My Corner of the Ring

by Jesselyn Silva

  The second and third rounds went pretty much the same as the first. Punch for punch I tried to stay in there, but every once in a while she’d land a solid blow and I’d have to wait a second to steady myself. While I was adjusting, she’d go in for a body shot. Thwack! Body shots stung. I tried to sting back, but I was sore and getting tired. I had never experienced that kind of direct impact. She had me stumbling.

  “Gain your feet!” my father called toward the end of the third round.

  A right hook, then a cross into my ribs. I knew the round was almost over, but I wasn’t sure if I had ten seconds or twenty seconds left, and in boxing, even a few seconds can make all the difference. Ten seconds later the bell for the end of the match rang, and I exhaled. In a flash, it was over. We bumped fists and shook the hands of each other’s coaches. Done.

  When I came out of the ring, I ripped off my headgear, and my teammates and family started to chant and cheer. Even though I had lost, I had given enough counterpunches and jabs to prove myself a worthy contestant. I had a snarl on my face, and my hair was a wild mess.

  “Ha ha!” one of my teammates laughed. “You look like Godzilla!”

  “Yeah, and you looked like Godzilla out there boxing, too!” another teammate said.

  Don gave me a big squeeze. “She ain’t no Godzilla, she’s Jesszilla Silva!”

  “Jesszilla!” All my teammates laughed. It was true. I had lost, but I had boxed my hardest, and I guess at times I had felt like a beast.

  “Good job in there.” Don smiled proudly.

  “She’s a Jesszilla in the ring,” said one of my teammates, still laughing.

  Don looked at me and said, “Guess you’re no longer Jess ‘Too Cute’ Silva anymore. Looks like you’ve graduated to being called something a little tougher.”

  I hadn’t thought about it until then, but I had never really wanted to be seen as “too cute” when I boxed. I wanted to be treated the same as any boy, and no little boy boxer would ever be called too cute. I wanted to be the opposite of cute. I wanted to be fierce and feared.

  My grandmother came over after the match with a concerned look on her face.

  “You know I love you, Jesselyn, but I’m never coming to watch you box again,” she said and gave me a great big hug.

  She continued, “I simply can’t watch you get hurt. But I will always be there in spirit. Okay?”

  I gave her a tight hug back and said, “Okay.”

  I had lost the match, but I also left something behind that night: I left behind people ever seeing me as a boxer who is “Too Cute.” I also gained ring experience and one more sanctioned match toward qualifying for the Junior Olympics. With two sanctioned matches now under my belt, and three more to go, I was now more determined than ever to go to the Junior Olympics!

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE AMAZING INVISIBLE GIRL

  My whole body was aching the Monday after the PAL fight, and I had a kink in my back as I lifted myself slowly out of bed that morning. I looked in the mirror and said, “Hello, Jesszilla . . .” It had a good ring to it. Usually after sparring with a teammate at the gym I was a little stiff and crampy, but I wasn’t used to the kind of aches and pains that came after a hard match like the one I’d fought on Saturday. Maya’s punches had been less predictable than my regular sparring partners’, and after coming down from the adrenaline rush of an actual sanctioned fight in front of a large crowd of people, I was completely wiped out. Boxers talk about the post-adrenaline blues, and I was discovering it was a real thing. I felt an overall sense of dullness. I guess after all those crazy stress hormones are done fueling your system for a fight-or-flight situation—fight-or-fight, in my case—everything starts to come down again and your mind feels stalled. That’s what was going on with me: inactivity, flat-out exhaustion. It took me longer to recover than I had expected.

  I went over to my glittery boxing outfit hanging on my closet door. I took it off the hanger and folded it for the storage bin. I never thought I would grow out of it so quickly. But it didn’t matter, because I came to realize I didn’t need a fancy outfit to feel like a real boxer. I could wear rags and still be the best out there as long as I was determined and worked hard.

  At breakfast Jesiah stuffed two huge bites of banana into each cheek and threatened to explode. I barely touched my food.

  “Eh, Jesiah, go finish getting ready for school,” Papi said. Jesiah chewed the last of his banana and bounded off to his bedroom. My father could tell something was bothering me.

  “You’re pretty quiet this morning. You okay?”

  “Just sore . . . and it’s Monday.” I picked at my breakfast.

  “Well, try to get some food in you.” His eyes were trained on me.

  “Papi, is it okay if I skip the gym tonight?”

  He paused for a second to process what I’d said, then smiled. “Yeah, of course. You had a rough fight. Give your muscles a rest.”

  I was relieved and glad he understood.

  We could hear Jesiah knocking things around in his room. He’d crawled under his bed looking for his athletic cup that he wore for football to bring to show-and-tell but was frustrated when he couldn’t find it. My father yelled his name. “No banging around,” he added.

  “I’m looking for my football cup!” Jesiah yelled back.

  “Just get ready for school. We don’t have any time for horsing around today.”

  Jesiah responded with a muffled complaint. It had been one of those mornings. Jesiah was grumpy too—Monday mornings weren’t his favorite—and my father was busy looking for warm coats because we had woken up to the shock of chilly weather in June. After leaving my untouched breakfast plate, I grabbed a pair of dirty jeans from the hamper, a hoodie that was too small, and socks that didn’t match. It was one of those days.

  The grumpiness continued on the car ride. My brother and I bickered about every little thing, so my father told us to travel in silence as we listened to cheesy talk radio. We were both ready for school to be out and summer to begin—it had felt like a long school year. Jesiah gave me one last sucker punch “just because,” but I was too sore to punch back, so I let him win that one. He stuck out his tongue in victory. I didn’t even care.

  After we dropped Jesiah off at school, my father twisted sideways in his seat with a look of concern. “What’s going on with you today, Jess?”

  “Nothing.” I stared out the window at Jesiah’s school. My brother had joined in a game of tag with a few of his classmates and was making silly faces at one of them as he raced around the playground. Something had been bothering me, but I felt stupid admitting it.

  “Are you upset that you lost the fight on Saturday?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Tell me what else . . . I know something’s up with you.”

  “I don’t understand why none of my friends came to watch me box. I mean, I loved that my family was there . . . especially Grandma. But not even Mackenzie showed up. They said they’d come, and they didn’t.”

  “Jesselyn . . .” My father exhaled.

  “I know what you’re gonna say.”

  “What?”

  “‘That’s not what’s important.’”

  “You’re right. That’s not what’s important. Work hard and focus on your goals—that’s what’s important. Don’t give any of that other stuff one ounce of your energy,” he told me.

  “But they said they’d be there to cheer me on! And this was important to me.”

  “You don’t need anybody cheering you on, telling you you’re good. Don’t let that be what drives you. You just need to believe that you’re good and challenge yourself to always want to be better. You know you’re an amazing girl.”

  “An amazing invisible girl.”

  He started to pull away from the curb, but paused to say, “Use this to keep you going. I
f you want a big crowd, if you want people to see you, keeping pushing for it in the ring.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” I said glumly.

  “If it were easy, you wouldn’t be doing it.”

  And with that, he put the car firmly into gear and we both looked ahead at the road.

  I knew he was right. He was always right. In fact, Papi always said, “Even when I’m wrong, I’m right.” And it was true.

  Papi also said that boxing wasn’t like other sports because there’s “no playing in boxing.” He’d say, “You can play football, you can play soccer, but you’re not playing when you box.” Not only is hitting someone hard work, but so is not getting hit. Hitting someone well and with precision is a craft. A good boxer works on controlling the punch and using the strength of their whole body to punch with a lot of power. That isn’t playing; it’s effort. And I knew I shouldn’t worry about who came or didn’t come to watch me box.

  You just need to believe that you’re good and challenge yourself to always want to be better.

  But there was something else bothering me about that night. It wasn’t just that my friends didn’t show up; it was that when it was my turn to fight Maya, I felt like we were a separate category of boxers—“the girl boxers”—and it really bothered me when I thought about it. Every time I stepped into the ring, someone was saying, “Be careful out there, little lady,” or, “Ohh, the girl boxers are going next.” It was like we were interrupting their fun or knocking on the door of their clubhouse or something . . . like we were an annoyance. I put in as much time at the gym as the boys on my team, if not more, and yet it always seemed to surprise people when I showed up.

  When I first started getting serious about boxing and began mentioning my goal of reaching the Junior Olympics, a woman boxer I met briefly at a gym warned me that people don’t like to see girls in the ring punching each other. “No matter how many times we duck under those ropes, it always makes someone feel uncomfortable,” she said. “And trust me when I say nobody likes it when they hear a woman say she likes to punch people.” But I was too naïve to understand what she meant by it at the time, so I didn’t really take her words seriously.

  In the film T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold, a documentary about Olympic gold–winning boxer Claressa Shields, there’s a scene where, after winning the gold medal in the Olympics, a public relations consultant for Team USA tells her she’s not going to get sponsors if she keeps telling people she loves “to beat people up and make them cry.” Claressa looks the consultant straight in the eye and says, “I box.” If a guy had said the same thing, he would have an entire cheering section going wild, and sponsors around the block. But not female boxers. No one knows what to do with female boxers. HBO and Showtime haven’t wanted to showcase women’s boxing matches, although the tides are turning. Showtime hadn’t aired a female boxing match until recently, and HBO just televised a female boxing match for the first time in its forty-five-year history. In May of 2018, thirty-four-year-old Cecilia Braekhus won the welterweight championship against former middleweight champ Kali Reis, and it was a big celebration—not necessarily because of who won or lost, but because a female boxing match was getting recognition on a major television network.

  Still, women have work to do to change the way our culture thinks about female boxing. In 2010, the International Boxing Association made female boxers wear skirts, because when the women wore shorts, audiences couldn’t tell the difference between male and female boxers until their headgear was taken off, and they didn’t want to be “deceived.” The rules have changed since then—women can wear shorts again—but despite the progress, it seemed like other stuff had to change, and I wasn’t sure what, or how to change it.

  Me with Olympic gold-winning boxer Claressa Shields!

  * * *

  AT SCHOOL THAT morning, nobody said anything about my fight. Not one person asked, “How’d you do this weekend?” Mackenzie avoided me altogether. That day my teacher, Ms. Nelson, opened class discussion with an interesting question: Are human lives more important than animal lives? Is a cute little puppy more important in this world than a cute little baby? One of my classmates said, “I would choose the baby, because a person is more important than a dog.”

  A lot of kids in the classroom started to all talk at once. “Not true!” “Dogs are waayyy nicer than people.” “How can you say that?! Dogs are smelly.” “I don’t like dogs! I like cats.” “Yeah, I’m allergic to dogs.”

  Ms. Nelson then asked, “What about germs? Are people more important than germs?”

  A big yes!

  “We’re always washing germs off our hands, aren’t we?” she said. “So germs can’t be good, right?”

  “Right!” we all said at once.

  “But think about it for a moment,” Ms. Nelson continued. “Think about the germs that live in your gut. If you chose human life over the life of germs, you wouldn’t be around. Your body needs germs to live. There are hundreds of types of bacteria in your belly right now keeping you healthy.” It was a weird thing to think about. “Everything has a purpose,” she said.

  Everything has a purpose. Everything has a purpose. That thought rang in my ears. I wondered what the purpose of working so hard to box was. Watching girls get in a ring and punch each other made people uncomfortable. My grandmother would have preferred that I did another sport. So what was the purpose?

  Breaking into the “boys only” club? That wasn’t originally why I had gone into boxing, but it has become something of a purpose to create equal space for girls and women in this sport as I continue improving and understanding it. When I sparred with boys, I wasn’t trying to “beat the boy.” I was just trying to belong. Gain their respect. Show them I was part of that world and had every right to be there. But I often felt like they were boxing harder with me to “beat the girl” . . . God forbid they looked bad while sparring with a girl! But of course if you were to talk to Papi, he’d say there is no winning and losing in sparring, regardless of whether you’re a boy or a girl.

  After class, I stopped Mackenzie in the hallway. Her long skinny legs made her the perfect ballerina—her true passion was dancing. She was pulling her fingers nervously through her long black hair. We had known each other a long time, and I knew she played with her hair when she got nervous. I wanted to know why she hadn’t showed up to my match.

  “Why didn’t you come watch me box on Saturday night?” I said. “You knew it was important to me.”

  She looked down and shuffled her feet. “Um, sorry, Jess. My parents think boxing is too violent. They really didn’t want me to go.”

  “But you watch your brother’s football games, and there’s tackling and shoving and stuff . . .”

  “My dad didn’t want me watching you hit people. He said it would make me feel queasy.”

  “Well, would it?”

  “I dunno, Jess . . . He said boxing encourages bad behavior.”

  Bad behavior? I thought.

  “Like it’s not a sport that teaches sportsmanship . . . Look at Mike Tyson and all those guys,” she continued.

  I almost screamed. Mike Tyson is not your typical boxer. He once said, “I try to catch my opponent on the tip of his nose because I try to punch the bone into his brain.” So maybe boxing is violent—maybe it’s one of the most violent sports around. But I’ve also seen more compassion and sportsmanship in the ring between fighters than I have on the playground at school. There’s a whole lot of respect that goes into a fight. It’s not just about hurting people or “the knockout.” A boxer might want to break someone down, but there’s a silent understanding among boxers that we’re all in this together. Sometime after the first sanctioned fight I’d had with the smaller, less experienced girl, Papi had admitted he’d kind of started rooting for her a little! That’s just the culture of boxing.

  I was disappointed in Mackenzie. “Do
you think boxing is just for boys and mean men?”

  “No, you know I like that you box. You’re doing it for the girls.”

  I rolled my eyes. Yes and no. I started off doing something I loved, and then it grew in purpose. “Yes . . . I mean, I didn’t get into boxing to fight for all of girlkind, but sure, maybe I like representing girls.” Except the truth was, I had begun to notice the boy-girl thing everywhere—not just in boxing and in sports but also in certain professions and roles in our culture. Like at the Greek restaurant where my father delivers food, for example; there are no delivery people who are women. Why not? I asked him one day.

  “Because they just don’t. Because it’s not safe for them maybe?”

  “But you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know. It’s always been men.”

  And the UPS delivery people, the newspaper carriers, the presidents of most countries . . . On the other side of things, all the librarians at my school were women, as were most of the teachers, and the nurses at the hospital. Adults kept saying our society was changing, but a good look around said it wasn’t.

  So if girl boxers made people so uncomfortable that they couldn’t even watch, what was my purpose? Everything has a purpose . . . I thought back to when I started boxing and all the boys at the gym would say, “Girls don’t box,” and how for a split second I’d started to believe that maybe they were right. But then I realized that girls do box, and they box really well, just as well as boys, sometimes even better. And it’s amazing to watch! I thought that maybe everyone else had made us invisible because they didn’t know what to do with us. If no one comes to watch, if no one cares to support girl boxers, then in essence, girls don’t box because no one sees them doing it.

  “I don’t get it, Mackenzie. If my best friend won’t come watch me box . . .” I stopped midsentence, shrugged in disappointment, and walked away.