A History of Women's Boxing

by Malissa Smith

  Justice Nathaniel T. Helman, in his opinion on the case, cited the precedent set in the Tonawanda (Garrett) case two years before by Justice Frank, which “found the regulation invalid under the equal protection clauses of the State and Federal Constitutions.”

  Because “no judgment was settled upon the reported decision” (Tonawanda had not pursued the case beyond the initial state court’s ruling), the dreaded New York State rule number 205.15, denying women the right to box in New York State, still stood.

  Writing that the arguments made by the NYSAC in the Davis case were “unimpressive,” Justice Helman continued by stating that upholding the denial of the license would mean “much need[ed] change would never take place,” and that such things as the possible “exploitation” of women boxers could be handled under existing “labor and contract laws.”

  Concluding that the “cross-motion” by the state was denied, Justice Helman found in favor of Cathy Davis by invalidating rule 205.15. In so doing, he directed the NYSAC to “promulgate rules for the licensing of women as boxers, with due consideration for the protective needs of women.”[17]

  Overturning the rule, which had been the bane of female wrestlers and boxers, did not mean that the NYSAC would act immediately—in fact the NYSAC filed an appeal to the appellate court in February 1978. By May, perhaps in response to the threat of further lawsuits, the NYSAC “took a major step toward the licensing of women boxers . . . when it requested permission to drop its appeal.” In their request, they noted that the commission “would have 90 days to draw up rules for women,” after which time, applications from women “will be accepted and processed by the commission.”[18]

  Bowing to the inevitable—and joining forty-two other states that had already legalized women’s boxing—on September 19, 1978, the NYSAC issued its first boxing licenses to the three women who had worked the hardest to see the ban overturned. The first license was issued to Cathy “Cat” Davis, much to the annoyance of Jackie “The Female Ali” Tonawanda (Garrett) and Marian “Lady Tyger” Trimiar. Lady Tyger felt that she and Tonawanda had labored longer with the previous court actions that eventually paved the way for Davis to succeed. The commission, however, issued the first license to Davis because it was her court case that had directly led to the legalization of women’s boxing in New York State.

  In true “boxing” style, Lady Tyger said, “I challenge the ‘Cat’ to fight right here and now.” Davis reportedly responded, “You’ll have to learn to box first.”

  Associated Press columnist Will Grimsley wrote, “The two made menacing gestures toward each other, and aides joined commission officials in keeping them apart.”

  “The Cat’s been ducking me for a long time—meow! meow!” Tyger said, adding, “I’m going to get her soon.”

  Grimsley also reported that while pithy dialogue between Cat Davis and Lady Tyger might have seemed manufactured solely for the many representatives of the press that had come to watch the proceedings, there was still a genuine animosity between the pair, stemming from earlier attempts to put together matches—and ongoing questions about Davis’s record.[19]

  While waiting for the NYSAC to finally lift the ban against female boxing in New York State, Davis had continued to pursue her boxing career. She also sought a more national platform.

  Davis’s statuesque figure, good looks, long blonde hair, and apparent “girl next door” wholesomeness were beginning to make her a media darling and a poster girl for women’s boxing. It certainly helped that she had been to college, spoke with a soft southern drawl, and was considered “articulate.” She also projected an image that was the antithesis of a “bra-burning” feminist activist—something Lady Tyger, a black woman who sported a shaved head and was an outspoken critic of the status quo, would have been automatically associated with, even if she had never uttered a word.

  The issue of class, color, and gender affectation was also never far from the surface in relation to women’s boxing. Algieri was quick to point out, “I’d expected to find the ugliest chick in the world. Bald. Terrible, who knows what? When she came up I said, ‘Hey you don’t wanna fight, man, you wanna be a model or something.’” He told a variation of that story whenever he described his first meeting with Davis—sometimes adding that he thought she’d be short and squat. Whatever the stereotypes for what a woman interested in boxing might look like, being a tall, slim, pretty blonde who didn’t look muscle-bound and who wasn’t obviously working class, “ethnic,” or black or Hispanic, was something that Davis and her team exploited—perhaps, it could be argued, to the detriment of other female fighters.

  Just after the New Year in 1978, Cat Davis accepted an invitation to join twelve other female athletes (all Caucasian) at the “Sports Superstars” tournament in Freeport, Bahamas, to be held on January 23 and 24, with parts of the competition shown on ABC television. The concept of the show was to take a group of “star” athletes from various sports and pit them against one another in a series of competitive events. In previous years, tennis star Billie Jean King had even participated. To be included with the potential for a lot of additional publicity was quite a coup for Davis. The eventual 1978 winner was speed skater Anne Henning (her third win in a row), but regardless, it gave Davis tremendous national exposure and established her in the minds of the media as a face of women’s boxing—if not the face.

  Returning home, she shot a segment for CBS Sports Spectacular television program at the Hilton in Las Vegas in February. The piece showed her sparring with Algieri and included an interview with her. She also appeared on The Today Show in this period.

  In an article by columnist Jeff Meyers that ran about the same time, it was claimed that Davis had “signed a contract that guarantees her $70,000 for her next three fights.”[20] That was an extraordinary amount of money. Considering that Bob Arum offered $15,000 for a three-fight deal the year before to LaVonne Ludian, Theresa Kibby, and Sue TL Fox, it was an enormous escalation in the apparent value of female fighters. What was absent was information on who was offering the guarantee and when the fights would occur.

  By then Davis was claiming a 16-0 record with fifteen by KO and one by decision. Aside from her boxing, she was also earning money as a model, performing exhibition bouts with Algieri (one famously at the New York Coliseum’s auto show a year later), and even speaking engagements. One thing Davis wasn’t really doing was boxing—not until two planned fights: a nontitle bout in Atlanta, Georgia, in June against boxer Ernestine Jones meant as a tune-up for a later title defense against Jo Jo Thomas in, of all places, Monaco. Surprisingly, the latter fight had also been announced as a twelve-rounder to be contested at the venue in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

  Ahead of her bout against Jones, People magazine ran a story about Davis in their May 15, 1978, edition—another first for Davis and for the sport of women’s boxing.

  Telling People, “I never want to be considered a jock,” Davis went on to say, “There’s the image that to be a boxer you’ve got to be dumb, have a nose that’s spread across your face and cauliflower ears. If you’re a woman, you have to weigh at least 180 pounds and swear like a sailor.”

  The author of the piece, in playing off Davis’s statement, wrote, “Cat (née Cathy) weighs 132 pounds, has a comely set of ears and a pug (not pug’s) nose and speaks like a lady in accents Louisianan.” It also described her training regimen (“rises at 9 a.m., eats an orange and drinks tea with honey, then jogs three to five miles. . . . By noon she is at a dingy Lodi gym where Algieri . . . helps supervise her two-and-a-half-hour workout”). By then Davis and Algieri were living together in a new apartment in Lodi, New Jersey, and while the article didn’t gush too much about their love affair, it did mention they were engaged to be married.

  Clearly following the script set by Davis and Algieri of presenting her as a clean-cut young woman who preferred training to actual fighting, the puff piece continued the depiction of Davis as worlds apart from the perception and reality of bo
xing.

  The interesting tidbit about her upcoming battle was that the article stated Davis would be fighting “10th-ranked Connie Smith in a nontitle fight in Atlanta” as a stepping-stone to her title fight with Jo Jo Thomas. Her championship fight was reported to sport a payday “of upwards of $35,000.” That was an astronomical purse for a women’s bout, and showed that Davis was truly hitting the “big leagues” as a fighter—and by inference, bringing other fighters with her.[21]

  Unfortunately for Davis, the match against Ernestine Jones (called Connie Smith for the fight), a black Chicago-based fighter, proved to be a disaster. Right from the start Jones clobbered Davis, sending her to the canvas in the first round of their battle with a stinging left. Jones was able to hit her at will, and Davis hit the deck one more time in the second round and again in the third before Algieri threw in the towel. Davis, so it seemed, had her first loss by TKO, complete with pictures splattered all over the papers showing Smith tagging Davis with a hard right.

  Immediately after the fight, Sal Algieri contested the outcome, proclaiming that Jones “had used illegal tactics,” and hollered for a no contest, which he received two weeks later. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald dredged up Sal Algieri’s past indiscretion—that he admitted he’d taken a dive against Australian fighter Rocky Gattellari in the 1960s. Denizens of the fight game in Sydney certainly hadn’t forgotten or forgiven him, and figured Algieri was “true to form” when he “started ranting and raving” to have the fight declared a “no contest.”[22]

  An article in the Chicago Tribune (Jones’s hometown) also thought it suspect to call for a no contest. First off, Ernestine “Queen Steen” Jones claimed when she got to Atlanta, Davis’s people said they wanted her to box using the name Connie Smith—with no explanation given. Jones’s trainer, Randy Tidwell, claimed to be equally mystified. “I think maybe they did it so that later they could say ‘Connie Smith doesn’t exist,’” he said. As Connie Smith, however, Jones had “signed a one-year contract with an Atlanta firm.”

  Given that the People article had already identified Davis’s opponent as Connie Smith (a boxer from Hawaii), it is possible that the planned fight fell through and, not wanting to cancel the bout due to all of the attendant publicity, Jones was sought out as a replacement and told to box under the assumed name, but that is speculation. Whether Jones’s management was also in collusion is an unknown—though they rigorously denied knowledge of it later on. As Jo Jo Thomas was also mentioned in the People piece, some contact had already been made between the two groups; so the question comes down to whether Ernestine Jones was part of the original package or not, and whether Davis’s people had intended to substitute Jones for Smith all along.

  As for the fight, the article claimed that Davis “went out cold” after being tagged by Jones in the first round. Tidwell put it his way:

  They had invested a lot of money in her. She had signed a TV contract and had a big spread in Ring Magazine. So the referee is counting, ‘One . . . get up, get up . . . two . . . get up, get up . . .

  Before the fight, they said you couldn’t be saved by the bell. But I counted 28 seconds she was down before the bell rang and they got her to her corner.

  Jones flattened Davis again in the second round. “This time, they dragged her to the corner . . .” said Tidwell.[23]

  The rationale for the no-contest claim was predicated on a few points that were articulated at different times. In July reporter Randall V. Beriage wrote that Davis claimed “her opponent drugged her drinking water and then stepped on her ankle.” He also quoted Davis as saying, “It was foul tactics on the part of my opponent’s camp.”

  Beriage also wrote, “She had good reason to want to remove the blemish from her otherwise undefeated record,” as Davis told him, “I’ve been signed by NBC Sports for $110,000,” seemingly all the rationale necessary to want to contest a bad beat down. Beriage had met up with her at a dinner for Ring 30 (the chapter for a boxing veterans aid organization covering the Bronx and nearby suburbs), founded and presided over by WBF head Scoop Gallello.[24]

  In September, at the presser where she received her New York State boxing license, Davis told reporters, “My opponent kept pushing me down in the ring and falling on top of me, hurting my leg. But I have never been seriously injured.”[25]

  Aside from her claim of a deal with NBC, the proverbial “elephant in the room” was the article about Cat Davis in the August edition of The Ring, which had already hit the stands. Sal Algieri himself had a byline for the article, entitled “‘Cat’ Davis, Woman Boxer, Could Be Start of a New Breed.”

  It was a big deal.

  The Ring—boxing’s self-proclaimed bible—had put a photo spread of Cat Davis on the front page. Never in the history of the magazine had a woman appeared on the cover (and as of this writing it remains the only time).

  The article was a three pager with accompanying photos showing Cat Davis in varying boxing poses. Another puff piece, it was told as a first-person narrative—expanding on the article in People and relying on materials provided in Davis’s press releases. It also made note of her increasing popularity as a gate draw, describing her as “the missing link between Ali and other fighters.”

  The controversy over her fight in Atlanta, however, was not included, as the article had gone to press before it erupted. Algieri did drop four names of possible future opponents, noting Davis would be fighting “two of the top four in the Women’s Boxing Federation list [including] Connie Smith of Hawaii.”[26]

  For the professional fighting world, the inclusion of Cat Davis on the cover of The Ring was an endorsement not only of her as the face of women’s boxing but of boxing itself. Stated differently, it was a way of saying that the sport was accepting the “fact” of the female side of game—although in truth it hadn’t. A more nuanced perspective would have been to say that women’s boxing had at the very least been acknowledged, even if there were forces in boxing (a strong majority) that would have preferred the women’s game to go away entirely.

  A couple of weeks after New York State issued boxing licenses to Cat Davis, Jackie Tonawanda, and Lady Tyger, a bombshell hit the press in the form of an attack on Davis and Algieri. New York City’s Village Voice published a page-one story by writer Jack Newfield entitled “The Great White Hype.”

  The article was all about Cathy Davis and Sal Algieri, alleging that they had fixed fights and padded Davis’s record with phony names. Accompanying the front-page portion of the article was the UPI photograph of Davis getting her head snapped back by a straight right thrown by “Ernestine Jones (alias Connie Smith).” Newfield was unsparing in his condemnation of Davis and Algieri, and purposefully provocative in choosing to make the allusion to “The Great White Hope” moniker of the Jack Johnson boxing era. Writing that “Cat is a lady boxer who is white, blonde, and pretty,” he added:

  Cat is also not what she appears to be. And her manager-boyfriend, Sal Algieri, stands accused of trying to fix her fights, of controlling a fake “commission” that regulates women’s boxing, and of using phony names for her opponents.

  Among Newfield’s allegations, he claimed that Ernestine Jones “says she was told by Algieri to lose.” Newfield also published a copy of the check made out to Jones’s manager, Jack Cowen. It showed the payday as $535 with a handwritten note on the upper left-hand corner that read “PURSE FOR CONNIE SMITH AS PER AGREEMENT.”

  The check was dated June 7, 1978, written on the Pyramid Promotions Inc. account, and it featured two “Payment Stopped” stamps on it. Davis’s lawyer, Robin Suttenberg, also signed the check, and although she claimed she was not part of the Pyramid Promotions organization, Newfield uncovered that she was listed on the incorporation papers as the “lawyer.”

  As it stood, Ernestine Jones was never paid for her efforts and had been involved in what was at the very least an unethical scam—a fact Newfield attributed to some degree to her being an unknown black Chicago-based boxer.

&
nbsp; Cowen also told Newfield that two weeks after the fight he had received a telegram from “Al Gallello, ‘chairman of the Women’s Boxing Federation,’” which stated that “the fight was officially being changed to ‘no contest’ because of dirty tactics.” The telegram also claimed that Jones’s trainer, Randy Tidwell, and Connie Smith were being suspended for six months. The WBF was able to take that step due to an absence of any actual boxing commission with jurisdiction over fight (there was not a boxing commission at that time in Atlanta). Since the WBF claimed to be the “sanctioning” body for the fight, they conferred upon themselves the right to overturn the TKO decision.

  In response, Cowen filed a “notarized affidavit” with NYSAC in August 1978. In it, he attested to the commission that he had been told to have Ernestine Jones fight under the name Connie Smith. Cowen also wrote, in part:

  Two days prior to the fight, Mr. Algieri made several attempts to myself and Randy Tidwell for Ms. Jones to lose the bout, stating she “had to lose” in order that Mr. Algieri’s television arrangements would not be affected by a loss. Mr. Algieri also stated that if Ms. Jones lost, it would mean a television appearance by one of our other female boxers.

  Newfield credited the “find” to a sportswriter, Malcolm “Flash” Gordon, who wrote and distributed an independent newsletter, Flash Gordon’s Tonight’s Boxing Program & Weekly Newsletter. Gordon’s mimeographed boxing programs already had a track record of exposing illegal shenanigans in boxing, including a Don King scandal in 1977 that involved phony records and payoffs to justify having subpar fighters on an ABC Sports boxing tournament.