“Boxing is about love,” says Colin, massaging my knotty shoulders with his green embrocation. I squint at him.
“Did you say boxing is about love?”
“I’m not being funny,” he says.
“No, I know. But that’s what I’ve been thinking lately.”
“Not love love.”
“I know.”
“Not like that girl t’ink.” Colin was accused of harassment a few months ago, such an absurdity. It hurt him. It pains me, too. Colin is my dream of dependability, the trainer I was hoping for. He feels like kin, which is odd seeing as we’re from opposite worlds. He understands people without judging them; and his silly, eye-rolling sense of humor counteracts the melodrama of boxing. He checks up on me, like a teenager. “What you bin doin’ last night? Let me see …” He searches my eyes theatrically for signs of substance abuse. “O-o-o-keeey, this time.” He is known by some as the Professor for his Solomonic mien.
Boxing is about love. I am believing with Catholic passion in this Pollyanna vision, all the more fervently since I have just signed a contract to fight. It is January 1997. I have taken one of Bruce’s fights, and Bruce, let’s not forget, books the opponents. Boxing, it seems from this corner, the opponent’s corner, might just as easily be the opposite of love. The encouraging noises men make, the jolly gym camaraderie, the bonds between trainer and boxer, all this might be a disguise for a mean-spirited enterprise. It might be that each of us here tries to profit from the other, that everyone is out for himself, that everybody wants to do harm—after all, what are we doing here but learning to inflict and withstand harm? It is self-evident that the sport itself is founded on a corrupt power structure, in which boxers are good citizens toiling diligently, some rising to power through righteous bravery, but many more by selling their conscience for position. Around now, an FBI investigation into the IBF (no relation) is beginning. Two years hence it will disclose how a rise up the IBF rankings is guaranteed not by talent but by cash bribes. Prior to the actual indictments, one lunatic “decision” after another (e.g., Boxer A lands 40 percent more punches than Boxer B; Boxer B wins) will be derided in the press—yet remain inscribed in the record books. Boxing will be the laughingstock of the sports press.
Women’s boxing, however, is another kind of laughingstock. Women’s boxing, in early 1997, is roundly and routinely derided in the boxing press, if it’s mentioned at all. The odd item in the newspapers, like that one in The New York Times about Kathy Collins’s recent victory, is marked by a breathless, politically correct tone quite distinct from the normal sports-page item.
“Women need to stick together,” Kathy Collins told me recently, rotating her attitude a few degrees after her epic bout. She is as much a contender as any of the girls, but just try getting paid like one.
“There has to be camaraderie,” she says. “It’s never gonna get done by one. The people who have a problem seeing it as a serious sport are the people in the sport. Don King uses it as a puppet show. Christy’s bout didn’t get the credibility it deserved.”
Since women don’t light the dollar signs in Don King’s eyes, there is no buzzards-on-carrion reaction to a skilled girl boxer in the gym. If it is indeed true that everyone is out for profit, women may be safe from nefarious exploitation for now. This doesn’t help me with my personal demons, the ones that have always been on my back, whispering, “Don’t go thinking you’re any good,” or, succinctly, “You look a fool,” and that work in many areas—my writing, career, figure, attractiveness, and, of course, athletic status. That is why I like Colin so much. He is my anchor in this place where I barely belong. Our symbiosis confirms I’m not here because I’m mentally ill. Colin has been in boxing since he was a teenager, and if he thinks boxing is about love, then I am not crazy to hope it’s true. The evidence of my senses, our mutual project at the United Nations of Gleason’s, makes me think it. Every day I sign in with Calvin—“How you doin’ today, Miss Kate?”—I’m refreshed. All the boxers are here: Juan La Porte is thinking of making a comeback; Stephan Johnson is hoping for a title shot some day soon; Terry I see mornings. Those three are like beloved high school teachers who brought my favorite subject alive and keep tabs on my progress. Especially Stephan, who taught me my first punch, who is the sweetest heart of the lot—shy, earnest, hardworking. If I’m feeling sorry for myself, thinking nobody’s in my corner in life, I come here and bask in the illusion of family for as long as we share the ring. Every boxing gym I’ve ever visited, except for the short-lived marble midtown palace, Strykers (“You don’t sweat there,” complained the boxers), shares this good spirit of dangerous people sending their power to work for the cause. Everyone here loves boxing.
“Anyone who like to box is great,” said the famous trainer Hector Roca the other day as we watched a girl in leotards doing yoga by the heavybags. I was embarrassed by her, pointing her out to throw my own boxliness into relief, but Hector, who usually acts the curmudgeonly misogynist, just shrugged.
“I don’t care if they no good. They try. She want to be here, that’s great.” He was right. I was grateful. Still, I thought of Terry claiming nobody here would talk to me if I were no good; I couldn’t help noticing nobody talked to the yoga girl, least of all Hector. I think I’m here under sufferance, and I want to earn my keep. Sooner or later I must fight.
The women are not profitable, but we are beginning to be wanted, as the realization dawns among boxing promoters that we exist. A female fight on the undercard is a good gimmick. Small-time promoters don’t care about the quality of this bout, and will get the chicks’ fight any way they can as long as it doesn’t cost much. If they can’t make a match, there exists a—let’s call him an impresario—in Ohio who will find an opponent at the eleventh hour. Phone this guy and he hits the streets, canvassing prostitutes, vagrants, crack addicts, junkies, until a girl who weighs about right agrees to an “easy” four hundred bucks. He flies her in, cleans her up, lends her a urine sample, and props her up in the blue corner.
“No—it’s disgusting. They’re showing her how to hold her hands at the weigh-in,” says Jill Matthews, who finally fought again in November. Through no fault of her own, her opponent came from Ohio.
“Some of them are so out of it they can’t even stand,” she goes on. “You just—poof—throw a little jab and they’re down.” Many a female fighter has an early record papered by Ohio girls, but few are big enough to admit it. When I heard about the syndrome, I was quite interested in fighting one myself just to get some ring experience, but that was not the way the wind blew. As it turned out, Jill was the unwitting broker in scoring me my first opportunity.
“Opportunity” is indeed the correct term, but mine was a match made in Bedlam. It came about through a combination of impatience and pigheadedness, and it was Fox Network sports commentator Tom McDonald’s fault. Having noted the female division in the Gloves and at Gleason’s, Tom decreed that the time was ripe for an amusing women’s boxing report and brought the cameras down to Gleason’s one morning. Jill was the only bona fide professional in the house. Then there was me. Would I, asked Tom, “move around a little in the ring” with Jill? No, that’s absurd, I said, Jill being forty pounds lighter than me. You don’t have to fight, he said, just move around a little. Katya Bankowsky had won a gratuitous cracked nose from a pre-Gloves photo opportunity just like this, yet I agreed.
As Colin laced on my sparring gloves, Jill’s manager, Kip Elbaum, glared.
“What size are those gloves?” he asked.
“Twelve-ounce, but don’t worry, we’re not hitting her.”
“Good,” said Kip, “because we’ve got the fight next week, then we’re on the Comacho undercard at the Garden on March fifth …”
“I won’t hit her,” I repeated.
“You’d better not,” he warned.
“I won’t.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Okay, okay … I don’t want to. She’s my friend.”
I didn’t want to do it at all. Especially not when I thought of the ten extra TV pounds on top of my ten extra post-holiday pounds. Vanity is such a vampire.
Ah, well, the cameras set up, we climbed in, they started to roll, and the bell rang. It was so strange to be facing Jill, she felt so tiny, eight inches down. My shark illusion was back so I didn’t even land on her headgear but stopped most of my punches short. Yet despite the mismatch, it was fun to move with her, my friend the Roadrunner, fastest boxer in the gym. It was fun until the pace rose and rose and, before I knew it, there was Jill in my face, laying into me full force. She was not hard to fend off and her defense was, as the gym critics liked to point out, nowhere. Still I felt the shots, and I couldn’t help admiring.
But it did seem unfair. How come she got to hit me after I had promised not to hit her? I had been here before. From the ropes, Colin broke silence.
“Hit her harder!” he screamed. “Right uppercut, left hook! Hit her!”
I threw my voice over my shoulder. “No!”
I am nothing if not a woman of my word.
The round ended.
“Okay, I’m coming out, Colin,” I said in the corner. “She’s not remotely holding back. This is shit, I’m coming out.”
“No, don’t quit,” he said, to my surprise. I thought he’d understand. “Don’t quit now with the cameras and everything. Hit her, you’ve got to hit her. They’re not holding back.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t. What’m I going to do? She’s forty pounds lighter. I can’t.”
“Yes you can,” he said, urgently. “Yes you can.” Then the bell went and again Jill was the bundle of fury and I was sticking to my guns, thinking over and over, No, I will not hit her! But now I was riled, my compassion at war with my irritation, and so it went till the bell, and again Colin hectored me, pointing out how bad I was looking, the big girl getting beat up by the little girl.
“I don’t care,” I said. And the third round was the same, and I felt I was very hard done by and probably a fool, but I would not hit her, I would not capitulate. The opposite of boxing. Then I remembered who it was in here with me.
“Hey, Jill,” I lisped through the mouthguard. “I thought we were going light!”
“Yeah, me too,” she said, hitting me.
“Back down,” I hissed.
“Yeah,” she said, stepping away…. “Hey! We’re doing better now,” said Jill, and we moved and feinted and I felt the air go out of the little crowd. They were enjoying that, the creeps. Well, they got more. Very soon I found Jill’s glove in my ribs again and as I folded down to protect, I let in a gorgeous ferocious hook to my jaw. Perfection. But she had gone too far. Now I wanted to hit her back, I really wanted to hit her, yet—and this scared the hell out of me—I couldn’t. I was frozen. Even though she was ring-Jill, she was still Jill. Even though she’d whapped me with her best shot, my hands were tied. Maybe I can’t do this, I was thinking. No killer instinct. Maybe I just don’t have heart, which is ironic, seeing as it was precisely my heart that was stopping my glove.
When the bell rang, I left the ring, ignored Colin’s raised eyebrow, and paced, fuming. I should have hit her, I should have. I did it again, I held back. Even when I got permission—no, orders—I didn’t hit the girl. People came up to me to say I did good. I took it as insults. Tom McDonald collared me.
“That was great!” He couldn’t help laughing. “Guess the little girl won. How’s your jaw? She got quite a shot in there, didn’t she? You’ll be eating soup through a straw tonight!”
“Yeah, well, what am I gonna do, hit her? I’d flatten her. And now she gets to look good and I look stupid and …” I sputtered out, the butt of the joke. It was at this moment that my moral code crossed the road. Come what may, I would never not hit again.
By the time we got to the locker room, I was mad at Jill.
“So, what happened?” I snapped. “Your manager begged so hard, I couldn’t do it.”
“I think you just don’t know your own strength,” said Jill, “because you hit me real hard …”
“What, that jab? In the first?” I remembered thinking “Oops” when that slipped out and resolving to be more careful.
“Yeah. It was real hard. And then they were screaming at me—you know, Kip was going: ‘You gonna stand there and get beaten up? Hit her! Go for it! You gonna get beaten up?’ So I hit you.”
That was the clearest information I’d ever got about the other end of my punches. No matter how much Colin told me I hit really hard, I didn’t believe him, in case it was soft soap. But I remembered that jab and exactly how much it was pulled and how much power I had in reserve, so I took comfort in this backhanded compliment.
“It was good to hear that,” I wrote in my journal later. “I felt better for that, though I went through the entire collection of negative emotions so far engendered by my boxing career. Sometimes I do wonder—why boxing?”
And I proceed to answer myself in histrionic prose:
Because it’s crazy and unpredictable. Because the rules are only there precariously on trust. Because polite, corrupt, hypocritical society puts a veneer on the strangeness just below whereas in the world of boxing, what’s below is tangible, and emotions are raw, because everyone here is in combat for no reason except choice. Because in here the whole equation is upside down. Because everyone in boxing is facing fears that most people don’t even see coming….
The consequence of the Jill episode was that Kip told the promoter about the big girl who was hit by the little girl and the promoter calls Bruce and Bruce comes up to me two days later.
“I’ve got a fight for you,” he says. The phrase is familiar, but this time it sounds different.
“When?”
“Two weeks.”
“Who?”
“Oh, it’s some model. You’ll beat her easy.”
“What’s her record?”
“She’s had a few bouts. I know two of them were against the same girl. I’ll find out more for you.”
“Is she black?” (My spurious gym hierarchy—it still lives!)
“No, she’s a white girl.”
“What’s her weight?”
“She’s a bit heavier. I believe she’s around one-sixty, but I’ll have to check.”
“She’s really a model?”
“Well, the picture I saw of her looks like it. She’s very pretty. Strange thing for a model to do, boxing. But, hey, it takes all sorts.”
“I think I’m finally saying yes. I’m going to ask Colin.”
The outline of the model gets colored in. Her name is Jen “Raging Belle” Childers. She is six-foot-three, 168 pounds, a righty, twenty-two years old; she won the Indiana Golden Gloves and her professional record is 6-0, three by way of knockout. Her contract allows her to fight in headgear. Bruce shows me her photo. She is putting up her dukes in a black jacket with the sleeves rolled up, dark lip pencil, heavy eyeliner, and mascara. She looks very eighties, like Duran Duran in drag—and I don’t mean Roberto. I hate her. Well, at least, I scorn her. Soon I’ll regret that, fearing the old hubristic set-up for the fall, but now I’m on the defensive and I think it’s correct. Just before the Jill sparring, I’d been out of the gym for a month, I am thirteen years older than her, weigh twenty pounds less, and have no experience, but I’m a tough old bird.
Colin says I’m ready, but there’s a caveat.
“You know Bruce’s fights, Kadie. Happen the girl’s a killer.”
“Yeah, well, how tough can she be? She’s a model.”
It is true that Lisa Long nearly took a Bruce bout last month that looked fine on paper (since it would also be the other girl’s pro debut). But rumors of this girl had preceded the offer (I guess someone saw her training) and I was among the contingent that advised Lisa, who was wavering anyhow, not to take this one, just in case. How right she was to turn it down. That girl knocked out one Melinda Robinson in the first minute of the first round. Then, in December, she scored a TKO over Kelly Jacobs, again in the first, followed eleven days later by another first-round TKO. Her name is Lucia Rijker, a Dutchwoman living in L.A., and she was the world kickboxing champion before she turned to boxing. Converted kickboxers and karate fighters comprise a sizable part of the female boxer population, and, being inured to combat and heavy training, they have a head start, but the buzz about Rijker far outstrips the buzz about any previous fighter. You should see this girl, they’re saying. She’s unbeatable. She makes Christy Martin look like Raggedy Ann. She’s the real thing.
I put my money on Jen Childers not being the real thing, then I put my mouth where my money is and on the last day of January meet the promoter in Bruce’s office to sign the contract. I’m not surprised to find Kip Elbaum there, all pally with the promoter, since it was he who scouted me—or reverse-scouted me—but I am a bit thrown to discover that he is the promoter’s son. Kip has a regular-guy appearance, rather like a blue-eyed Paul Simon, but his dad, Don Elbaum, is straight out of central casting. He comes up to my eyebrows, has the bulbous, florid nose of a bruiser and brilliantined hair, and is dressed in a double-breasted black zoot suit, a black turtleneck, and pointy-toed shiny-black chelsea boots. He looks like a miniature Harvey Keitel—in Bad Lieutenant, not The Piano.
“That’s a great outfit,” he gushes. I’m wearing baggy black shorts, an old tank taped up in back, and wrecked boxing boots.
“Really,” I say.
“I hear you’re a famous journalist,” continues Elbaum Sr.
“No,” I say. “I write for magazines.”
“This is gonna be great. We’ll get them all down to the press conference. You can make it next Monday, right? We’re gonna get terrific PR on this.”
“I don’t know about that. I’m kind of crazy with deadlines right now.” This is no lie. I am beginning to doubt my sanity. “Anyway, where’s the contract?” Elbaum hands me a pen.
“Hold on. I want to just make sure of a couple of things.”
“Oh, right, yeah, you take your time.”
“I see here the weight is listed at a hundred and sixty-five pounds. You know I’m fighting way under that, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, we are aware of that.”
“Can she come down at all?”
Elbaum Sr. and Elbaum Jr. exchange glances.
“You know, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I doubt it. She already lost a lotta weight, it’s quite a story. Came down from two hundred and twenty pounds. She’s so tall, people made fun of her, but you should see her now—she’s a knockout, really a knockout.”
Resisting the obvious pun, I pretend I didn’t hear the disturbing news that the model had a weight problem. It ruins my game plan of avenging crimes committed against average-looking women.
“Well, you should at least pay me a weight-handicap premium,” I joke.
“We can do that. How ’bout six hundred? That’s two hundred more than any of the guys on the undercard.”
“Whoopee.”
I am thoroughly enjoying this. It is very cinematic. I feel I should sign in blood, but I use the ballpoint, doing a double take at that phrase about understanding the risk of permanent injury or death. Kip pipes up from the corner.
“You know she wears headgear.”
“Yes, I heard that. I hate headgear.”
“You don’t have to wear it. It’s up to you,” says Elbaum Sr. “Don’t want to risk that pretty face,” he adds to Kip, chortling, meaning her.
“If she hits her too hard,” replies Kip, meaning me, “we take her out,” meaning her. “First sign of blood.” He makes the throat-cutting sign. Both Elbaums do a shifty laugh, the family resemblance is suddenly evident. Only now does it dawn on me that the girl is on Don Elbaum’s payroll, that she is his fighter, and that this loads the dice in her favor to a most absurd degree. Well, it’s too late now. I have signed.
“You write about restaurants, right?” says Elbaum Sr. when the business is done. “I know this great Italian in TriBeCa. Would you care to accompany me?”
“I have to train,” I explain. Is he asking for a date? Or does the opponent always dine with the promoter after the contract signing? This protocol sure is peculiar.
As I box, I am aware of two pairs of Elbaum eyes watching critically. It is very off-putting, being scrutinized for mistakes, but it doesn’t matter because I am doomed anyway to one of my hopelessly miserable gym days. I suck. I am depressed. This now poses as the absolute only state I am ever in, but at least I can unload it onto Colin: Are you sure I’m ready? Are you sure I can box? What are they thinking? What if they tell her I’m crap? What if they tell her I’m good?
“You look fine, Kadie. You be beating yourself up again,” he soothes. “Don’t pay them no mind. Let them t’ink what they t’ink.”
It is torture, this self-judgment. Canvassing Colin and other boxers, I have concluded that everyone gets bad days in the gym (“Man, there’s times I git tired after one round …”), but that the best boxers resist drawing conclusions from them. Katya and Jill, Veronica and Bridgette all admit to the same tendency of thinking they look bad, and it is heartening to reflect that those four never look bad to me. My very worst workouts sometimes elicit extravagant praise, like the other day, as I hit the heavybag and my inner soundtrack whined—You’re all stiff (whap-whap-whap). No power, Kate. When are you going to learn? A Metro’s champ I’d never met was watching me. “Hey,” he piped up, “I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley. You got skills!” I wonder if my feminine propensity to fret about my physical appearance has infected me so that I care too much about how my performance appears instead of just accepting my limitations and working to overcome them. Colin says women are always worrying whether we’re doing it right, whereas men just work. Men don’t seem to take a bad sparring session so seriously. I want to learn from that. It’s the same thing I glean from my basic but continuing yoga practice: “The mind makes a lousy master but an excellent servant.” So teaches the Bhagavad Gita. The key to athletic prowess is to ignore the fickle bully of the mind altogether. The mind is not a good judge of reality.
On this note, the fact that Lucia Rijker is a practicing Buddhist astonishes me. Over the next two weeks, as I prepare for battle, this becomes more and more bothersome. How can she square the pacific live-and-let-live tenets of Buddhism with the efficient beatings she deals out? If it is true that she is so phenomenal, then her beliefs must be assisting her. How is this possible? Since Katya has entered negotiations with Rijker to film her fights and make hers the central story in Shadow Boxers, I hope to be able to find out from the horse’s mouth sometime soon.
But that counseling is not available now when I need it. The pressure, the pressure is mounting so fast. Giant roller coasters and hurricane fronts of nerves take up residence, my thoughts boil, my heart plays bongos, it comes in waves. I am afraid of everything, of being wrong to fight at all because I am nice, of running out of breath mid-round, of losing, of brain damage. Colin gets me working extra hard on defense. “It take one punch,” he keeps saying, an unhelpful phrase. A woman featured on one of the recent rash of TV specials about women’s boxing—on ABC or 20-20 or Sixty Minutes—was the victim of that one punch. A bad trainer sent her into the ring prematurely on one of those gratuitous undercard chick fights. She landed in a coma and now she will function at half-speed forever.
It’s reassuring that at least half the crowd at Gleason’s routinely survives far bigger bouts than mine. They’ve all had a pro debut. Then again, their first fight came after they’d been training since boyhood, their first pro fight after many, many amateur bouts. I wish, oh how I wish, that the age restrictions could be relaxed and I could fight amateur, where the referees are still cautious with women, likely to stop the fight when somebody bleeds. My fight will not be stopped, not for my blood at least; especially not at the Blue Horizon, where blood is the Philly fans’ favorite treat.
“Ooooeee!” whistles John Toliaferro delightedly, when I tell him my bout is at the Blue. “Git outta here! That place! I was there one time and this guy was takin’ a beatin’, I mean he was out on his feet, and the ref don’t stop the fight so his trainer, he throws in the towel, and the ref ignored it. He just ignored it.”
“Gee thanks, John.”
“Oh no, I don’t mean—it ain’t always so bad.”
Word spreads fast. Whenever Colin steps away, I am showered with free advice.
“Ever fight a tall person? Oh boy. Gotta be smart.”
“Stay inside.”
“Stay low.”
“Overhead rights.”
“Go to the body …”
“Aren’t you worried about her record?”
And the most common comment: “Giving away some weight there, aren’t you?”
“Ignore them,” says Colin. “You’ll know what to do.”
This issue of weight is funny—funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. I have never before been tempted to gain weight deliberately but, boxing being all about transfer of weight, I am considering it now. Just as fractional adjustments in timing and angle allow you to connect with a punch or miss the target altogether, so a few pounds of body weight can make a huge difference in how hard that blow will be. It’s physics; it’s why Pierce Egan, the early-nineteenth-century chronicler of pugilism, writer, publisher of Boxiana, and hero of A. J. Liebling, called the sport “the sweet science of bruising.” So I have learned that male secret I yearned to possess since the jazz-club incident. Now I understand how throwing a punch is a question of converting weight to strength to power—power being the application of maximum force in minimum time—and how the secret that causes the weight to get into the fist is torque, a concert of twists at the hip, the waist, the shoulder, the wrist. There is only so much you can do with the secret, though, when you don’t have the weight to back it up. This was illustrated beautifully by Jill, whose technique is sublime but whose hardest punch didn’t sway me. Conversely, sparring with Sandy Guttierez, as I have been doing, lets me taste an extra sixty pounds. It hurts a whole lot, like a kick from a horse, and even though I’m in the run-up to the bout and ought to be sparring hard, Colin still calls her off me if I get cornered. Somewhere in between Jill and Sandy lies the model’s twenty-pound advantage, which I could theoretically lessen, but I decide to leave it alone. I couldn’t gain muscle fast enough; I would gain fat and self-loathing. So … yes, I am going to give her the weight.
After a few days’ sparring with Sandy and Corey and Darius, a former pro about my height but heavier, Colin apparently decides I need stronger medicine. (Now, the night I signed the contract, my body started to disintegrate. I took this as a good sign. If I can get the rasping throat, blocked sinuses, raw lungs, shredded feet, period cramps, and narcolepsy over with now, I’ll be in the pink just in time. On day four of this, ten days before the bout, I want to go into hibernation until it’s all over, but, realizing that time is emphatically against me, I drag my pallid ass into the gym.)
“You’re sparring with Veronica,” announces Colin.
“Aw, not today, Colin. I was thinking I’d give sparring a miss, just today. I’m all weak.”
“Nah, Veronica be cool. I seen her spar. She don’t go hard. You just be moving around a little.”
The phrase “moving around a little” is not one to trust, but I cannot beg off sparring simply because I’m feeling a bit poorly. I fit the breastplate, let Colin buckle on the headgear, smear my face with Vaseline, slot in the mouthpiece, and wait. This year, Veronica isn’t starving her way down to the middleweight class so as to meet fresh competition, but has entered the Golden Gloves as a heavy weight, although she weighs some eight pounds less than the 178-pound limit. I have only ever seen her spar with men, which is, of course, not unusual; still, of all the girls at Gleason’s, she is the one I have the least desire to meet in the ring. I think she is the best of all of us.
At the bell, I see immediately how wrong Colin was. Veronica is not about to “move around a little,” she is looking to fight. I have never felt out of my depth in a ring like I do now, and every weeping pore in my body is rebelling against the unfairness of this challenge. I would like to have had some lead-up; I would like to have known this was going to be war. I would have armed my defenses. There is no camaraderie here. At the bell, Veronica strides toward me, waits for my exploratory, rather reluctant jab and counters instantly. At one jab each I’m soothing myself, removing myself: Hey, okay, take it easy, no need to go all out—but when she doubles her next jab, bends and uppercuts, as if to test the fit of her glove in my floating rib, I see I’m not giving myself very good advice. From here on in, any punch of mine lights a fresh stick of dynamite in Veronica, until she seems to be composed of many fuses burning down: some slow, others fast. She’s surging forward already, backing me up (hey, I’m the one who does that!) and I’m no good in reverse; I can’t hit hard. To buy thinking time, I retract into defensive mode, which signals “let’s cool the pace” as clearly as saying it out loud, but she is deaf to this. Her right hand finds a gap in my guard—one of those hammers I’ve admired from the ropes, wondered whether they’re as hard as they look—and it’s horrible, like being woken up at dawn by a fire truck. I snap out of my doze and switch on emergency overdrive even though the last thing I want is to fan the fire. I have no choice but to fight. I do not want to fight, not yet, not tonight.
I grapple with my conscience and my common sense, wishing I were lost in the moment but consumed instead by the useless ranting of my mind, the lousy master. The round is a blur. I am outclassed and I am outweighed. I feel overwhelmed. She is utilizing the full armory, up, down, hook, cross. It seems to last forever. I sense by peripheral vision how the whole gym has been drawn around, how the collective breath is being held, how we are furnishing an excellent spectacle. I have no anger. I feel sad that it’s come to this. Finally, the bell.
“I thought you said she’d go light,” I snap at Colin. “She’s going all-out. I’m not into this.” He mops me with the towel, squirts the water.
“I know, Kadie, I’m sorry. I t’ought she be cool. You jus’ gonna have to fight.”
“Okay, but how?”
“Like you do with Darry. Get your foot between her feet, push her back. Use your weight.”
“What weight? She’s so big, I can’t move her.”
“Jus’ keep up the pressure, Kadie. You be fine.”
I should have refused to go back, given my state today and the proximity to the big event, but there is no question that I will answer the bell. And the same thing happens, only more so. Veronica hits me like the apocalypse and all I can do is fend her off as best I can, absorbing blows, giving them back. I try to believe I am hitting hard, but the only sign that Veronica is feeling my punches at all is her relentless and increasing pressure on me. It is this I can’t bear, not the pain; there isn’t really any pain. I hate the confusion of having her always on top of me like a swarm of giant bees there and there and there, like she is pressing herself into my mind. No adrenaline rush is kicking in to help. I am resigned and weary and unhappy. Then, during one of her flurries, a realization hits me. This may feel like a fight, but it is not a fight. What if I quit? Colin would be mad at me, the crowd would be disgusted, Veronica would think I’m not for real, my friend Tom watching over there would see I’m not so good at this, I would probably wish I hadn’t, but I could regroup. We could start again tomorrow. I’ll be ready tomorrow. It takes one second to decide. I make a turn to my left, beginning to drop my hands and bam, Veronica, not knowing my intention—why would she?—takes instant advantage of the opening and slams her thirty-pound weight advantage neatly up my nose.
A flash of something like light in my vision, a river of blood, a great wail from the people, hands pulling me through the ropes, helping me down.
“Sorry, Colin,” I say, mortified and cross, as he mops my nose, soaking my towel in red. “I didn’t want to do that today. I was trying to leave.”
Colin says nothing. There’s a kerfuffle, people murmuring, “Hey, she didn’t ought to do that.” I’m the only one here not furious with Veronica. I am furious with myself. As soon as I can, I slip off to the toilet and shed tears of humiliation and then I feel oddly cleansed. Back out there everyone has a feel of my nose, which is swollen and red and cracked, but not smashed. Tom says he was really impressed by the action, as long as it lasted, which makes me feel better. I’m just glad it’s over. And one thing’s for sure: Raging Belle ain’t going to hit like that. I figure I’ve had one too small and one too big, but third time lucky—she’ll be just right.
Chances are, when people see a pair of black eyes on a woman, they’re not thinking, “Ah, yes, of course, she’s a boxer.” No, they’re thinking domestic violence. (Or, perhaps, like the salesgirl at the makeup counter at Henri Bendel’s, whose gaze lingered on my white leather coat—which looks posh, though it cost me twenty-eight dollars—they think “rich bitch with a nose job.”) Normally such evidence of physical trauma is the badge of a victim. Pain that descends unbidden makes a person pitiable, but a person who invites, endures, and gives back pain is thought heroic. Wearing my shiners around the streets of Manhattan, I am conscious that the day has not come where a battle-scarred hero (outside the virtual world of Lara Croft Tomb Raider games or the even less realistic one of Chyna and Lita of the WWF) can be a woman; the fact that my eyes hardly get a second glance tells me that New Yorkers have been inured to bruised women by the domestic-violence helpline ads on the subway trains. I know how I got them, though, and I hold my head high.
Gleason’s is another matter. At the gym, my black eyes look stupid. “Thought your fight was next week,” giggle the boxers. Ricky Frazier (no relation to Joe), a well-known light heavyweight whom I like a lot, collars me.
“Who’s your trainer?” he asks. I tell him. “Uh, nothing against anyone, but how d’you get those?” I explain that I was trying to leave the ring, but it’s no good. One thing leads to another and he’s giving me tips, starting with my stance.
“What?” he exclaims. “Square on? You better be good at ducking and diving. That’s why you got those. You’ll get gun shy if you don’t learn not to get hit.” My doubts about Colin’s “British” style reinforced, I thank Ricky and wish fleetingly he were my trainer. Angel comes over, which is rare these days, and palpates my nose.
“It’s broken, isn’t it?” he declares.
“Nah.”
“It is. Thass why they’re both black. Thass what happens.”
“Nah. Look, I can do this!” I knock my nose.
“Well, it’s broken. Just hope nobody hits you on the nose. So close to a fight, too. Shame.”
I feel such a fool. The day after the “accident,” I’d woken up depressed again, feeling beaten up. My nose is my Achilles’ heel. Well, I’m just going to pass my nose karma onto her.
Something good is coming out of all this. I have declared war on the whiny voice, the one that goes, Hey, you’re not really an athlete. The guys here, they’re from adversity, they have natural skills, they have the hunger. You, you’re a nice girl. You’re not even fit, you’re a fat girl. And in the ring with Veronica, there it was: Give up. You’re outclassed, don’t even try. I will not take it anymore. I do not like being hit. Nobody goes into spar that heavily a week away from fighting; you do that earlier. (And, Colin, why hadn’t I?) The week before, you go in with people who will work you hard, but not beat you up. I have been hard done by, but I have not been erased. My heart is stronger, coming through that fire. All you gym commentators, you trainers who don’t get much respect and you never-contenders and you hangers-out who vaguely train—all of you know-it-alls. I don’t need your bad advice, your backhanded well-wishing. I am not afraid.
Now Colin’s trying to put me in with wimpy girls so I can beat them up. He thinks it’ll make me feel better, but the prospect of bashing wimpy girls makes me angry on so many levels. No, I tell him, I will not hit Brook. No, I will not box Maria. Put me back in with Veronica.
But Veronica has not been in the gym since that day. Then, just before my fight, she appears. Having felt funny about her, as if she were my mugger, I’m glad for the chance to talk.
“Were you feeling bad about that?” I ask. “Because you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Ah, no—I know,” she says. “I jus’ git so hyped up before sparring. You know.”
“Not really. It was supposed to be light sparring.”
“I git so nervous before sparring, I gotta do it. I’d been meditating half an hour on everything that gits me mad—you know, if a friend died, if a pet died—whatever gits you mad, and I couldn’t go back down. The fear, it sits there in your stomach and the meditatin’ pushes it down. Then you don’t even feel the punches, you don’t feel nothin’, and your body just moves for you. The power’s there, the moves are there, you’re trained, you’re strong, you got power. It’s all in the mind. You gotta do that, too, Kate.”
“I’m there,” I say.
“You can’t be afraid of being hit,” Veronica goes on. “’Cause if you’re standing back here afraid of trading punches, you’ll be no good.”
“I know,” I say. “This was good,” I point to my nose, “’cause she’s not gonna hit as hard as you. No way.”
Now, this is what I’ve got to do. Practice meanness. No apologies. Win.