1995 was the year when Vogue Magazine decided that women could and would box. This ran in the April 1995 issue …
The Grand Avenue Gym in Portland, Oregon, is an old-style fight gym, with not a shred of Lycra visible. The smell of bleach is complicated by the tang of sweat. Scattered around the gym some twenty boxers, fiercely focused on their tasks, punch the bags, shadow box, and skip rope with startling speed and grace.
In the ring, two boxers glide around each other, long ponytails flying beneath their leather helmets. The smaller boxer, thirteen-year-old Maria, is a beginner. She darts forward, fists flailing. Twenty-seven year-old Rene Denfeld, a taller and more experienced boxer, doesn’t punch back but slides to the side, twisting to avoid the punches or blocking them with her gloves. Occasionally her left hand floats out in a lazy jab, flicking lightly at Maria’s helmet. Maria’s father and two brothers, beside the ring, call out, “Move your head!” and “Slip, Maria!” After the first few times, Maria pulls her head away as the jab approaches. When the bell rings, Maria touches gloves politely to thank her sparring partner, then climbs out, puffing and grinning as her father removes her mouth guard and gives her a drink of water.
Denfeld, a writer and 116-pound competitor who won her division in the Tacoma Golden Gloves this year, leans over the ring ropes, listening to the quiet instructions of her lean, seventy year-old coach, Jess Sandoval. Boxing is an individualist’s sport. It is taught not in groups but one-on-one, a fact often mentioned and much appreciated by women boxers.
Women in the ring are a phenomenon so startling that they attract reporters, sell tickets, and shatter stereotypes simply by being there. Competitive boxing is usually depicted as something so brutally painful that no sane woman would set foot in the ring. Yet this spring, thirty women entered the New York Golden Gloves, tucking their hair into sweat-stained leather helmets, donning padded chest guards, breathing through fitted mouth guards, slinging punches with speed and power.
Until 1993 only boys and men were allowed to compete in the nation’s thousands of amateur boxing events. Since then, Denfeld and other women have been cropping up in matches all over the country. But short of the Olympics, the New York Golden Gloves is the largest and most publicized event in American amateur boxing. John Campi of the Daily News, which sponsors the event, says, “I’ve watched many of these women train. They are serious athletes. They take it as a discipline.”
And the women have been good for the Gloves. Their raw novelty has pumped fresh life into the sixty-eighth year of the tournament. Ex-Peace Corps volunteer Marlene Eichholz started boxing two years ago in an exercise class and now drives two and a half hours each way from her ten acre boarding kennel near Woodstock, New York, to train at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn. The twenty-eight-year-old Eichholz worked hard to gain enough weight to make the Golden Gloves minimum of 100 pounds.
One of Eichholz’s probable opponents in the Gloves is 103- pound Deidre “Dee” Hamaguchi. A Yale graduate, Hamaguchi, thirty, spends most of her time teaching judo to women and schoolchildren in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesent.
Then there is thirty-two year-old Katya Bankowsky of Manhattan, an independent filmmaker. As a child she wore out her brother’s punching bag. “But there was really nowhere for a girl to box, so I put it out of my mind,” she says. Two years ago she started training at Gleason’s.
Women’s involvement in combat sports is not really new. There have been professional women boxers since the fifties. But there were so few women professionals—100 at most in the United States at any time—that they rarely got matches. They have been sidelined as an occasional novelty act, trotted out with mud-wrestling-style hoopla. Few women ever got enough training or experience to be competent. The classic tale of a professional women’s match had scorn in the punch line: “the first time she got hit, she started to cry.”
But women were never permitted to go through the traditional schooling process of amateur boxing. They were in the position of a kid who was never allowed near the water but at the age of 21 is informed that she can now try out for the Olympic swim team. It’s a tribute to the cranky power of the human spirit that some would try anyway, and that a few could be pretty good.
The growing interest in self-defense classes in the 1980’s paralleled the introduction of boxing aerobics classes in health clubs. Then, in Seattle, in 1993, Dallas Malloy, a sixteen-year-old pianist and the daughter of college professors, sued the national amateur boxing organization for gender discrimination and won the right to compete. In October of that year, Malloy also won the first women’s amateur bout in American history against a game college student named Heather Poyner. Malloy, now eighteen, has gone on to college and other interests as most amateur boxers eventually do. But the door she unlocked is now and forever propped open for others.
Last spring the Chicago Golden Gloves tournament included fifteen female competitors. By July 1994, some 260 American women had registered as amateur boxers. There are more now. Women in the United States are catching up with women in Canada, Britain, and other European nations who began boxing years ago. The organizations that regulate the sport internationally are now discussing the possibility of women boxing in the Olympics. The term woman boxer is no longer an oxymoron.
The drama of women’s entry into the sport of broken noses is inflamed by the public’s conflicting notions about women and about boxing. Female boxers ignore Hollywood clichés about the sport of boxing—that it is the last male bastion, that the only justification for its danger and brutality is as a harrowing escape route from poverty. Many of the new female boxers are educated professionals, the antithesis of the poor-street-thug stereotype.
For now there are no million-dollar purses waiting for women boxers. Bizarre though it may seem, they box because they enjoy it. They claim it’s great for self-defense. They say it’s a great workout for every muscle, that it’s intellectually challenging, that it’s not as dangerous as it’s cracked up to be, and that it increases self-confidence. Some may suspect that they’ve taken too many punches already, but these women insist that boxing is fun.
Women’s capacity for aggression is rarely acknowledged. Denfeld says, “If you close your eyes and imagine a woman being punched, what you will see is what we see in popular culture. You see a woman who is cringing, pleading, helpless, violated. Yet women are told that if your children are threatened, all of a sudden you’re transformed into a raging creature with superhuman powers. There’s this mythology that in a pinch an untrained woman is going to toss three guys out of the window and know precisely how to throw a punch.”
For many female boxers, the sport is an opportunity to grapple directly with fear. “The first time sparring and getting punched was a real breakthrough for me,” says Denfeld, “to realize that I wasn’t going to break, and not only that, but I could hit back.”
Boxing headgear leaves the face open. That means women risk bloodied or broken noses, swollen lips. Denfeld laughs because her boyfriend is embarrassed when her face is bruised. He’s afraid people will think he hit her.
But the women themselves take their injuries in stride. At Gleason’s Gym, Bankowsky has even seen models allow themselves to take serious hits. “One of them,” says Bankowsky, “got a black eye and had to miss a booking. It’s pretty interesting that somebody who makes a living off her face would take up boxing.”
During the Dallas Malloy lawsuit, the amateur organization tried to argue that females are more at risk than males are. But they could find no supporting medical evidence. Boxers are not prone to the permanently paralyzing injuries that occur in many other sports, from football to skiing. Still, boxing is not ping-pong.
One hazard predicted for women has not materialized. The reaction of male boxers has been surprisingly positive. “Maybe it’s not something they wished for or wanted, but they seem to take real pleasure in having women come into their world,” Denfeld says. “There are, inevitably, a few jerks. But some women are that way too.”
Sparring, however—the scholarly practice of the sport—is problematic. Few gyms have enough women to allow them to spar only with each other, so they often work out with male sparring partners.
“It’s very hard on the men,” says Denfeld. “There’s a tremendous taboo in our society against hurting a woman. We’re seen as physically weak, and any guy who would hit a woman is considered a real jerk. Other men look down on him. But in this almost clinical training process they can let the taboos slip away, forget that I’m a woman and just think of me as an athlete.”
The scarcity of women competitors means that it’s sometimes impossible for women to find an amateur match. Among the thirty entries in the New York Golden Gloves, some may have no opponents in their weight class and thus be unable to compete. But the boxers tend to view this situation as temporary. They have a crisp impression that they are paving the way for others. Bankowsky says, “We’re the first women to enter the New York Golden Gloves. Ten years from now, the women who enter the Golden Gloves are going to have been training for ten years. They’re going to be a whole different caliber of boxer than we are.”
In Bankowsky’s eyes, this tournament is more than competition to win the prized and glowing gloves. It’s a fight for the future.