Flash had written in his June 29, 1978, edition that there were other instances of Cat Davis’s opponents boxing “under phony names,” and that Davis had KO’d “the same opponent four times under different names” in what he coined “Sal Algieri’s ‘dive caravan.’”[27]
Not much more came of the accusations leveled by Newfield in the press—at least not overtly as no one really picked up the gauntlet in the press—except to rehash portions of the accusations and to look more skeptically on the legitimacy of some fighters and of women’s boxing. What did happen was Cat Davis was pretty much ignored by others in the fight game who were too busy trying to make a go of it to worry about the machinations of Sal Algieri and his “friends”—aside from “skirmishes” between the growing number of rival women’s boxing organizations and the WBF. Davis’s career never recovered.
The entire affair left a scar on women’s boxing as a whole, and meant that fighters outside the Algieri organization had to work much harder to prove their legitimacy. The WBF—the organization started by Algieri—was almost universally dismissed, although it continued to operate and pump out materials on Davis, as well as to sanction other belts through at least 1981.
A documentary featuring Davis that had been filmed in 1978 aired in May 1979 as part of a documentary series on public television. The one-hour work by Jane Warrenbrand, entitled “Cat, A Woman Who Fought Back,” followed Davis’s “fight” to get licensed in New York State, including footage from her July 14, 1978, bout against Mona Hayes, a substitute for California fighter Toni Lear Rodriguez who had canceled at the last minute. (A clear mismatch, Davis defeated Hayes by KO.) The documentary also featured brief comments on women’s boxing from heavyweights Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier—none of it particularly flattering.
Davis, who had been so much on the ascendant prior to the debacle in Atlanta, fought very few fights after the Newfield article and none of the “promised” fortune came her way. In her next big battle, the following year on July 2, 1979, she faced off against the purported German women’s boxing champion, Uschi Doering, in what was billed as a twelve-round WBF championship bout at the Exposition Building in Portland, site of Davis’s earlier triumphs.
The much younger and taller Davis handily defeated Doering, although Doering had managed to tag Davis with what was described as a “head-snapping” straight right early on—seemingly the only photo from the fight that was circulated over the wires on the UPI feed. Other than the moment of that photograph, Davis was seen to dominate throughout the fight, refereed by ex-fighter Willie Pep, who had been part of Davis’s coterie early on in her career. He “halted the fight less than a minute into the sixth round as Davis was peppering Doering while she remained hunched in her shell.” It was considered to be a good stoppage.
This time around, however, there were less than two hundred fans in the crowd, and the press questioned Davis’s right to call herself a lightweight champion, since she had dropped to “number five on the Boxing Illustrated list”—with Lady Tyger, her nemesis, listed as champion.[28]
Perhaps the most scathing article published about the fight was reserved for Sports Illustrated. The short piece raised the question of how the fight could have been called a championship bout because “that billing will be disputed by”:
(1) Ernestine Jones, who is credited with having knocked out Davis last year in Atlanta, which Cat vigorously denies, and (2) Marian (Lady Tyger) Trimiar, also known as the Black Kojak because of her bald pat, who insists that she, not Cat, is the world lightweight champ.[29]
The commentary by Newfield regarding race and class did not go away either, but neither were his points dealt with in any meaningful way. As a promotion “machine,” Algieri and the WBF had certainly mined an untapped vein of opportunity: that of a white, educated, pretty, middle-class young woman who happened to earn her living as a champion female boxer. While it called into question the editorial priorities of the publications that “drank the Kool-Aid,” and the public’s fascination with the seeming incongruity, most seemed to have little stomach to ask the harder questions about the swirling issues related to race, class, and gender. It seemed that, while they reported on “women’s libbers” entering the heretofore vaulted domain of the manly art, few were willing to dig down into the deeper societal issues that were continuing to plague the United States.
That WBF and Algieri also cheated their way into getting Cathy Davis to the “top of the heap” was also unfortunate—and proved, perhaps, that when it came to boxing, no one was incorruptible, even a pretty “white girl” from the “right” side of the tracks.
A lifetime later, and long since out of the game, Davis (who in 2005 lived and worked as a chef in South Africa’s Kruger National Park) reflected on the controversies for a piece in Sports Illustrated. In answer to a question as to whether “racism had played a role in the editors’ decision to feature the white Davis rather than the black and arguably more accomplished Trimair,” she responded,
A lot of what we did got distorted [by the press]. Boxing is all about oppressed people fighting their way up in society, and women’s boxing was a mirror for the rising women’s movement.[30]
Certainly that was true, but issues of race and class were also never far from the surface and were important considerations, which continued to be unresolved as the sport unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s.
Win Some . . . Lose Some
As the drama associated with Cathy Davis unfolded, women’s boxing continued on. Fights were fought, new fighters entered the game, and fighters who had been there at the beginning of the 1970s boom began to bow out of boxing. Promoters in Nevada and California, still working the vein of gold they’d discovered, even began putting on all-female fight cards with some success.
According to Bill Dickson, by 1979 he’d staged eighteen or nineteen women’s fight cards at the Hyatt Lake Tahoe. He explained, “At first they were very inexperienced, but as they started to learn more, fans realized [they were seeing] some [well-fought] contests. Some good girls started coming along, and you could feel it. It was no longer a novelty.”[31] He did say that he was hedging his bets on promoting an all-female card, claiming that women often bowed out at the last moment. By putting on a “bonus bout” between male fighters, he had “insurance” in case any of the women’s contests fell through.
In California, where there were at least twenty-five licensed fighters, promoter Sammy Sanders felt none of Dickson’s trepidations. Familiar with the women’s fight scene and impressed with the women who boxed at the Hoover St. Gym in the Southland area of Los Angeles, Sanders put together what was likely to have been the first professional all-female fight card in California.
The bouts were called the “World Premiere All Girls” boxing show and were presented at the Hawthorne Memorial Center on February 11, 1979. The bouts were also promoted as elimination fights for the planned World Championships to be held in July. The main event was a six-round battle between Lady Tyger Trimiar and Carlotta Lee, a former kickboxer with a 17-1 record in the sport who had taken up boxing after seeing Lady Tyger fight at the Olympic two years before. Lee, who traveled as far as Japan to compete in kickboxing events, had also recently graduated from the University of Houston with a bachelor’s degree in nursing, proving that Cat Davis was far from the only college woman in the sport—which, in fact, had many.
Other fighters on the card included: Cora Webber (another kickboxer, and twin sister of boxer Dora Webber, both of whom were considered among boxing’s best), Lydia “Squeaky” Bayardo (who was quickly becoming known as a very strong fighter), Dulcie Lucas (a college student at Cal State in L.A.), Valarie Ganther, Shirley “Zebra Girl” Tucker (who went on to successfully campaign to get the California State Athletic Commission to extend the limits on the number of rounds allowed for women’s fights to ten), Toni Lear Rodriguez (who had canceled a fight against Cat Davis in July 1978 and was considered a powerhouse fighter), up-and-comer Garcielo Casillas, and Candy Sm
ith.
The evening also sported at least a thousand excited fans who were treated to what writer Alastair Segerdal described as an evening of boxing “that would rival any male championship card.” At ringside were the “glitterati” of women’s boxing at the time, including women’s boxing promoters Johnny Dubliss, who was big in California, and Eric Westlake, who put together shows in Las Vegas.[32]
Boxing in California was also experiencing growing pains. As Don Fraser, who’d promoted the first show at the Olympic, put it, “Everybody followed my pioneering and then it lost interest. The novelty wore off.”
Aileen Eaton had also become cool, stating, “I won’t say I wouldn’t use women again, but most likely I would not.” In her experience, women didn’t necessarily understand what it meant to actually make weight or other requirements that male boxers took for granted. Even knowing that women were new to the profession and needed time to learn the ropes didn’t make it any less vexing to her.[33] She did, however, put on fights through the early 1980s.
The second all-female card in California was held in July at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Billed as the “First California State Triple Crown,” the show featured three championship bouts with arguably some of the best women boxers on the West Coast scene. This time, Carlotta Lee was matched against Cora Webber in a title match along with two other championship pairings: Lilli Rodriguez v. Toni Lear Rodriguez, and Dulcie Lucas fighting the Canadian fighter Britt Van Buskirk, who was rapidly becoming known as a very good boxer. The other three fights on the bill were Lady Tyger v. Ernestine Jones, Graciela Casillas v. Karen Bennett, and Squeaky Bayardo v. Toni Bryant.
“Good” boxing wasn’t only confined to Nevada and California. In fact there were increasing pockets of strong female fighters all over the United States with prominent fighters in Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas, New York, Arizona, and other states. British native Tansy “Baby Bear” James, who’d come south from Canada to California as a teenager, was among the first boxers in Nevada in 1975, but had since fought all over the country. In 1978 she opened a women’s boxing academy in Kansas City, Kansas, and passed the state test for her referee’s license in the same year.
Baby Bear’s boxing career included being banned from doing battle in Cincinnati along with Joanna Lutz in 1977. She also fought in a ten-round featherweight championship battle against Toni Lear Rodriguez that was sanctioned by the recently formed Women’s World Boxing Association (WWBA), headed by Vern Stevenson.
Baby Bear was outpointed in the contest, attributing the loss years later to a bout of hepatitis. “I was so drained by the hepatitis,” she said, “I had no stamina. Toni Lear was just too strong for me.” She retired from boxing after losing a rematch a year later at the Olympic in L.A., in early 1979.[34]
Baby Bear refereed many men’s bouts, but one of the most memorable of the fights she officiated in was the Women’s Boxing Federation[35] bantamweight title fight between Bonnie Prestwood and Debbie “Ginger” Kaufman, a fight that was held at her own “Baby Bear Boxing Arena” and promoted by Vern Stevenson. Prestwood, a housewife and a product of the Muncie Police Athletic League, fought a ten-round war against Minnesotan Ginger Kaufman—among the original coterie of boxers at the University of Minnesota who’d taken on the AAU and won the right to fight an amateur tournament there.
The bout between Prestwood and Kaufman was an all-action affair almost from the start. Prestwood, “who had never been floored,” went down twice in the second round from two “sledging rights,” the second of which “dropped her flat on her back.” Hanging on until the bell, Preston came out swinging in the third round with a “series of right uppercuts and left hook combinations to the head” that left Kaufman stunned.
The fourth round saw Kaufman land “a straight right to the button” as Prestwood was coming off the ropes. The shot “spilled her face forward” and left her “glassy eyed” as she forced herself up from the canvas at the count of nine. Baby Bear let the fight continue, and after Prestwood and Kaufman tangled again, Kaufman let loose with her “fearsome straight right hand that had been the difference all night,” putting Prestwood on the deck again.
By then the crowd was wild. Prestwood was able to push back in the fifth and sixth rounds, landing her “short inside right uppercut and combination[s]” with tremendous effect. In the seventh round, however, “the co-ed from Minnesota figured out the right uppercut and contained it with clinching at close quarters.” Going into the eighth round, the two fighters battled toe to toe, with an observer giving the advantage to Prestwood until she was hit with a “crackerjack right hander” that put her “through the ropes.”
No sooner had Baby Bear pushed the two women apart than the fierce battle began anew with Kaufman throwing another straight right hammer that put Prestwood on the deck for the last time, giving Kaufman the KO win and the title.
Vern Stevenson, admittedly a fierce advocate for the sport, but nonetheless a fair judge of skills in the ring, proclaimed the bout “the greatest ladies battle ever fought,” with a reporter on the scene adding, “It very well could have been.”[36]
Under the auspices of the WWBA, Stevenson was promoting fights wherever he could. In 1980 he turned his sights to Miami after receiving a call from Dave Lewin, the president of the House of Champions boxing club, who had a proposition for him. He and his associate, Luiz Izquierdo, wanted to add a women’s bout as a main event to the boxing show they were putting on at the Jai-Alai Fronton center in Miami.
Lewin had gotten it in mind after meeting the former women’s boxing champion Barbara Buttrick. Although she had retired from the ring twenty years before and had been raising her two daughters while working as a bookkeeper, she was still an active member of Ring 31, the Miami chapter of the National Veteran Boxers Association. In speaking to Lewin, Buttrick had taken it upon herself to educate him about the state of women’s boxing. Lewin learned about the WWBA and the growth in women’s boxing in other states from Buttrick. Doing a turnaround, Lewin decided that a women’s boxing match would be just the thing to add as a novelty.
With terms set, Stevenson signed on two WWBA-ranked super lightweights. The first was a thirty-year-old boxer named Blanca “the San Antonio Rose” Rodriguez. Decidedly older than many of the boxers coming on the scene, she was nonetheless skilled. She also was the mother of a nine-year-old son and worked as housekeeping supervisor in a nursing home in San Antonio, Texas. Her opponent was a student at a junior college in Tacoma, Washington, named Tina O’Riley, who was twenty-two years of age. The plan was to have the pair fight in an eight-round main event bout—the only female contest on the six-fight card.
With Vern Stevenson in town, Buttrick acted as an ambassador of sorts to ease Stevenson’s and his two fighters’ way into the Miami boxing scene. Buttrick, of course, had been keeping abreast of the resurgence in women’s boxing since the early 1970s. She had even given some consideration to returning to the sport, but after working out at the Fifth Street Gym for a few days, it became apparent to her that her fighting days were over. She also thought about training women—something she had considered as a young woman—and placed advertisements in a local paper. The response, however, was not what she had hoped, and consisted of a lot of “obscene telephone callers” as it had run next to the ads for massage parlors. Undeterred, she thought of other ways to reenter the sport and eventually affiliated herself with the WWBA.
On the night of the fight, Buttrick had the chance to work “the corner for Rodriguez,” and even brought along her twelve-year-old daughter, Beverly, to help her—handing out flyers for women’s boxing lessons, among other things.
Stevenson for his part met with the press. Stevenson felt the acute need to establish the legitimacy of his organization and of women’s boxing in general as the Davis/Algieri affair was still fairly fresh in fans’ memories. Tackling the problem straight on he said:
With us, credibility is the thing. It’s been a long, uphill battle, but we’re starting to
get acceptance. This isn’t just a show, a gimmick. It’s for real. These women are good boxers. You can’t keep women out of the ring, it’s against the law to discriminate. We’ve got women plumbers and telephone linemen and mechanics, why not boxers?[37]
As the fight card unfolded, the arena was sparsely attended through the preliminaries and even the main event. Regardless, when the two women came into the ring, they put on a tough hard-fought show for the crowd. Rodriquez had the height and reach advantage. With a stiff left jab, she was able to score a lot of points in the early going. O’Riley, having figured out her opponent’s jab, took over in the middle rounds, scoring often. The momentum swung back the other way in the last couple of rounds—which was all that was needed to give Rodriguez the edge on points in a close fight that saw neither of them hit the canvas.
After the match was over, O’Riley, sitting next to Buttrick in the dressing room, tried to describe her feelings about the contest:[38]
I was really scared before the fight, but I know I went in there and did an athlete’s job. I know I went eight rounds of boxing, something that most men couldn’t have done. It’s hard to put it into words. I’m still high from the whole experience.
As women continued to box across the country, other boxing opportunities began to offer themselves in the form of the Toughwoman boxing contests. First begun in 1979, the Toughman/Toughwoman concept was simple: Put together a tournament with as many contestants as could be garnered into each weight class represented and let them have at it with few provisos except that the entrants must have had no more than five amateur fights. Each bout was limited to three rounds, each of one or two minutes duration, and contestants wore heavily padded gloves. Winners were to be awarded cash prizes of varying amounts. Events were also shown on local television, not only piquing interest but creating a carnival atmosphere at the events, which could be thought of as a hybrid of professional wrestling fine-tuned for the masses.
A History of Women's Boxing Page 31