dead in its tracks. Her right hand, says Reggie, reminds him of Sonny Liston’s; she hits harder than half the men here. Well, she’s twice the size of half the men here, a big, bald brute of a woman in low-slung Levi’s and a heavy key bunch on a D-ring on the belt. Bridgette, when she’s done training, enthrones herself in the orange swivel chair in the locker room, dons her wire-rimmed specs, and gets the update on everyone’s week. She drops her head and goes into spasms of laughter, stifling the sound like she’s playing pranks at the back of the schoolroom. You want to hug her, which is something that would not occur to you out there in the ring.
Now, Veronica Simmons you would never hug. She is big, too, but in baskeball-player fashion, with long legs and sleek, cut muscles. She trains with the young and patient John Toliaferro and also hits like a truck, though I have heard it said that she is too static. Veronica never smiles. She is inscrutable, even in conversation, which she holds more readily with the black girls, whether or not by design I don’t know. I wouldn’t dare pursue personal issues with her, beyond asking what she does for a living (corrections officer) and what sport preceded boxing (basketball; she won a scholarship).
Small, sinewy Jill Matthews performs constantly—in the locker room; onstage fronting her band, Times Square (with her husband, David, on guitar); probably while cutting hair; and certainly during her childhood gymnastics career that nearly took her to the Olympics. She feels she failed at that sport, she says, and now she’s getting a chance to redress it. Jill, despite her long strawberry blond mane and eyeliner, is a tomboy or—she insists—a gay man in a woman’s body (“David hates it when I say that. Eurgh, he goes. Don’t!”). About Jill it is said that she has no defense, something that I suspect is said of me, too, since it is true.
The biggest change for me is that I have a new trainer. When I came back, I didn’t specifically leave Terry, he just melted back into his busy life and his morning sessions with Victor Valle, so I looked around for a Gleason’s trainer, one of the guys who live here. I picked Angel Rivera, a thirtyish, brick-solid Puerto Rican whom I always liked. He wears baggy jeans, a white T-shirt, and a short Afro do, and seems to bring intense concentration to training his people; he always has an opinion and always laughs, flashing the whitest teeth I ever saw. Since I’ve been with Angel, I feel accepted into the fold, more a part of the gym and all who train in her. My technique has improved tenfold. I pick up my feet and acquire lateral movement, do a lot of drills where I catch a punch and counter, catch and counter, or step to the side, step in and throw, or drop down, pop up, and hook—nothing different, but it feels different. Where before I would string a bunch of moves laboriously together like beads, now they coalesce without my thinking about it. I am less awkward. Like most of the trainers, Angel has a small flock. He keeps us all on the go like a cabaret plate-spinner, cajoling one, jumping to the bag to keep that one’s momentum going, throwing a quick yell to the shadowboxer. We range from sixteen-year-old Sechew Powell, who has won the Junior Olympics several times in several different weights and is now ranked the number-one lightweight in the country, to a middle-aged professional psychic. I spar with all of them. With Sechew it’s excruciating at first, since I’m sure he must be crying with boredom, but he swears he learns something every single time, no matter who, and I, in turn, learn from his attitude. Naturally, he pulls everything, and I find it difficult to pretend it’s real. When I manage to connect, I can’t tell whether he’s allowed me to do so or whether I earned it. He says I earned it, but I still don’t know. With the psychic, the tables are turned. I am forbidden to hit her, while she tries to hit me as hard as she can. For a New Age person, she is remarkably violent. It helps me to make sense of my sparring sessions with Sechew and the others: I see how they really might get something from it, because to use defense alone is a whole lot harder than it looks.
The Golden Gloves was a milestone for women’s boxing, but the news of it, frankly, reached few people. Now, almost a year after the Collins-Howe matchup, comes an event that thrusts the sport further into the limelight than it has ever been. On March 16, 1996, at the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas, Mike Tyson, fresh out of jail, is due to challenge the British heavyweight, Frank Bruno, for his WBA belt. So little is going on in the heavyweight ranks that this show, to be televised live on pay-per-view, is bound to be watched by every remaining boxing fan on the planet. And on the undercard, for the first time in a nationally broadcast event, there is to be a women’s bout. It is going to be the TV debut of Christy “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” Martin, who signed with Don King in October 1993 and has been racking up a 34-2-2 (25 KOs) record ever since, so far invisibly. She is to face an Irish fighter, “Dangerous” Deirdre Gogarty.
Tyson reaps the expected storm of attention—after all, this is his first attempt at a belt since his release from jail for rape, the perverse nineties corollary to Ali serving time for conscientious objection. Iron Mike is not my cup of tea. At this point, long before he chewed off Holyfield’s ear, got a shrink, and seemed a bit more simpatico, he is just a bully with an ugly slugging ring style. Still, I wouldn’t miss the Tyson-Bruno bout for the world. I’m rooting all the way for Frank, a hero back home along the George Foreman cute-and-cuddly axis. But, needless to say, the main event for me is Martin-Gogarty. This is far from true for the all-male crowd I’m watching with—a couple of them sometime sportswriters—in a Greenwich Village apartment. Women shouldn’t box, they chorus, largely to get a rise out of me. This bout is going to be a joke. Bring on Mike.
Well, as the millions who watch tonight witness, it is Mike and Frank who are laughable; the main event is six minutes and fifty seconds of tedium. We are all embarrassed for boxing as Frank Bruno clings to Tyson like an orphan until Tyson pries him off and slaps him to the canvas in the third. But even as the big nonevent unrolls, talk in the apartment is still about the women, though nobody can bring himself to take them exactly seriously. “Bring back the chick fighters,” they keep saying. “Lesbians fight best.” Later, the reporters (whatever they might have said in private) will print genuine praise:
“The Gogarty-Martin bout was superior to most male fights,” writes Steve Wulf in Time magazine. “It was crisp and clean and devoid of the arm holding, head butting and eye thumbing so prevalent in boxing.”
“Not only was the bout … more competitive than the typical prelim,” concurs Richard Hoffer in Sports Illustrated (in the issue with Christy Martin on the cover), “it also had more action and better boxing than the main event.” Newsday’s Greg Logan feels the same way: the fight was “the absolute hit of the Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno card. What began with a visceral squeamish feeling for many fans—men and women alike—ended in a cascade of cheers for two athletes who gave their all.”
Whatever criticism has been thrown at Christy Martin since (and there is much of it, all concerning the way she ducks dangerous opponents), tonight in Las Vegas she is mind-blowing. Not even my opinionated companions can deny that she has perfect style. They react rather like the ringside crowd, as Tom Humphries describes it in the Irish Times: “it took five, maybe 10 seconds for the beery, testosterone charged crowd to realize they weren’t watching a novelty act. … The mixture of ferocity and serious boxing skills left the most chauvinistic ticket holders gapemouthed.” “Martin is a model fighter, hardly ever throwing an incorrect punch and always pressing the action,” Richard Hoffer expands later in the inaugural issue of SI for Women. “She, alone among King’s fighters, has never produced one boring round.”
And let’s not forget the performance of Deirdre Gogarty. There is no doubt that Martin has the upper hand, but Gogarty, who appears about ten pounds lighter, fights back every inch of the way, bloodying Christy’s nose early on (we’ll get used to that sight, she has a faucet nose) and displaying a defense as impressive as the winner’s attack. But, of course, defense doesn’t win fights.
Every single boxer, trainer, and hanger-on at Gleason’s has seen the fight. Overnight, the women here have emerged from behind the scenery, no longer spear carriers. There are roles for us! Speaking parts! Trainers scrutinize us with narrowed eyes. Could she beat Christy? I, as the only woman of approximately matching weight, am instantly cast as Christy’s inevitable nemesis. “Hey, you could beat that girl” is something I hear more than once a day. Outside the gym, if the subject of boxing arises and I boast that I partake, someone always assumes I must be that girl on the Tyson card. Everyone has heard of her. For years, Christy Martin continues to be the sole female boxer to cross the average sports fan’s radar.
When I ask Bruce what he thought of the fight, he admits to being more impressed than he believed possible—and he was already the chief proponent of women’s boxing around here. (Angel, by contrast, pulls a face and says, “Not bad.”) Take Gleason’s pulse the day after the Tyson-Bruno bout and you’d think Christy Martin was the most interesting thing to happen to boxing in years. So when Bruce announces that the girl (the term she prefers) herself is going to make one of her many media appearances right here at Gleason’s gym next week, there is quite some excitement. She will do interviews with several news crews that will tape her working out before they talk to her. When she sends word that she wants sparring partners, everyone looks the other way, has something else to do that day. I don’t get it. Why don’t they all—Veronica, Katya, Lisa, Sky (the others are too light or heavy)—leap at the chance? Do they know something I don’t?
It doesn’t matter. Aware I’m in over my head, I still want to know how it feels. Christy, after all, is the girl with the biggest slice of the pie. I decide to let my trainer be the judge.
“Angel,” I beg. “May I?”
“Sure,” he shrugs.