Teeth of glass, tongue ripped. You bit down, the body is coming apart. Serves you right, you hated it you said, that body. Serves you right. That brain. They said if your mouth is loose, your chin will smash, your jaw come undone. Cool, you thought. The bone up through the brain. A flesh flap opens, blood everywhere. They say, you go girl, you the toughest girl in here, they want that. You go. Do her bad. Bad is good. Stay in there, stay in there, suck it up, Kate, suck it up, they say. It’s only just begun.
It is fear speaking. You may as well run hard at the dark because it’s going to find you where you sit. After a while it is just funny. You see, Kathy Collins is coming to visit. Support your local team. She has been winning, fighting and winning, our pocket Christy. But something in the way she moves … She is an interesting fighter. She seems meaner than the creature of the Don King Show, the publicity-seeking coal miner’s daughter, more complicated with her notorious hundred-pound weight loss and her attitude. I have never met her, only seen her that once when she seemed to beat Leslie Howe and her world ended, temporarily, when they called it a draw.
Bruce sought me out one day. Kathy Collins is looking for work, he said. She’s got a big bout coming. Do you want to do it? But of course I do. Not. Do. Not. “Yes” isn’t so obvious now that I’ve been penetrated by blows, seen the skin of my own eye gray and violet, felt that sadness the morning after. Yes isn’t obvious, but it is inevitable. Politely, I consult with my trainer and of course he is all enthusiasm—I would be upset at anything less—and Kathy Collins is called and we are all set, me and Lisa Long, who has recovered from her lion’s-den Gloves trauma and is freshly martial. Both of us are the right size and ready.
My trainer? Naturally, I picked the guy who has been teaching other girls how to hit me. His name is Colin Morgan and he works in tandem with Reggie Forde because they are both from Guyana and knew each other back when. They hold court in their Guyanese corner, a table next to Johnny Rodz’s Unpredictable School of Professional Wrestling, where they play the endless game of dominoes—more of a domino war really—cracking tiles on the table, insulting each other, gossiping. In addition to Reggie and Colin, the clique includes Patrick Forde (Reggie’s cousin), Andrew Murray (Colin’s middleweight, whose WBA ranking wavers between two and eight), and, when he’s in town, Charles McGlaughlin, who scouts for promoters, splitting his time between Gleason’s and, would you believe it, Isola Akay’s Allstars in London.
When I left Angel, I hit on Reggie first, because he’s done great things with Bridgette and because I thought he was the boss and Colin his second. Reggie took me seriously, made me work. Immediately he showed me what Angel never could, how it came about that I’d been getting hit by right hands. He’d been watching me.
“You know, I doan’ say nottin’ bad about nobody in the gym …” he said in that sweet singsong accent of the only English-speaking country in South America. The end of the sentence never came, it didn’t have to. “You gotta protect yourself,” he said, making me hold the left glove way up and in front, bending the body like a reed. “I do,” I objected. I always argue with the experts before I comply. Most trainers were fighters (my first ones, Juan La Porte, Stephan Johnson, Lonnie Smith, Terry Southerland, still were); they teach you what they did, make you in their image. What they are used to are men who arrive complete with a stance, moves, a set of punches. But women are something quite different: fresh, keen, smart, ignorant. Bruce Silverglade says that women learn better because we don’t think we know it all like men do. It’s true. I was a deferential postulant, thirsty for knowledge, eager to please. Brand new and absorbent, I learned this thing from that one, and this thing from that one, and often the things would cancel each other out, namely: Juan La Porte’s “Don’t get on your toes like that” versus Isola Akay’s “Don’t be flat-footed, keep on your toes.” My patch work induction.
I love how Reggie moves, fluid and insouciant even now, at a dozen pounds over his fighting weight, and many years past his excellent career. One year, he was the only amateur to fight in all the world’s games up to and including the Montreal Olympics; as a professional he held light heavyweight titles; but my favorite of his accomplishments is his notice in the Guinness Book of Records as the only fighter to win two back-to-back bouts at London’s Royal Albert Hall. He’s gruff and irritable one day and chummy the next; he doesn’t iron his moods. He has the face of a small boy incessantly forced to eat broccoli. Bridgette gets fed up with him. She works ten-hour shifts for Con Ed, fixing icy cables from six A.M. and she’s exhausted by the time she gets here, but Reggie cuts her no slack, makes her go round after round on the bag while he plays dominoes. Still, during my problems with Angel she endorsed him strongly. When he’s not around, she said, you get Colin: two for the price of one.
After two weeks with Reggie, I believe we’ve reached a deadlock. (So shoot me.) He will not shift his style an inch, and my questions meet incomprehension. I’ve got his signature move—drop down, hook to the body, almost simulataneous (that’s key) short right to the chin—but now what? He has already lost interest. One day he’s gone early, so Colin Morgan offers me padwork.
Only now does it click for me that it was Colin in the other girl’s corner both those times, and how he’s usually in the little crowd at the ropes watching me spar. He is familiar. He has a remarkably small nose, a mustache, cropped hair, and big, deep, thinking eyes, a face to trust; and apart from the bad knees that stalled his career at 17–1, he’s still in fighting shape. We are the same height and age, though he looks about twenty-two.
“I fixed you be comin’ to me in you orn time,” he says after the padwork. “I don’ say a t’ing.” He grins, I grin. The padwork was the best ever: feet unglued, arms extended, wrists firmed, stiffness melted. Colin is really there with me. We have instant rapport. We joke that it’s because we’re both kind of British; we find this hilarious.
Colin’s style is the opposite of Angel’s. With Angel I boxed bent and still. Colin chases me round the whole ring; his mantra is: “Move!” My back had interpreted Angel’s “You’re all stood up” as an order to hunch; Colin straightens my back and twists my torso so my left hip bone is still pointing frontways but my upper body is more flat to the opponent instead of shoulder-in. This is counter-intuitive—the first thing I ever learned was how to lead with the shoulder, secreting my surface area behind my left side, keeping it all in a line to make as small a target as possible, the angle of my feet, the bend in my knees correcting the disequilibrium. Colin explains that bringing the body around gives you more speed with the right. Your legs move you away, your defense is to move more than to block, keeping everything in front of you. You can stay low, boxing from a crouch, or stand up. This is the British style, says Colin. You should like that. I don’t, really, but I’ve decided to put myself in his hands. I can get accustomed to this, I can relearn.
Kathy Collins’s upcoming bout will indeed be a big one. It is going to be the first-ever female professional boxing match at Madison Square Garden, and her opponent is Andrea “Sweet Feet” DeShong, an experienced, thirty-four-year-old brawler from Ohio whose claim to fame is that she is the only woman to have beaten Christy Martin—twice in the late eighties. The main event is Bronx heavyweight Lou Savarese versus Buster Mathis, Jr., with aging Puerto Rican showman Hector “Macho” Camacho and one of Gleason’s champions, Junior Jones, on the undercard. Savarese, a very handsome boy who also trains at Gleason’s, is slightly notorious for having never been beaten (in his next fight, he would lose a questionable decision to George Foreman) while never having fought anyone ranked in the top ten. Macho Camacho’s infrequent outings are by now as serious as WWF spectacles, and this one is no different—he’s facing a guy with a pitiful 10-19-1 record. Only Junior Jones (40–2, and currently between belts) is for real, but being a featherweight, and lacking the flash of Prince Naseem Hamed, he’s not much of a draw. All in all, the August 20 card, to be televised on USA Network’s Tuesday Night Fights, is a typically nineties lackluster affair. The women are the best reason to watch—at least for those few boxing fans who have so far acquired the taste—even if there is no female title at stake. The purse for each woman is a miserly $1,200 (Savarese’s payday is $20,000).
In mid–1996, women’s championship belts barely exist. In Florida, an organization called the Women’s International Boxing Federation has been up and running for some time, staging its first six-pack of title fights in April 1995 in Las Vegas, and producing rankings ever since (DeShong is ranked second in the 147–pound class; Christy Martin is number two in the 135–pound class; Collins is nowhere). The WIBF is the brainchild of no less a personage than Battling Barbara Buttrick—“The Mighty Atom,” the only female in the Boxing Hall of Fame, now in her fifties with a grown daughter of her own (“She doesn’t box,” Barbara tells me sadly, as if this were a major character flaw)—and a garrulous Irishman named Jimmy Finn, who might well be the world’s chief proponent of women’s boxing. Finn and Buttrick are doing the best they can; but the underfunded, overstretched, and unpublicized WIBF is hardly the WBA, or even the disgraceful IBF (International Boxing Federation). The two most powerful promoters, Don King (rumored to be scouting for more women to add to his stable of one) and Bob Arum (also rumored to be female-boxer shopping) do not acknowledge it. But it’s all we’ve got.
Kathy Collins doesn’t feature in the rankings because she hasn’t been noticed yet. Since the Leslie Howe draw, she has fought two four-rounders, winning both by decision. The Garden bout is her big opportunity, the female-boxing equivalent of a title shot. Had there been a junior welterweight belt, Christy Martin would have been its first guardian and, since she had been beaten by DeShong, the latter is practically a champion. Collins is shooting for the top after three fights, and nobody is giving her a snowflake’s chance in hell.
Am I nervous about sparring with Kathy? The day of her big bout, I will turn thirty-five. It is two years, almost to the day, since I arrived at Gleason’s and three weeks since I started with Colin Morgan. I’m as comfortable with the new style as a ballerina dancing the dying swan in a wet fur coat. Twenty-four-year-old Kathy Collins does not let “the friendship and sisterhood thing” dilute her aggression. Six days away from her make-or-break bout, she needs to go all-out; maybe she asked for work at a foreign gym so she wouldn’t have to batter her own teammates. I am bloody terrified. Also, I can’t wait. After the Christy cancellation, I’m dying to acquire, finally, some notion of what stuff I’ve got.
Colin is patient; Colin is calm. When I hint at my fears, he doesn’t laugh at me. He tells me how fear is normal and necessary. My boxing books confirm this, especially my favorite quote from the great light-heavyweight champion, chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, and friend of Bruce Silverglade, José Torres. In Peter Heller’s book In This Corner, he talks about what happens inside the tough guy on the block the night before his first sparring session at the gym:
All of a sudden he starts developing diarrhea, he’s very nervous, butterflies, can’t sleep, and he feels that that’s completely abnormal for a tough guy to feel that way…. So they don’t go to the gym, and that’s the end of the guy, because they don’t understand that feeling, that having diarrhea, butterflies, and being afraid is so normal, it’s not even funny. In other words, you go to the gym to learn how to control that feeling…. Fear is one quality that you need if you want to be a good fighter. That’s the quality that makes you alert and makes you aware.
So instead of fighting fears, I’m having fighting fears. I find it paradoxically relaxing to have all my nameless, floating anxieties serried together in one solid front of realistic dread. If the fear bombards me too hard, I just remind myself, Hey, it’s only sparring. Not that I know how far this proper sparring will go, but Colin says I’ll be fine. He swears he wouldn’t let me do it if he thought I couldn’t handle it, and it’s not as if we haven’t been sparring every day. I spar with Domenico, who now hits hard where he used to hold off, with Hollis Parris, a talented seventeen-year-old, and with Corey Jones, an eighteen-year-old taciturn wiseass and four-time Junior Olympic welterweight champ whom a lot of trainers avoid because he insults their boys. Corey will pop up a string of jabs from waist level, or leap in suddenly and bap the ears with both gloves as if clashing cymbals with your head in between. “Corey vex me,” says Colin. “He should turn pro. He don’ take it serious.” I can’t touch him until I learn to capitalize on his scorn for the girls, going hard when he gets lazy—then I can land some. I spar with Sandy Gutierrez, Colin’s “big daughter” (as opposed to his real daughter, eleven-year-old Cherita), a super-heavyweight with a half-shaved head and a mallet punch. Colin sometimes has to call her off me. I spar with Lisa Long, the one who had such a bad time in the first Gloves. We are perfectly matched, right down to our mutual reluctance to lay into each other severely. Lisa, in addition to holding a world title in escrima, has trained in kickboxing and tae kwon do, but boxing is “definitely the most gruelling physically and mentally,” she tells me. “Boxing takes the most discipline and concentration.” I am proud to be on a par with Lisa because she’s such a fine athlete, but it’s an uncomfortable pride because I think we tread too softly on each other’s fears. We discuss the impending Kathy Collins challenge.
“What’s the rules here? Are we supposed to go hard?” I wonder.
“I was gonna ask you that. I don’t see the point. I mean we’re doing her a favor. She’s gotta know that.”
“I don’t want her practicing her death blows on me,” I admit. “I’m going to keep it down. If she comes forward, I’m blocking.” Lisa nods.
“You just don’t know. When we go—me and you—we have a certain respect. It’s clean. We can increase the intensity.”
Lisa and I do increase the intensity, but only up to a point—a point somewhere below the big pain threshold. Cheating.
“Once I decide to go pro,” Lisa told me once, “there’s no more being nice. I’m there to make a name for myself. Unfortunately, I’ve got to be a mean bitch.”
We both know that isn’t quite true. Jill Matthews is not a mean bitch. And although her sparring sessions with Tyrene Manson are wars, they are now the best of friends. When I picture generic girlfriends, I think of hours on the phone, borrowing clothes, discussing boyfriends. I despise those clichés even as I take comfort and pleasure in them. We can be twee, a bit too cute. And when I picture generic male bonding (straight guys don’t call each other “boyfriend”), the corresponding clichés are back-slapping, competitive bantering, impersonal conversations. Jill and Tyrene’s friendship sits on neither pole. It is girl rap lyrics in action, male pattern bonding with a female twist, it is—I don’t know what it is, but I like it. It seems new.
Jill says she loathes coffee klatches. She calls girls wimps. “The minute it’s normal to box,” she says, “I’m outta here.” At the moment, she’s having trouble getting into here, her career having hit a roadblock since her debut last June against Anissa Zamarron.
“I got cut in the first ten seconds when I barreled into her head,” she says cheerfully. “There I was, in the emergency room, going to David, ‘Don’t ever let me do this again. Don’t you ever let me back in the ring.’ Two days later, I was: ‘I’ve got to do it again! When can I do it again?’” Since then, Jill has signed five contracts for her second bout. Every one has fallen through.
“I offered the second girl my purse, eight hundred dollars. She says, ‘No, I want twelve hundred.’ You know, I like getting the going rate. A hundred bucks per round is fine, but these girls, they say, ‘I want more because I have this’”—she points at her crotch. “And they wonder why men are reluctant to take us seriously. If I was a guy fighter, I’d be pissed.” Jill says she’s thinking of listing all those five fights as victories.
“I’d be champ by default. But you know what? When you spar in the gym with a girl, that counts. If they’re not gonna let us fight, then that’s the best experience I can get. I’m looking at every sparring session as a bout.” I like that thought. My fightlike nerves seem justified now; or at least not “completely abnormal” as José Torres’s hypothetical tough guy would think.
Kathy Collins has brought her trainer and a handsome man with slick black hair who, it turns out, owns her gym.
“Hi, I’m Frankie,” he says. “This is Kathy.” I thought so. I haven’t a clue what to say. How was the traffic? That’s a nice tracksuit?
“Kate,” I say, hand outstretched, smiling on one side of my mouth.
“Hi,” says Kathy, shaking with a power grip, friendly enough but not smiling. She is about five-foot-five, stocky, blond, hair braided in cornrows, pretty. She goes to change, the trainers huddle. Lisa and I will box alternate rounds, it’s decided, three each, me first.
Eventually, she is ready and I take my corner. The absolute horror of this moment is delicious. I mean, here I am at the point of no return, a minute to go, thirty seconds to go, all my bleating, all my boasting, and now, the test. This is only a test. She feels different from Lisa or Sandy or Sky or any of the boys because she’s made a one hundred-percent commitment to box, because I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me and there will be no consequences for her if she makes a mess of me. I fear she might. Kathy has the moves, she’s stretching her neck side to side, shaking out her arms, doing deep knee bends at the ropes. She makes it clear this is her profession. I have decided to respect her. I’ve told Colin. “Thass cool,” he said, “do what you do.” The bell.
We are in the middle in no time. We circle, guard up. Damn, am I going to throw the first punch or is she? I seem to have a long time to think about this. Pap! There! I did. I jabbed to her headgear. I meant that. This is only a test. And instantaneously pchooo! She counters. Didn’t hurt a bit. Didn’t feel it. Some more of that, then I try something else, other angles, an uppercut, just to see if I can get in there. She blocks. Circling again, more jabs and so on and finally, bap-boom, a right. That I felt. It wasn’t so bad. My heart is turning somersaults, I am deliriously happy. I know I’m going to be okay. She has a vocal accompaniment to her punches, like Monica Seles serving, only more sibilant: pchooo-pchooo! I think it sounds great and dangerous. I’m tempted to revert to my old hunch because this upright stance feels like a handicap, I feel like a doggie begging with his paws up, but I give it the benefit of the doubt. To tell the truth, I’m hiding behind it. This is yet another first, my first real-real sparring, and I am happy with her contender’s status for now. Lisa can be the mean bitch today.
The round goes on and on and on. If ever you feel your life is accelerating too fast, step into the ring. Time shape-shifts in here; it has geophysical topography, does a little city planning, settles into epochs of glaciation, is prone to seismic events. In the ring you need concentration fit for the most convoluted endgame or Fair Isle knitting pattern, yet you must remain nonthinking, or nonverbal anyway. It’s like meditation, a relief from my hectoring self-consciousness—or it would be, if I could only shut up, but I’m still issuing instructions to self, going in and out of the animal state. I love it. Every second is different and counts, but I’m suspending the payoff, storing information for later. It’s okay for the first round, though. Every punch I throw, I measure the distance between us, and with every punch and block and move the geometry evolves like it does with every pitch in baseball. We are moving close, toe to toe, but we are both economical with the punches. It’s what I’d hoped. Too many of the women’s Gloves bouts I’d seen—as well as Kathy Collins’s own pro debut—were marked by frenetic activity without pause. A phrase needs a caesura to be beautiful. Rhythm. She’s probably thinking I’m boringly cautious, but I don’t care, I like it like this. At the thirty-second bell, we close up. I am careful because she is dangerous on the inside—I’ve noted her left uppercut and this roundhouse right to the body that’s her favorite shot—but I’m surprised how open I find her midsection. From the corner, Colin’s going “Body, body!” and I’m pleased that I was ahead, instinctively knowing what to do in this pool of ring time, but reason overrides instinct. I wimp out. Then again, it’s the first round. At the end of it, I’m a person who knows she can be good at this, a changed person. Mind you, I haven’t had to eat any serious shots yet.
I climb out, Lisa climbs in. I find Kathy’s done more work than I noticed; my ribs are sore. Lisa looks mean, verging on cruel. I know she has been agonizing over this day, refining her intentions, and now I can see what she decided. Her holster is loaded. At the bell, both boxers advance and this time there is no pause before the first exchange. Kathy’s moved to round-two tactics. Lisa has also. I watch and learn. Lisa is at the top of her form. Where I left spaces, she fills them with combinations, and Kathy is having to work. Lisa isn’t respecting her as I did, as I intend to continue doing. She looks for openings and seizes them. Yet as I admire Lisa, I have to resist comparing myself, judging; it’s better to watch with curiosity and interest. (Oh boy, how often I have come up against that one?)
When it’s my turn again, I remain cautious, but I crowd her more, barely knowing what I’m doing because I can’t yet, as they say, “spell-fight.” That is, I’m like a child who can read and comprehend but not yet construct a grammatical sentence. I move in on her, forcing the pace, and when that works and she is—oh my—on the ropes, I don’t know what to do with her. I pummel her ribs with all the force of a cat pawing at the teat, then step out. It’s the corollary to the other times when I thought I was a frightening shark attack and the other girl forgot to notice; this time I know that all the danger I’m embodying is only in my head. This is only a test. What I’m doing is aborting the fight. This is a door I’m not trying, not yet. Maybe next round. Well, Lisa goes in again and does the same again, exerting pressure, trading punches, trying doors. They look evenly matched. I shouldn’t like that if I were Kathy. I’m dead proud of my sparring partner. And in the third—my third, Kathy’s fifth—I let the brakes off at the thirty-second bell for the first time in my life. A diet of too much polite sparring has conditioned me to aim squarely for the headgear as if I were scoring points, as if I were allowed to fight amateur. Now I cross over onto the professional track and shoot for the nose, the throat, the temple, the jaw. She shoots back. Now she’s warmed up and frightful and mighty, and though my defense is better than before, it’s not good enough. I eat one huge right hand, but it doesn’t stop me. It doesn’t stop me. Man, I feel superhuman!
In the last, Kathy and Lisa go even harder. I have never seen Lisa look this good, fearless and strong. I can see clearly now that I’m off duty; I see the entire gym lining the ropes, I hear how they love it. (Were they this way for my rounds? Yes, they were.) I’m soaked in sweat, fulfilled and spent; this time I did come. My nose throbs. The crowd crescendos, Colin gets excitable, there is no blood, the bell rings, it is over. Frankie and Kathy thank us profusely, as if we had cooked them a fine dinner, and I realize how we have indeed done her a favor. Men get paid for this. Outside the ropes I’m shy with Kathy, although she is so much younger. She talks too loud, as if she’d been training her voice to fight too, and there is not a chink in her armor of machismo. I find that touching. I can’t block this curious feeling of protectiveness toward her that I’m sure would offend her if she knew of it. Thanks to the sparring, I feel a bond that wasn’t there before, even if it is only I who feel it. She is my fighter. I am slightly appalled at this sweetie niceness, the default coffee klatchness of me. Jill would throw up.
Now that the work is done we chat. Frankie is equal parts hearty dad, businesslike procurer, and emollient chat-show host. It turns out what he actually is, is Kathy’s manager and paramour—they will be engaged within the year—and he has great plans for our sport, schemes that outstrip even Jimmy Finn and Battling Barbara’s WIBF. He founded his gym, the Academy of Boxing for Women, in Huntington, Long Island, over four years ago and now is garnering support for his anagrammatical IWBF (International Women’s Boxing Federation)—not a rival, he insists. There’s room for more than one belt-granting body in women’s professional boxing, he says. Never mind that none has so far been recognized, it’s crucial to set them up right, with rules for the financial and physical protection of the athletes. The IWBF is not-for-profit; it will operate on a percentage of the fighters’ purses, although Collins is the only one from the Academy who has seen a purse.
The next day, Bruce gets a call. Can Lisa spar again tomorrow?
“She wants you,” I laugh. “You got the better of her. Now they’re out for blood.”
“I’ll do it,” she says. “But they’d better not try anything. I’m not in the market for a nose job.”
I don’t mind that they don’t want me. I have no illusions. I can swallow my pride. I wish I’d fought.
I find Kathy Collins in the locker room in her skivvies, scowling at the scale.
“Man, I got five more pounds. I hate this shit.”
“You got four days. You’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Sauna suit. Sweat. Same old.”
I would like to ask many things. Does she have any doubts? What does she do with them? How are her nerves? But I chicken out because I’m posing as another blasé boxer, even though this is new to both of us and, though I’m off duty today, in the back of my mind sits the knowledge that we are two of a kind. We are welterweights. If I do compete, if I turn out to be any good, I may fight her.
We are welterweights. Colin, Terry, Oscar De La Hoya, Felix Trinidad, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns are also welterweights, though the last two were much admired for their successful metamorphosis into the heavier weight classes. Boxers are the most weight-obsessed men (apart, perhaps, from college wrestlers) you will ever meet, but it is a practical obsession, different from ours. Women’s weight is taboo. Since I am heavy, the subject of weight has always felt heavy. Now that instead of fighting my weight I am fighting at my weight, it is delightful and horrible to be perpetually confronted with my number, to be actively checking my weight instead of avoiding the scale. Sometimes that’s not easy. Men in the gym ask what I weigh in the tone usually reserved for “How are you?” As if it weren’t an impertinent question. They already know what I weigh, anyhow. I can’t lie about it. Men in the gym have caliper eyes, accustomed as they are to calculating their own or their charges’ readiness for the weigh-in, where a half-pound extra means disqualification. The subject of weight is loaded differently in here. So many men at Gleason’s are smaller and slighter than I am; there are many featherweights. How they admire me for my muscles and heft, how those string-beans envy me. I am used to men thinking I’m smaller and lighter than I actually am just because I’m female, but boxing people entertain no such charming delusions. So the insults I receive daily are compliments.
“What’re you weighing, Kate? One-sixty?”
“Big LEGS!”
“You gain weight? You got big.”
“My, you lookin’ diesel.”
Men outside the gym—but never women—also invariably ask me my weight. Sometimes I feel like saying, “One-forty-eight. And what’s your salary?” but I understand how he’s just making conversation and perhaps buying a few seconds while he reshuffles his weltanschauung. A woman boxer in 1996 is not yet a common sight. The other personal question nearly all men—but never women—ask is: “What about your breasts?” I explain how we have chest protectors, just like he wears testicle armor, whereupon he squirms and blanches as if this might lead to a breast shortage some day soon. The breast question usually comes before the weight question (one guy explained how he’d had it drummed into him as a child that if he hit his sister in the breasts, she would die), but both are inevitable.
I’m not always comfortable with being a walking experiment in outing weight, but it’s better than dissembling about the number on the scale. There have been too many decades of calculating female body standards in ounces; too much pressure on our proxies in the movies and on TV to be not only gorgeous, but also skeletal (preferably with tits)—and let’s not even mention models. It’s a truism that womankind is sick of the pressure, and that the pressure makes us literally sick. Boxing is a cure. The “tale of the tape” before a bout is a whole new set of vital statistics—not bust, waist, hips, but height, weight, reach. This is the first locker room I’ve found where we discuss making weight instead of losing it, and even though that amounts to the same thing, it’s a positive act with a practical purpose, not a passive obeisance to the idea that women should take up less space. In here it is understood how body types function and how to work with the material you’ve got. Fighting weight is your optimal functioning shape, not your hobby, and the weight you fight at is your natural size stripped down to its most refined version—probably about five pounds less than your “walking around weight.” The categories, for both men and women, are:
|
Strawweight |
105 lbs. and under |
|
Junior Flyweight |
to 108 lbs. |
|
Flyweight |
to 112 lbs. |
|
Junior Bantamweight |
to 115 lbs. |
|
Bantamweight |
to 118 lbs. |
|
Junior Featherweight |
to 122 lbs. |
|
Featherweight |
to 126 lbs. |
|
Junior Lightweight |
to 130 lbs. |
|
Lightweight |
to 135 lbs. |
|
Junior Welterweight |
to 140 lbs. |
|
Welterweight |
to 147 lbs. |
|
Junior Middleweight |
to 154 lbs. |
|
Middleweight |
to 160 lbs. |
|
Super Middleweight |
to 168 lbs. |
|
Light Heavyweight |
to 175 lbs. |
|
Cruiserweight |
to 190 lbs. |
|
Heavyweight |
unlimited |
Men often go up one or more weight classes during their careers—like Hearns and Sugar Ray—but what women will do with our limited capacity for building muscle mass is not clear yet. So far, we are dropping down to lighter categories, as Veronica Simmons just did in her first Gloves, starving herself into the middleweight class, where she could find an opponent. When I got to Gleason’s I didn’t know what my natural weight was, so long had I been consciously manipulating it, ignoring it, lying about it, hating it. But after two years here my body was settling down and the impossible thin me in the back of my mind was finally dying. Yoga gurus say it takes seven years for every single cell in your body to be renewed, so that it takes seven years of daily yoga practice to reform your body completely. Well, three years of daily boxing and I’d metamorphosed into a pleasing version of me. Boxing is not an upper-body workout, it is a whole-body workout; it compacts the frame and chisels at you. Arms and the internal and external rotators of the shoulders are conduits for the body weight that you bring up through the legs, hips, and torso, so boxing is like doing multiple repetitions with light freeweights. Your abdominals must be hard enough to withstand blows. I was getting cut. My body fat was down to around 12 percent. Muscle is three times heavier than fat, so I looked leaner and weighed more. I enjoyed eavesdropping on the men talking about their weight problems; it was like a satire on my teenage years. In tiny towels, they hop on and off the scale by Bruce’s office scowling and tutting. They yell in the showers, clearly audible on the women’s side, “Oh, man. I got eight more pounds! I was down to sixty-five, I dunno wha’ ’appen….” They do not cry about it. From them I was learning to transfer weight from body to fist, and also from problem to tool.
So bless Kathy for berating the scale instead of herself. They would have let her fight anyway, I bet—there aren’t enough women in the pool to provide a last-minute substitute—but worrying about making weight must be light relief from grosser worries. Out there, Lisa awaits. Her attitude is different today, more resigned, I fear. We all know her role in this visit is as meat, so any amount of apprehension is justified, yet when they begin round one, Lisa looks quite as effective as the other day. In fact, the session is unfurling like an action replay, until suddenly Lisa reels back, blood streaming from her nose, and Colin jumps in the ring and everyone fusses around. I didn’t see the punch because there hadn’t been one. Kathy had straightened up abruptly and banged her head up into Lisa’s nose: accidental head butt. Shall they stop? Frankie asks. No, Lisa’s game to continue, but only if they keep off her face. She thinks her nose may be broken. (She knows the symptoms, because she’s broken it four times before.) Sure, they say, they’ll keep off her face. But they don’t. Kathy comes on as if nothing had happened, just like in a real fight, where three more rounds after a head butt is nothing unusual. Afterwards, they thank Lisa again and she goes “Sure” and we wait till they’re gone to assess the damage. Lisa is not happy.
“I’ve never once got in the ring when they said they’d go light and they did,” she complains. “I’m not doing that again.”
“Why didn’t you stop after the incident?” I ask.
“I dunno. Idiot. I thought they meant it about keeping off my face. You head butt someone helping you out, you give them some respect.”
“Was it deliberate?”
“You don’ know,” says Colin. “You jus’ don’ know.”
Four nights later, despite the fact that Buster Mathis, Jr., has been replaced at the eleventh hour with the underwhelming Tim “The Hebrew Hammer” Puller (13-4)—whom Lou Savarese will devastate, felling him in the second round—the Garden contains about 2,500 people, and thousands more tune into USA for the Tuesday Night Fights, an institution for as long as there’s been cable, and on which Collins versus DeShong is the first female bout ever. Kathy’s lack of remorse for what she did at Gleason’s may have been egregious, but it’s a good sign for her tonight. She must have zero doubts, since everything rides on this result. If she loses, she all but loses her chosen career. If she wins, she’s on the map. Me, I’m the opposite of fighting tonight: champagne in hand, I’m watching with my twelve birthday dinner guests, wearing the black eye Kathy gave me the other day, a convergence of life with boxing life. Friends are bemused.
Well, Kathy wins. Not just barely, but by dominating every one of the six rounds, though DeShong is no slouch. It’s an exciting fight, endorsed the next day by The New York Times in the headline: BRIGHTEST STARS AT GARDEN ARE THE WOMEN. Collins, writes the reporter, “energized an evening of very average theater.” The piece goes on to relay her musings during the bout: “How nicely, she thought, Andrea DeShong’s pink boxing gloves went with her red welts.”
“She was real cocky the whole time,” Kathy is quoted as saying, “sneering at me and saying, ‘Hmm, that’s good,’ after I hit her. I’m thinking, ‘Don’t you know you’re losing the fight?’ I think I surprised her. I know I surprised myself.”
Evidently, she also surprised the viewers at home. In a telephone poll, 51,000 of USA Network’s Tuesday Night Fights viewers responded to the question “Do you want to see more women’s boxing?” Eighty-one percent voted yes. Yet boxing at this moment was having one of its hours of disgrace: a bloodbath broke out ringside after the recent Riddick Bowe-Andrew Golota July 11 Madison Square Garden bout, sending half the audience home with worse bruises than the boxers. This was the first card at the Garden since then. The sport needed some good PR; maybe the women’s bout did the trick. It looks like Collins’s victory is a victory all round.
Six weeks later, USA gives the people what they want and carries another women’s bout: a lightweight I’d never heard of named Kathleen Ridell versus the powerful Tracy Byrd. Tracy’s brother, the respected heavyweight Chris Byrd, is the main event. Dad, her cutman, works her corner. So does God. Byrd, one of those Christian soldiers, has Romans 8:28 embroidered on her trunks: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose. So much for my worries about this violence being a bad thing. God comes through for Tracy as she dispatches the ridiculously overmatched Ridell. It is so boring that even I, female boxing advocate number one, am beginning to doubt that our sport has legs. The talent pool must deepen, and fast. Promoters have to take the chick fight more seriously. Frankie G.’s got to get his WIBF in order. There are several great women in the ranks—flyweights Yvonne Trevino, Bridgette “Baby Doll” Riley, and Jolene Blackshear; featherweights Bonnie Canino and Nora Daigle; junior lightweights Laura Serrano and Fredia “The Cheetah” Gibbs; lightweights Daniella Somers and the twins Dora and Cora Webber; welterweights Mary Ann Almagar, Gina Guidi, the Frenchwoman Sandra Geiger, and the Brit Jane Couch—but there aren’t enough in any one weight class to sustain the momentum, and currently there’s nobody notable above welterweight. Jill Matthews is still begging for an opponent. I wish there were more fighters out there. I wish we had a star.
I am about to get my wish.