Although a bit unnerving, the good news was that the bout was going to be televised live on KCOP (Channel 13) along with the main event—a ten-rounder between heavyweights Howard Smith, ranked four, and Dan Johnson.
Fight night came with a flourish. Los Angeles Times columnist John Hall began his report of the fight this way: “So it’s come to this . . . Olympic ring announcer Jimmy Lennon: ‘In this corner, in a black one-piece boxing ensemble.’” Hall continued,
That was Diane “Blondee” Syverson being introduced en route to her split decision win over Princess Red Star in the “first-ever” at the old downtown fight club. . . . The women were livelier than heavyweight headliner Howard Smith, the crowd roared, TV ratings were the best and promoter Aileen Eaton says she will continue to feature females as often as she can make suitable matches.[28]
The ratings for the fight had taken a big jump during the time when the two women fought, outdistancing the men’s bout and “all but rivaling the network telecast of the pro basketball playoffs the same night—at a more inviting time.”[29]
Kibby’s camp was less than happy with the split-decision outcome for obvious reasons. Asked for his reaction, Dave Kibby Sr. said, “It was the damndest thing I’ve seen in all my born days. . . . Theresa went straight in, around and in back and punched from the opening bell to the end.” He continued, “In the third round she rained punches on Syverson and had her so confused she didn’t know what was going on.” Kibby also said that Don Chargin had told him, “It was Theresa’s fight,” but having been impressed by the professionalism shown by both fighters intended to “bring them back.”
Regarding the death threat, Kibby noted there’d been extra security and that they had even been “met at the plane by former heavyweight boxer Mario Silva,” who “escorted” them “to and from the arena.” Security personnel were also on hand in the ring with two assigned to each corner. What made the night worthwhile—even with the loss—was Kibby’s report that Aileen Eaton had told him, “I’m happy and proud the way things turned out. They were good weren’t they.”[30]
Aside from the two Kibby-Syverson fights, the month of May was a busy one for women’s boxing.
The Hyatt Tahoe at Incline Village, Nevada, added its first women’s bout to a fight card on May 5, 1975: a four-rounder featuring Caroline Svendsen and newcomer Ersi Arvizu, with referee Mills Lane in attendance. It proved to be Svendsen’s only loss—a TKO in the second round of the fight.
In Portland, Maine, on May 20, 1975, not one but two female fights were held on a three-fight card. The first was between Cathy “Cat” Davis, a New Yorker who picked up the gauntlet from Jackie Tonawanda and “Lady Tyger” Trimiar to sue for the right to box in New York. She fought against Bobbi Shane with Davis taking it with a KO in the fourth round. The second female bout on the card was a three-rounder between Gwen Hibbler and Margie Dunson. Hibbler won the bout by unanimous decision, and went on to fight Lady Tyger the following year. As for Dunson, she fought Cat Davis no less than four times—losing each of the bouts.
The month of June also had a number of fights. Marion Bermudez, the karate champion who had defeated Karen Mast in the fall of 1975, fought a boxing match against Ersi Arvizu, defeating her by TKO in the third round at the Hyatt Tahoe on June 9. A bout between Diane Syverson and Kim Maybee was fought on June 12 on a card that included Dave Kibby—a card Theresa Kibby was originally scheduled to appear on.
Also in June, New York fighter Cathy “Cat” Davis fought a bout against Nickie Hanson, who was making her debut in what was scheduled to have been an eight-round bout at the Seattle Center Arena. Davis won the contest held on June 29 by KO at fifty-six seconds into the second round. The next night, on June 30, Theresa Kibby went back into the ring to fight a four-rounder against LaVonne Ludian, a Las Vegas blackjack dealer, at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas, Nevada, the first of a regular series of women’s bouts there. Kibby took the fight by unanimous decision. The Olympic, however, took a hiatus from putting women’s boxing on their fight cards until September 30 when Marian “Lady Tyger” Trimiar fought a Japanese female boxer named Masako “Taka-Chan” Takatsuki, defeating her by unanimous decision after four rounds of boxing.
As matches were being scheduled and fought, fighters like Sue Fox were also seeking out gyms and trainers to gain the necessary experience to succeed in boxing. In Fox’s case, it meant uprooting her life and moving to California. She began training at a gym in Westminster, California, but once there, had to go through the ritual of a beat-down in the ring with an experienced male bantamweight sparring “partner” to begin to gain any sort of acceptance at all. Acting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she’d even agreed to spar with him the next day—in effect a second day of punishment—but he never showed up. Fox eventually learned the fighter had been told to knock her out. Fox’s will of iron, and the kind of heart that had already buoyed her as a competitive karate fighter, meant that she had refused to go down. “I loved boxing that much,” she said. As for the bantamweight, according to Fox “he was too humiliated to return to the gym.”[31]
Fox’s experience was in no way unique, and truthfully the proverbial beat-down was a known quantity on the men’s boxing side—a technique to measure how tough fighters really were and whether they understood just how much of a commitment boxing really required. For women entering the ring with little to no experience, and not having had the opportunities to fight as youngsters, the entire process was a huge shock to the system. Women were also ignored in gyms, finding it hard to get attention or any sort of assistance during their early forays. If these fighters continued to show up, seek out sparring partners, and in all other ways persevere, they were more often than not received with some begrudging respect and, over time, could team up with the same trainers who worked with their male counterparts. It was by no means a perfect situation, but at least women were beginning to learn the intricacies of boxing rather than just walking into the ring as “fresh meat” for a beating.
The political side of women’s participation in the sport was also never too far from the fore in this period. At the beginning of 1976, fighters “Lady Tyger” Trimiar and Gwen Gemini had appeared alongside former heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano on the Mike Douglas Show, a popular television talk show. The two women had come on the show to promote their four-rounder at the Arena in Philadelphia—the first sanctioned female bout in memory in Pennsylvania—but with Lady Tyger’s newly shorn bald head they were something of a “freak show.” The two women had previously fought a sanctioned exhibition boxing contest in Connecticut in December 1975, the first female bout in memory in that state. That bout went unscored, but Lady Tyger was considered to be the clear winner by everyone watching the fight. She was also deemed skilled. Gwen Gemini had little or no experience before entering the squared circle; however, she proved to be a quick study and by the following year was very well respected by her peers and considered one of the sport’s best fighters.
The fact that the Philadelphia match at the Arena was planned as an exhibition did not deter the promoters from the usual hoopla surrounding fights. They also didn’t shy from having Lady Tyger and Gwen Gemini appear on an eight-fight boxing card. Lady Tyger even put in an appearance at Joe Frazier’s Gym in Philadelphia the day before the fight, which the press attended.
As a prerequisite for the fight, the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission required women to don an aluminum bra—a precaution against injuries to the breasts, although the impact on a fist, even a gloved one thrown at full force onto a chest protector, did not seem to be a consideration. Lady Tyger had refused to wear her aluminum bra during the bout.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she told reporter Gary Smith from the Philadelphia Daily News after the fight. “I’ll get in trouble if they find that I didn’t wear the aluminum bra we’re supposed to wear. Please don’t write that.”
Smith did. Letting his readers in on the “secret,” he wrote, “Sorry, Lady. Can’t sit
on a scoop like that.” Smith went on to quote Gemini who said, “I WORE my aluminum bra,” having clunked on it making a “loud knocking sound.”
The Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission had, however, already determined not to allow a decision—opting to hold off until the commission decided further on which boxing rules were to apply to women’s bouts. As with their previous bout the month before, the fight was called a “no contest.” In the eyes of the crowd and other boxing aficionados, however, Lady Tyger won handily, showing off her superior boxing skills and some flourishes including an “Ali shuffle.”
Smith’s article was less interested in any skills Lady Tyger might have shown and continued in a bemused and nearly feckless tone as he turned his attentions to Gwen Gemini:
Another reporter approached, searching for the social significance of two women boxing, digging to see if the soul of a women’s libber lurked beneath Gwen Gemini’s aluminum bra.
“What IS women’s lib, anyway?” asked Gemini. . . . “I love to stay in the kitchen to cook. . . . I’d cook myself to death.”[32]
Bob Wright, a sportswriter with a boxing beat for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, wrote a piece that began by intoning a “but why?” query about Lady Tyger’s shorn head. “Because it’s me. Clean, unique. And it’s very convenient.”
To the “Why fight?” question she offered, “I don’t fight, I box. I’m an athlete and this is my sport.” As for being “unladylike,” she said, “Men! I’m a lady. You can be a lady and be an athlete too.”
He did, however, give her the opportunity to espouse her perspective on women’s rights, including the fact that she’d voted no on the Equal Rights Amendment because “I found out at the last minute and didn’t really know what it was all about.” She continued:
Mostly I’m for equal rights for people. I think anybody should be able to do anything they’re able to do. As a girl, I haven’t been able to get all the exposure and experience guys get boxing amateurs. But I think when it comes to where we can get the same background; you’ll find a lady can do the job just as well as a man.[33]
While not all female boxers shaved their heads or were clear in their perspectives on the issues of the day, the inanity of the questions was vexing at best. Underlying them was the discomfort with the continued push against the legal barriers to full unfettered participation in all aspects of society.
In boxing in particular, those arguments also became nuanced in the “jargon” of boxing lore. Were women practicing “science” or were they merely brawling—or worse, “cat fighting?” This sort of question was sometimes at the heart of whether to legalize female boxing. The California Athletic Commission had raised just such issues in their rather public deliberation on whether to sanction women’s boxing. The queries, however, very clearly revealed the biases of the commission members. As an example, one commissioner adjudged that female fighters were less aggressive because of concerns about their appearance. Such opinions played out in the press, as did the general castigation of all female boxers as a bunch of “women’s libbers”—a euphemism for man-hating troublemakers or worse.
Not to be lost, though, was the fact that many of the women were not particularly skilled. And that was putting it kindly. From the point of view of the boxing fan who’d come to an arena to watch a fight card with every expectation that the skills the boxers displayed would be at least adequate, seeing fighters flail around the ring with no science was painful to watch. Throwing gender into the mix made it that much more unpalatable to a subset of fight fans who reacted whenever a fighter was perceived as missing a certain level of competence. One retired boxer who had been at the Pineda v. Maybee fight put it this way: “Those girls were dragging it; you can’t change the rules for them; they sell fights here, and it’s a fraud if they don’t produce what they promise. Make ’em fight proper; let ’em get in there and kill each other.”[34]
Women’s Boxing Las Vegas Style
They’re real pros. . . . When the girls fight it’s SRO. They are worth the $250 apiece, plus expenses, for the four-rounders. I know one thing: When they fight it’s on the dead level and they’re in shape.
—Mrs. Bill Miller, promoter, Silver Slipper Casino, Las Vegas, 1977[35]
By the fall of 1976, there were a considerable number of women who were fighting with some regularity in regional pockets of the United States. Venues in the state of Nevada in particular were finding an upside to featuring women’s bouts: more bodies to fill the seats at the fights, to buy drinks, and to play in the casinos.
Boxer LaVonne Ludian, who’d lost her debut bout against Theresa Kibby in June at the Silver Slipper Casino in Las Vegas, began to appear regularly on fight cards at various venues in Nevada.
Ludian faced a series of female fighters making their debuts on the Wednesday night fight shows at the Silver Slipper beginning on September 15. She also appeared at the Hyatt Tahoe and the Sahara Tahoe in their regular shows. Ludian’s many appearances in the ring quickly pushed her record to 6-1 when she faced Kibby again on December 8, 1976, at the Silver Slipper. She lost for the second time to Kibby by unanimous decision—but it didn’t keep her from a spot on the January 5, 1977, card against Andrea Chandler, whom she trounced for the second time with a first-round KO. (Their previous fight had been at the Hyatt Tahoe in October.)
The interest in women’s boxing in Nevada had started with Caroline Svendsen’s first fight. In fact, the Silver Slipper, under the promotional hand of Bill Miller, had put on the casino’s first women’s bout on October 22, 1975, one month after Svendsen’s first bout in the state. The contest was a four-rounder between Britisher Tansy “Baby Bear” James and Aggie Henry, with James getting the nod on points. It was a debut for both of them. Henry went on to fight against Ludian in November of 1976 at the Sahara Tahoe, losing to her by KO in the first round.
Bill Dickson, the promoter for the Hyatt Tahoe, began putting women on the fight cards at the urging of Caroline Svendsen’s manager, Ted Walker, and as noted, the first fight was in May 1976. It’s quite possible that there was an earlier bout, but if so, it did not appear in the official records. Dickson also put LaVonne Ludian on the card at the annual Gardnerville, Nevada, 4th of July celebration (held on July 10)—a four-rounder pitting her against Sharon Blain in her debut bout that Ludian took by KO. Taking on duties at the Silver Slipper in 1977, Dickson became the matchmaker responsible for the Wednesday night fight shows, including the female fighters under promoter Mrs. Bill Miller, who had taken over for her husband after his death by heart attack in 1976.
Many of the women in the shows were one-fight wonders, although some persevered through two, three, or more fights, becoming regulars with growing followings. Fighters such as bantamweight Karen Bennett, appearing in six shows between January and June 1977, was a particular favorite at the Silver Slipper. While Bennett lost her first two bouts—her debut, against Masako “Taka-Chan” Takatsuki, and her second against karate champion Marion Bermudez—she was hooked on boxing and won her next four fights with KO wins.
Takatsuki had been around boxing since getting her license as a trainer in Japan where she taught boxing at Tokyo’s Saitama Chuo Boxing Gym in the early 1970s. A featherweight, she was the only woman licensed to train boxers by the Japan Boxing Commission after having successfully gained her boxing manager’s license. She also made regular appearances in exhibition fights with men at Tokyo’s famed Korakuen Hall.[36]
Written about in Boxing Illustrated Magazine in 1973, Takatsuki had received a challenge from Millie Golden—a California-based woman living in Anaheim with a light background in the sport—but nothing ever came of it.[37] Takatsuki eventually came to the United States in 1976 to gain her license to box women.[38] As noted, she lost her first bout in the United States to Lady Tyger Trimiar at the Olympic Theater on September 30, 1976, on points after four rounds of boxing, having taken a mandatory eight-count in the first round.
Sue Fox—who’d lost her rematch against The
resa Kibby in Missoula, Montana, at the first sanctioned female bout in that state, on October 23, 1976, by TKO in the third round—also began fighting at the Silver Slipper, the Sahara Tahoe, and the Hyatt Tahoe. By then, Fox had hooked up with Dee Knuckles who began managing her along with others who fought in Nevada in 1977 and 1978.
By March 1977, Don Riley, writing for the Knight Ridder news service, published a piece with the title “Women Boxers a Smash in Vegas.” Riley posed several questions in his piece, among them, “Would you believe that recently a middleweight feminine swatter from California won the ‘fighter of the month’ honors?”
Likely he was referring to two separate welterweight bouts that had been called fights of the month: the February 2 fight between Sue Fox and Charlene Anthony at the Silver Slipper, which ended in a unanimous decision for Fox, and Fox’s March 1 bout against LaVonne Ludian at the Hyatt Tahoe, which was called a draw. He also singled out Fox as the “red-headed pig-tailed southpaw swinger who throws 100 punches a round.”
He published the startling fact that female boxers could “command $100 more per fight than their male preliminary counterparts.” He backed up his claim by writing that a recent fight at the Silver Slipper “upstairs ballroom” was jammed with “1,100 fans” who’d shelled out “nearly $10,000 to watch the festivities which were clearly highlighted by the girls’ bout.”
Mrs. Bill Miller, who took credit for putting on the shows, told Riley:
They’re real pros. . . . When the girls fight it’s SRO. They are worth the $250 apiece, plus expenses, for the four-rounders. I know one thing: When they fight it’s on the dead level and they’re in shape.[39]
A History of Women's Boxing Page 26