A History of Women's Boxing
Page 17
Buttrick’s opponent for the clandestine bout turned out to be Kathleen Turpin, sister of three boxing brothers. Oldest brother Dick became the first “colored” boxer in the modern era to win a title fight in England, having been awarded the Lonsdale Belt as the British Middleweight Champion in 1948. Not to be outdone, Randy Turpin, two years Kathleen’s junior, was to later defeat boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson for the middleweight title of the world in a hard-fought fifteen-round shocker in London in 1951. A third brother, Jackie Turpin, also won a championship (BBBC title) and made a name for himself while fighting as a featherweight.
With thirty pounds on Buttrick, Turpin was certainly going to be a challenge. This was especially so as she was pictured in the press hard at work on a double-ended bag in the boxing gym where she trained—and presumably, having been around boxing all her life, she had at least some modicum of skill.
During this period, Buttrick also challenged Cath Thomas, who was continuing to make a name for herself in Australia. The hope was that the two women would fight for an Empire women’s championship title, with Buttrick ceding twenty or so pounds in order to fight. The challenges of getting the two women together proved to be too great to even consider. Both were banned from boxing in their home countries and there was the vast geographical distance between them. As it was, Thomas “demand[ed] expenses, and a guarantee, before accepting the bout.”[22] The two women, fierce competitors both, were never able to meet in the ring. Thomas seemed to slowly dissolve into the recesses of history with very little more that can be found about her boxing exploits past 1948.
For unknown reasons, the fight between Buttrick and Turpin was never listed on the “official” record of fights that Buttrick maintained over the years.[23] It is possible that the Buttrick/Turpin fight did not take place at all. The venue owners may have pulled the bout, fearing repercussions from promoting a clandestine match. Furthermore, there is little, if any, information on Turpin herself after this period, nor reports on whether she ever fought at all after the Buttrick challenge.
As the spring wore on, Buttrick also pressed for permission to fight professionally by requesting the BBBC reverse its long-standing ban on female boxing. Issues raised include the canard that women needed special rules, not to mention “protective devises to prevent permanent injury to girls who slug each other.”
The ringing endorsements of Buttrick’s trainers to the press were couched in language that left no doubt that women’s fighting was not the equal to men’s.
Wally May opined, “Any fight between women with which I have anything to do would have to be a lady-like exhibition.”
Even Len Smith said the fights should be “short” with “big gloves and a new code of foul blows,” to help “overcome some of the old objections to girls in the ring.” He did, however, go on to say, “a bloody nose now and then wouldn’t hurt them.”
Mickey Wood’s tact was to speak about Barbara Buttrick herself, saying:
She is a girl who really likes to fight, and we just can’t keep her out of the gymnasium. . . . She would crawl in through the window if we shut the door. We have decided to give her the best of our professional skill. She is in prime physical shape, and what a slugger! I don’t want my chin to get in the way when she swings.
Buttrick herself, in making her case to the public, said, “Girls are in most sports and should do well in boxing. I’ve just got to convince the boxing boards it is safe, and anyway, I’m not afraid of getting hurt.”[24]
The BBBC did not agree and maintained the ban.
By this point it was obvious that there were no particular opportunities for Buttrick to fight an actual boxing match—other than sparring in the gym or risking the possible repercussions of fighting in clandestine matches. The only recourse was to follow in the footsteps of her heroine Polly Burns by taking to the boxing booths still plying English fairgrounds from one end of the country to the other.
Buttrick’s first appearance was with Tommy Wood’s boxing booth show on Derby Day, June 4, 1949, at the fair held annually at Epson Downs. She fought male opponents, taking on all comers who were within a thirty-pound swing range of her ninety-eight-pound frame. As was the normal course in the boxing booths, Buttrick took on all female comers in her catch-weight range from 90 pounds to 130, and in the absence of women, boxed men, her usual opponents. Boxing as many as thirty or more rounds in a day, Buttrick became an efficient boxing machine, and to her recollection, was never bested by a challenger.
Next up, Buttrick toured the West Country, with Sam McKeowen’s Boxing and Wrestling Show. The boxing show became a perfect venue for her “professional” fights, as they would take place on the fairgrounds well away from the prying eyes of the VFA, BBBC, or the LCC in a duly licensed venue.
According to Buttrick’s official record, as the summer wore on she tallied three fights, two in July and one in September. Of the three fights, Buttrick won the first by TKO in the second round against Margaret Johnson in Penzance, England—a well-known stop on the boxing booth circuit even if the location was remote at the edge of the peninsula jutting out into the Celtic Sea. Buttrick won her second fight against Joan Fletcher by KO in the second round in Brixham, England, and won her third match on points after four rounds of boxing against Sheila Craig in Paignton, England—just down the road from Brixham.
Interviewed by a West Country boxing magazine, the article on Buttrick noted that the “objects of her tour with the booth were to gain experience and encourage other girls to take up the sport!” The piece also reiterated Buttrick’s desire to “start a gymnasium” of her own and went on to proudly mention a West Country woman, the wife of boxer Alf Wright from Plymouth “who could hold her own” in the ring.[25]
For the next boxing booth season in 1950, she switched to Professor Boscoe’s Boxing and Wrestling Show, which plied her home county of Yorkshire. Buttrick received top billing as “Britain’s Leading Girl Boxer,” and drew considerable crowds of men, women, and children. Boscoe, acting as her promoter, sought out professional fights for her, although with little success.
One such fight in July 1950 was to have been fought against Elsa Hoffman, a young German woman living in the town of Dewsbury. Set to be held at the Dewsbury Feast on the fairground, “Elsa failed to turn up” for their “four two-minute round” fight. Speaking with the press about the planned fight, the mayor of the town, J. E. Brown, said he felt the fight was “deplorable” and was “glad that nothing came of it.”[26]
Even though the sold-out match was canceled, Buttrick received challenges from the crowd. In all, she fought four “official” fights—winning three by KO and one by TKO between July and September. This was in addition to the daily rounds she fought in the booth.
Despite the shock and dismay that women might have a boxing contest at the fairgrounds, there was a long tradition of boxing women in boxing booth shows stretching back to the late 1800s. In the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s in England, such shows as The Moore Family of Athletes featured not only the sons but also the daughters of the shows proprietor, Professor Moore. The same was true of the Hickmans, a boxing family that claimed to go as far back as the 1820s champion Tom Hickman. The Hickmans traveled in the 1920s with the Pat Collins Boxing Show.
Winnie Davies boxed in Jack Lemm’s athletic and strongman shows in the late 1920s and early 1930s (he was her father). Davies was even occasionally featured on the show bills as the Flyweight Champion Lady Boxer. Other boxing booth notables included Alf Stewart, whose wife and daughters—while not boxing—shared duties as timekeepers, ticket takers, and all of the other jobs that kept the show running.
Boxing booth work was by no means easy for boxers. Fighters had to work all day and well into the evening before packing up the show and hitting the road for the next destination, where the long workday started all over again. Hardest were rainy days when the crowds stayed away and very little money came into the till. Packing up in the rain was also difficult as was the near-cons
tant travel from town to town.
As with male boxers, the fairground shows gave women fighters the opportunity to learn their trade and come in contact with other fighters and entertainers seeking to earn a living by their fists. While it could be difficult for women in particular—because they were subjected to negative attention by the authorities—the female fighters were at least able to practice their trade and, as in Buttrick’s case, out of sight of the boxing officials who would rather she not jump in the ring at all.
In 1952, with Smith by her side, Buttrick took off for a season of touring the French countryside with a boxing booth show there. The retinue traveled the length and breadth of France in such places as Joinville, Neufchateau, Vitre, and Dale, and—as with her British boxing booth tours—aside from daily bouts, she racked up six more wins to her running tally of “official” fights. It is difficult to know if the women she fought were actual boxers, savate fighters, or just women who were eager to challenge her. What is clear is that in France, as in England, women were only too eager to pick up the gloves. Speaking about her time in the boxing booths, she told a reporter:
It was an exciting life . . . we moved from town to town and I didn’t feel tied down. We’d put up the tent and then I’d fight at night. If the girls that come up could last three rounds with me, they’d win a prize. Many of them would fancy their chances with me because I was very small. But I never had much trouble.[27]
Following her travels through France, Buttrick and Smith decided to give the United States a go, where they’d heard that women were starting to box professionally. It was to be a momentous decision, one that saw Buttrick and Smith marry earlier in the year, in June 1952, and leave England for good with a view to making a life for Buttrick as a professional boxer, hopeful of the potential for greater opportunities.
Boxing Beauties: Women’s Boxing in the 1950s
I went at her with a combination attack—left jabs to the head and hard rights to the body. Girls can be beaten with body punches. After three rounds of all the punches I could throw, Miss Hagen was finished.
—Mrs. Lancaster (Pat Emerick), March, 1972[28]
In an era of bathing-beauty contests, “Susie homemaker,” and visions of the Cold War beginning to stir in the public’s consciousness, women’s boxing in the United States had begun to pick up in the late 1940s. There were pockets of opportunity for actual fights in something other than the nightclub venues plied by Mickey Walker’s all-girl boxing troupe in the mid-1930s. This was due in no small part to the rise of women’s wrestling and the newcomer to women’s sports Roller Derby, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s aired as many as three times a week on television.
Such wrestling stars as Mary “The Fabulous Moolah” Ellison, June Byers, Millie Stafford, Mildred Burke, Ella Waldek, Mae Young, and former boxer Bonnie Bartlett were wrestling stalwarts in the late 1940s and on through 1950s. The popularity of these fighters led to the growth of women’s wrestling in all parts the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The acceptance of women in the wrestling ring also helped open the door to bring female boxers as a feature on fight cards.
In June 1950 Jo Ann Hagen, billed as the women’s world featherweight champion, came from South Bend, Indiana, to fight a six-round match against a Chicago fighter named Nancy Parker at the Radio Center in Huntington, West Virginia. Hagen won the bout by decision after both women boxed to the adoring hoots, whistles, and shouts of the three thousand fans who’d poured into the arena to see them fight—one-third of whom were women. For the contest, Hagen and Parker boxed wearing sixteen-ounce gloves—presumably for their protection and likely to satisfy the authorities. A newspaper reporting on the fight claimed that the fight was lackluster at best because the fighters both wore twelve-ounce gloves. The article also stated that it was only an exhibition fight, which meant there was no decision issued.[29] The discrepancy in the glove size was not addressed.
This first female boxing bout in the state of West Virginia was reported to be a fully sanctioned event, although the state’s “athletic commissioner J. Patrick Beacom protested the bout as being against ‘common decency.’”
Luckily for Hagen and Parker, the fight—promoted by Dick Deutsch, a local boxing and wrestling promoter—was not opposed by B. W. West, the commission official responsible for the Huntington jurisdiction, who opined that he “knew of no law prohibiting women from boxing.” Deutsch himself was a well-known promoter who the year before had put together a wrestling card featuring seven women in a variety of pairings and went on to promote Joe Louis’s wrestling appearance in Huntington in 1956. Speaking of the boisterous female fans at the Hagen-Parker fight, whose number even surprised Deutsch, he went on to say, “Maybe they learned some pointers on how to deal with hubby when he gets rough,” perhaps speaking truth to an all-too-common occurrence that harkened back to the meme of women’s boxing as self-defense.[30]
Unfortunately, West Virginia’s foray into the world of women’s boxing was short-lived. Within a week or so of the contest, the West Virginia Athletic Commission voted to ban female boxers from the ring. Patrick Beacom, who had objected to the Hagen-Parker fight from the onset, led the call for the banning, claiming that participation in boxing “may cause such physical harm to the women boxer as to do great injury to the already sick boxing game.” He gained the support of the National Boxing Association (NBA) in his call for the ban.[31] While recommending the ban, the NBA had no power to enact any decisions—those were left to the individual state athletic and boxing authorities. In another blow to the sport, the French Boxing Federation announced a ban on female boxing the following November, even though the women affected by the ruling contested it strongly.
Jo Ann Hagen (shortened from Ver Hagen and originally a sandlot baseball player) was known as “the Bashing Blonde from South Bend.” She boxed for trainer and manager Johnny Nate, who popularized women’s boxing in and around South Bend. The women worked out in a space below Nate’s tavern on North Hill Street, where there was a heavy bag, an area for sparring, and other boxing equipment. Nate himself had been a bantamweight, achieving some notoriety as a Golden Gloves fighter in the early 1930s. His older brother, Georgie Nate, also came to prominence as a boxer in the Midwest.
At some point, Johnny Nate turned to training and managing female fighters, including Jo Ann Hagen and Phyllis Kugler. Phyllis fought under the name “Phil” Kugler in the 1950s until someone figured out that the apparent amateur boxer fighting in the arena was a girl. Kugler, a self-professed “tomboy,” had grown up in the sport with a father who had been an amateur boxer and brothers who all took up boxing. In an interview with the South Bend Tribune decades later, Kugler recalled “her mother had different feelings”:
My mom had a problem with it, especially when I broke my nose for the fourth or fifth time in a fight down in Texas. . . . But my mother wasn’t the only one. It took some people around here a long time to accept what I was doing.
On the topic of boxing, clearly her main interest, she also told the reporter, “What really worked for me was a double left hook followed by a right cross.”[32]
Hagen—said to be the 126-pound champion—featured in an earlier bout against Arvilla M. Emerick, billed as Pat Emerick, another South Bend fighter, who’d taken up boxing in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Emerick’s workout at that time consisted of practicing her punches on the heavy bag, sparring, and running five miles a day along a path that bordered the railway line not far from the University of Notre Dame. She likely also spent at least some time training with Johnny Nate. When she wasn’t boxing, she worked first as a ticket taker in a movie theater and then as a store manager.
In 1949 Hagen and Emerick fought a six-round co-feature main event at the Moose Auditorium in Council Bluffs, Iowa, promoted by former boxer and current wrestling star Champ Thomas. It was to be the town’s first public women’s boxing match. Stories about the fight in the local paper began appearing a week before on an almost daily basis.
Hagen was reported to be the more active and aggressive fighter during the first three rounds of the bout, but in the fourth round, Emerick came on strong, taking “all the steam out of the South Bend blonde who passed out at the end of the round.” Hagen was revived by her corner, but declined to enter the ring for the fifth round, giving Emerick the TKO win.[33]
Recalling the fight in 1972, Emerick remembered it as only lasting three rounds before Hagen took to her stool:
I went at her with a combination attack—left jabs to the head and hard rights to the body. Girls can be beaten with body punches. After three rounds of all the punches I could throw, Miss Hagen was finished; couldn’t answer the bell for the fourth round. They gave me the championship on a TKO.
Emerick stated that she gave up fighting in September 1950 after a serious car accident in Indiana. She went on to marry Robert Lancaster in 1955 and raised ten children with him. She also recalled that in the nearly two years that she fought professionally, she had traveled in and around Indiana, Nebraska, and Iowa, earning as much as $250 for a title fight, “before deductions,” but otherwise earning very little.[34] She was purportedly given a trophy with a golden glove on top for the fight against Hagen.[35] In all, Pat Emerick claimed a record of eighteen fights with only one loss—her first.