A History of Women's Boxing

by Malissa Smith

  Undeterred by his stance against women as fans, Olson next shopped the world heavyweight championship match in Butte, Montana, between his two female fighters along with another twenty-two-year-old fighter named Terry Fisher, from Olson’s hometown of Seattle, Washington. His idea was to pit two of the three fighters against each other and then see if other bouts could be promoted. The request for the bout was brought before Troy Evans, chairman of the Montana State Athletic Commission; however, prospects did not look good even though there was no particular rule against it.

  Speaking with a reporter, Olson stated, “They use the standard gloves and there is no wrestling or hair-pulling in connection with their fights.” Despite his efforts, the fight was never held.

  Boxing also saw a bevy of young girls take up the gloves. In 1969 Laura Bloomberg, a “sports minded” twelve-year-old, was the only girl to regularly box at the Manomet Boys Club in Manomet, Massachusetts. Although she originally came to the boys club to play basketball, she became enamored of boxing when she watched other kids at the club picking up the gloves. Shortly after she joined the club, trainer Charles “Babe” Woods, a former New England middleweight champion himself, who over the years trained or worked the corner for such fighting luminaries as Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, and Renaldo Oliveira, set up a boxing clinic at the boys club on Fridays.

  Bloomberg came along with the other kids to give it a go. Learning she was a girl, Woods, a little uncertain of how she’d do, figured he’d give her a shot, especially since they boxed with twelve-ounce gloves. Bloomberg proved impressive from the beginning with excellent raw physical talent, a terrific work ethic, and a genuine flare for the science of fisticuffs. Woods even went so far as to compare her to middleweight Paul Pender. She was also made an honorary club member and came out a winner in all of her fights. Her boxing prowess, however, ran afoul of the Massachusetts State Boxing Commission because of her gender when they learned she would be fighting at a boys club fight night open to the public. The show was to have been a benefit for the club and included a roster of professional boxing stars set to fight three-round exhibition bouts.

  As reported in the press, the commission chairman, Eddie Urbec, stated that Bloomberg’s participation in a boxing match was “in direct violation of the state laws” and would be “turned over to the State Police.” He added, “This is serious indeed. One punch and she can be hurt for life.”[13]

  Bloomberg’s father, a retired Marine Corps master sergeant, fully supported his daughter, saying:

  Laura is very sports minded. . . . When she first came home and told me that she wanted to do a little boxing I went to see Babe Woods. . . . He explained the program to me and I watched some of the bouts. I can’t see there is any real danger. As soon as the fighters get tired, the round ends. . . . Laura gets hit harder playing sandlot football . . . [though] this will be her last year of contact sports anyway.

  Woods, although a keen supporter of her throughout, still advised her parents that they “get her some golf clubs and have her take lessons . . . because when she gets older she can’t very well play football or box.”[14] Clearly, though, Bloomberg’s coach and parents supported her fighting. They were in agreement that while she could participate as a child, once she hit adolescence her sports options should be limited to “girls’ sports.”

  At a meeting held with all parties shortly before the club show benefit, it was determined that Laura Bloomberg’s fighting days were over. The meeting attendees included Urbec, two detectives from the district attorney’s office, the show’s promoters, trainer “Babe” Wood, and Laura Bloomberg’s father. Eventually, they came up with one face-saving compromise: Bloomberg’s evident talent for boxing would be honored in the ring by none other than Paul Pender himself, along with boxers Lou Brouillard and Dick Hall—champions all.

  Celebrating her boxing abilities under the headline “Battling Little Laura Ends Boxing Career,” the lead paragraph of the Boston Globe article detailing her saga read: “Twelve-year-old Laura Bloomberg of Manomet will retire tonight as the only undefeated girl pugilist in America.”[15]

  In a similar case in 1972, a twelve-year-old girl named Jackie Fuller from South Oxney, England, was a boxing phenomenon at her amateur club, winning all of her bouts. She was poised to move up in class when a medical examination revealed she was a girl and she was forced to quit. Her coach, Bill Green, was quoted as saying, “That girl is the best boy I have ever trained. It wasn’t until her medical that we discovered the truth.” He continued, “She was real championship class. But now it is over. It’s illegal for girls to belong to a boxing club.”

  In response to queries by the press, Jackie is reported as having said, “I just prefer boys’ games. Netball was too soft so I joined the boxing club.”[16]

  Not all girls were prohibited from boxing. Three months after the Bloomberg episode, at the Hoffman Estates Boys Club northwest of Chicago, girls were welcomed to join in club activities on a series of “Ladies Nights.” Participating in everything from darts to boxing matches, the girls were allowed to compete against each other with boxing gloves and given instruction on the finer points of how to throw a jab.[17]

  A boxing trainer named Doyle Weaver, feeling committed to the idea that young girls should be given the chance to box, made his Dallas Junior Gloves Club coed in 1966. With the popularity growing, he started a Missy Junior Gloves Club two years later with a mantra of egalitarianism and a same-size-fits-all training philosophy. The program he set up trained girls from the ages of six to sixteen, and despite extreme pressure to stop his efforts, he persevered. The payoff was that three hundred girls signed up in 1972—“more than had ever participated in his boys’ boxing efforts.”[18]

  In places as far flung as Port of Spain, Trinidad, women were also clamoring to fight in the ring—and in 1965 Beatrice Clarke, a former bicycling champion, made a splash challenging any and all ring opponents to compete against her. With a plan to legalize females in the ring in 1966, a local promoter, H. A. Clark, promised to put on women’s boxing events.[19]

  Even “Dear Abby” got into the act with a column on female boxing. A reader signed “Milwaukee” asked if there was a “danger factor” if women picked up the gloves as opposed to wrestling. The columnist responded, “Medical authorities agreed that repeated blows to the area of the breasts CAN be dangerous to women” if they didn’t wear “protective covering” so “skip the boxing” without it. “As for wrestling,” she opined, “you can bend each other into pretzels if you like.”[20]

  At the time Bloomberg was prevented from fighting, the National Organization for Women (NOW)—founded in 1966—though barely three years old, was strongly and very publicly advocating for women’s equality. The Bloomberg case also occurred fifteen months or so after President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11375, which put a stop to discrimination based on gender for federal employees and all organizations contracted with the federal government.

  Johnson’s order led directly to ending the practice of listing employment advertisements under the headings of “male” or “female” and, as amended, was used as the basis for lawsuits against institutions and other large corporations that discriminated against women either through labor practices or pay equity. It was also a pivotal forerunner for future legislation, including Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which granted equal rights to women in education. While aimed at ending discriminatory practices in education based on gender, Title IX is most closely associated with providing female students equal access to competitive athletic programs on par with those offered to male students.

  When it came to professional competitive sports, however, the impediments to legality versus illegality were clearly in the domain of athletic governing bodies at the state, county, or city level. In the realm of amateur sports, lawsuits eventually won women the right to compete, citing civil rights statutes in effect. As long as women’s boxing was restricted by the statutes of states or other lesser j
urisdictions and their governing-body rules and regulations, women would be denied access to the licensing necessary to perform as boxers, judges, referees, trainers, or any of the other licensing categories required on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.

  Positive changes were also in the offing. When it came to female reporters, the New York State Athletic Commission began allowing properly credentialed members of the fourth estate into dressing rooms at boxing and wrestling matches—as long as the fighters were reasonably dressed. The June 1972 ruling also allowed women to sit in the press row—alongside the bastion of cigar-chomping sports writers of the old school. The ironclad “men’s only” club had, however, already been “breached” in Seattle, Washington. When a female reporter joined the elite ringside row at a bout in 1970, some of the old-timers were alarmed.[21]

  Another facet of boxing’s “men’s club”—judging at ringside—also fell when Carol Polis, a former stockbroker and mother of four, fought her way into the judge’s chair in early 1974. Polis, the wife of a part-time boxing referee, had become enamored with the game. Before working as a professional judge, she’d scored fights on the backs of the fight program, her acumen spot-on in comparison with other boxing aficionados.

  Describing herself as a “very, very bored housewife,” Polis took the step of undergoing “three months of ringside apprenticeship and a series of tests administered by the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission.” Having successfully passed her examinations, Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania swore her in as a boxing judge on February 1, 1973. He was quoted as saying her certification represented “a solid blow against male supremacy.”[22]

  A little over three weeks after gaining her appointment she officiated at a ten-round bout between Ernie Shavers and Jimmy Young that ended with a TKO in the third round, with Shavers coming up the winner. Describing the fight, she recalled being “in shock because there were 17,000 people there.”[23] She told a reporter at the time that she was “‘a little nervous’ before the bout and later said ‘I’m glad it was a knockout.’” [24]

  Polis’s one pet peeve in the early days of her judging was that she wasn’t allowed to sit ringside in between her judging duties. Though not an actual “rule,” she found that when she wasn’t actually officiating she was forced to scramble for a place in the stands and was often “expelled by a ticket holder.”[25]

  By October 2, 1974, Polis managed to breach the citadel of male boxing in New York State when she was issued a license there, thus paving the way for two other women to take on judging duties: Eva Shain and Carol Castellano (wife of fellow boxing judge Tony Castellano), who were both licensed on October 1, 1975. Shain had the distinction of being the first woman to judge a heavyweight title fight at Madison Square Garden, on September 29, 1977. She gave Mohammed Ali the nod over Ernie Shavers in their fifteen-round war, scoring the bout 9-6 along with fellow judge Tony Castellano. The referee had scored the bout 9-5-1 also for Ali.

  As discriminatory barriers to women began to fall under the banner of the “women’s liberation movement,” boxing commissions and other boxing-related organizations began to feel the heat. The visibility of women climbing into the ring or officiating at ringside helped ferment a miniboom in the number of women picking up the gloves and fighting for their right to box. These women, steeled by the struggle of their “sisters,” began using civil rights and other legislative precedents to fuel their cause, which in turn gave rise to greater numbers of females willing to fight for their right to box.

  “I’ll see you in court!”: The fight to gain licenses

  Jacqueline Garrett, claiming to be twenty-six—although she was likely forty at the time—and fighting under the name Jackie “The Female Ali” Tonawanda, wanted to box professionally. It was October 7, 1974, and she did what every other amateur fighter wanting to turn pro did in New York State: She applied for a boxing license at the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) office. In her case, though, another female boxer, twenty-one-year-old Marian “Lady Tyger” Trimiar, hailing from the South Bronx, also wanted to turn pro—and a slew of reporters and photographers who documented their every move accompanied them.

  Tonawanda trained with such boxing old hands as Connie Bryant and Freddie Brown at Bobby Gleason’s legendary boxing club, Gleason’s Gym, when it was still in the Bronx before a move to Manhattan in 1974. Tonawanda originally took an interest in the sport when she dated a boxer. She’d follow him to the gym and after a while began banging the heavy bag during his workouts, eventually learning the intricacies of the sweet science. At five feet, nine inches tall and around 175 pounds, Jackie could hit every bit as hard as a man, and as late as the 1990s she was still no slouch in the ring. As remembered by former Junior Welterweight Commonwealth Champion turned boxing trainer Lennox Blackmoore, who knew her in the early 1980s, “When she hit you, man, you felt it.”[26]

  As for Lady Tyger Trimiar, an attractive 130-lb. fighter, she heeded the sign that invited women in to box at Gleason’s Gym, training with Mack Williams, who had her full-out sparring with men. She first came to the attention of the press in May 1974 when she made her amateur boxing debut at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan’s Washington Heights (most famously known as the hall where Malcolm X was assassinated). A piece in the New York Times noted that as she made her way down her block the night of the fight, “Children called her name and followed her down the sidewalk, shadow boxing with mailboxes, parking meters and one another. Passing motorists slowed down and shouted ‘Good luck, Tyger.’”

  She’d been training at the Wagner Center with Mickey Rosario, working out seven days a week including daily runs and sparring with whoever would take her on—with one sparring session even costing her a front tooth. For her debut bout, a friend named Diane Corum had agreed to box with her. Even though Diane, known as “Killer Diane,” outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, Lady Tyger was game.

  When it came time to fight, though, an official with the local AAU came up to the ring apron and yelled, “The girls cannot fight on this program. All other bouts must be completed.” The two women obliged, and though by the time they got into the ring the crowd had definitely shrunk, they were wildly applauded for “every punch for three rounds.” When it was all over, Lady Tyger was asked about the fight, to which she replied, “I’m going to do it again [and] go to court if I have to.”[27]

  A month before her bid for a license in early September, Trimiar sparred in a boxing show at the famed San Gennaro Festival on Mulberry Street, in New York City’s Little Italy. Touted as “Women’s Lib” entering the ring, the boxing festival was put on by Madison Square Garden promoter John F. X. Condon, in part to promote Vito Antonfermo, a middleweight set to fight a few days later at the Garden. Condon was intrigued by the idea of a female fighter and—hoping to arouse the crowd’s interest—matched Lady Tyger against a fourteen-year-old male lightweight comer on the amateur scene named Miles Ruane.

  In the ring Lady Tyger proved more than capable, impressing the audience and the reporters in attendance with her taut fighting style and liberal use of the jab in her one-round exhibition against Antonfermo. Her two-round “bout” against Ruane, for which they had agreed to forego body shots, was called a “draw.” Lady Tyger felt she was on a mission. “Right now,” she said, “I’m the only woman boxer and I’m trying to convince the American Olympics officials that there ought to be a girls’ boxing team.”[28]

  With dreams of a possible fight between Trimiar and Tonawanda at Madison Square Garden, the press went to Gleason’s Gym to talk to both women about their background in boxing ahead of their planned trip to the NYSAC office. The reporters quickly established that both women had been solidly trained, but it was in the more probing questions that the women started to open up.

  Tonawanda, in response to a query about why she kept boxing even though she wasn’t fighting, said, “It’s loneliness or wanting to be a part of something.” She also talked about how she’d met great fighters over the yea
rs working out at the gym, including the likes of Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano in between her gigs as a singer, with some even showing her a trick or two. The boxing came in handy, she said. “Once in San Francisco, a guy came up and grabbed my shoulder. I hit him once in the jaw, once in the stomach, and down he went. He kept saying ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.’”

  Tonawanda also spoke of how the gym had been hers and hers alone until Trimiar came. “‘I showed her what do,’ [she] said, ‘but I was too heavy to box her. I guess I’ll have to take off a lot of weight. Training is good for that. I run a couple of miles at six every morning [and] work out a few hours in the gym everyday.’”

  As for Lady Tyger, she reemphasized how entangled her bid for a license was with “women’s lib.” In fact it was so important to her, she’d “had chest protectors designed for herself and Jackie to use in their match.”

  Closing out the interview, Tonawanda said, “This is a big thing for me, though. People used to ask me what I was training for, and I’d say I was training for a fight. Now it’s true.”[29]

  Having made it down to the NYSAC offices at 270 Broadway, the two women filled out their applications and paid their five-dollar fees. After being fingerprinted, they sat down at a desk in front of Commissioner Ralph Giordano and with raised right hands were sworn in. Afterward, they stood in line with other fighters to wait for their medical examinations. On hand to support them was the Garden’s John Condon.

  Speaking of the experience, Tonawanda said, “I think other girls will apply if we get our licenses.” Trimiar added, “One of my reasons for applying is to open the door for others.” A clerk at the office named Emma Elizando chimed in, “I think it’s great . . . [t]his is where it will start.” One of the fighters in line also added, “I’ll fight one of them.” As with the other fighters, the full NYSAC was set to review the applications at a meeting in early November pending any issues with the women’s fingerprints slated to be sent off to Albany to be checked.[30]