A History of Women's Boxing

by Malissa Smith

  Organized by Arthur Dore (with assistance from former Olympic trainer Dean Oswald) for his company Ardore Ltd., the tournaments took on a life of their own. Local contestant winners were then given the opportunity to apply to enter into the higher-level “toughest men” events, where they could garner huge payouts if they made it to the finals. The first such men’s competition, held in Pontiac, Michigan, was advertised to pay out $50,000 to the heavyweight winner, $20,000 to the other finalist, and $5,000 to each of the semi-finalists.[39]

  The first Toughwoman contest was held in December 1980 in Sioux City, Iowa. It proved so popular that a second contest was held in May 1981 with twenty-five contestants vying to be the “toughest woman in Des Moines”—each trying to win the $1,600 top prize. This contest adhered to the same rules as for men and consisted of three rounds of two-minute duration. Promoter Kathy Eisenhauer was quoted as saying, “The women are just as talented as the men [and] a lot of them are even better fighters. They take it seriously.”

  One of the requirements for the contest was that each female entering “must train at least thirty days prior to the bouts and have no previous boxing experience.” Winners of the women’s contests in each weight class also had the opportunity to compete in the newly formed “national Toughwoman contest.”[40]

  While the contests were controversial due to the specter of having untrained fighters waling on each other, the fights and tournaments did not run afoul of the local courts. Still, injuries and even deaths occurred, which made the contests something more than just a lark. For the women entering them, Toughwoman contests were often the first opportunity they had to enter a boxing ring—an opportunity that led some women to later take up boxing and other martial sports professionally.

  The Experiment: Gleason’s Gym

  We were in the 1980s and the recession was going on and I said, “Ira, we’re cutting off half of the population of the country. Women want to come in here to box, they want to work out and when we go to the bank in the morning, they don’t say, is this female money or male money, they’ll just take it.”

  —Bruce Silverglade, owner, Gleason’s Gym, July 10, 2013[41]

  With the coming of the women’s movement in the 1960s came a resurgence of interest in martial sports. There were opportunities to take self-defense classes, and for those women who wanted more thorough training, classes in karate, judo, and eventually kickboxing that allowed them to progress far enough in their sport to obtain black belts and beyond. When it came to boxing, however, there were few classes designed for women. That meant that any boxing training was old school: in a boxing gym one-on-one with a trainer, and encompassing lots of roadwork, calisthenics, and shadowboxing before rounds on the heavy bag, the speed bag, slip rope, and sparring in the ring. What was missing were opportunities for women to learn how to box systematically and safely without being subjected to the kind of “beat down” that Sue Fox had experienced. Worse perhaps was being completely ignored in the gym for months at a time, unable to find a trainer who would work with them, and having learned very little by way of actual boxing skills or pointers on what to do in the professional boxing ring. The situation was very reminiscent of what women experienced in the 1950s, when the pioneers of that era worked out in gyms as the sole woman in a sea of men.

  Dee Knuckles—in her San Pedro gym actively seeking out trainers for girls’ boxing classes—was a rare exception. When it came to boxing programs, most were geared to school-age boys. Girls were only rarely accepted: perhaps a girl or two, and these often dropped when it came to any competition because of pressure from outside organizations. Some “professional” gyms were friendlier to female boxers than others, but there were really very few established programs that taught boxing geared specifically to women who might have had no prior experience with the sport.

  One boxing club of renown that began to consider bringing women in for lessons was Gleason’s Gym in New York. A traditional boxing gym, Gleason’s was the home to countless champions—first in its quarters in the Bronx, and then on West Thirtieth Street at Eighth Avenue, a few blocks from Madison Square Garden. It had never been particularly averse to accepting the occasional female boxer as one of its own, and had even been quite inviting to women in the early 1970s, although a year or two might go by when no women were training.

  In that period, Jackie Tonawanda became a fixture at the gym. A big woman, boxing as a heavyweight, Jackie could always hold her own against the men she sparred with. She also had decent ring skills and possessed a work ethic that rivaled any of the serious male fighters who worked out there—although her claims of having fought and won many fights as a professional were certainly suspect.

  According to Bruce Silverglade, the owner of Gleason’s Gym, Yvonne Barkley, the sister of former champion Iran “The Blade” Barkley, was another highly talented fighter. “She taught Iran how to box, and she was tougher than Iran,” he said. “She looked like a guy in the ring, and she was just really tough so she held her own in there,” just like Jackie.

  Yvonne Barkley also boxed professionally for a time, facing top female fighters from the period such as Lady Tyger (another Gleason’s alumni), Gwen Gemini, Squeaky Bayardo, and Sue Carlson.

  Given that there were so few women boxing at Gleason’s, individual women were usually on their own and if they sparred it was against men, who made it a point to pull no punches just because they were boxing a female. It wasn’t that a woman had to be “tougher,” but she did have to prove that she had real boxing skills, heart, and the willingness to train the same way the guys did.

  “I was a little bit in awe of their abilities,” Silverglade went on to say. “The fact that they would come in the gym [and were such] good athletes, in great condition, doing a heck of a tough sport.”

  While Gleason’s could accommodate the occasional female fighter, what they didn’t have were the facilities or the space to handle a possible large influx of women who wanted to learn to box. The gym’s owners were also in a quandary about how to handle women boxers. Silverglade’s partner, Ira Becker, was a “traditionalist” and would say, “No, no, we don’t want women in the sport.”

  Bruce Silverglade, on the other hand, was much younger and figured that if women wanted to learn to fight, the gym ought to figure out a way to bring them in. A realist, he was also concerned about the “bottom line,” and the gym was feeling the pinch of the early 1980s recession that was affecting his gym membership. Silverglade was also speaking to women who would wander into Gleason’s asking if they could learn to box, and seeing that the trickle was becoming a trend, wondered if there was a way for the gym to begin offering lessons, perhaps lessening their financial troubles.

  The problem was the facilities at the gym were not really adequate for bringing in women. The space consisted of two rings, hanging boxing equipment, and only one dressing area. The shower and bathroom facilities were down in the basement.

  Talking it over together, Silverglade and Becker decided to try an experiment. They would close the gym early three nights a week, let women come in, and see what happened.

  The first group had six very eager women in it. “I had two trainers and we trained in a group, and it proved to be very, very successful right away and the numbers grew. Eventually he had groups of 12 women training at one time,” said Silverglade.

  “We had models, business women, you name it. But women would come, not to make money, not to get out of poverty like the boys do but because it was a challenge for them. Most of them were highly educated and already had good positions and so this was a challenge. It was very easy to teach them, too, because they’d come in and say ‘listen, I don’t know how to box. Teach me.’”

  What Silverglade found was women were more ready to learn than their male counterparts because they had no preconceptions about how to box—or the notion that they already knew how to box coupled with a lot of bad habits that needed to be “unlearned.” Since his female students were starting from
scratch they had no such ideas and with so much motivation they learned readily, becoming quite skilled very quickly.

  Silverglade was also adamant that there would be nothing to distinguish between the way men and women were trained. The regimen was the same: “We were going to teach the sport of boxing and it progresses to sparring.” The women quickly took to that as well, sparring amongst themselves—and sometimes even sporting a shiner or two after three or four rounds in the ring.

  In 1985 Gleason’s needed to find new space, and eventually found a locale in what is now the “trendy” neighborhood of Dumbo, Brooklyn, but at the time was an area that was dodgy at best. While it was under construction, Silverglade insisted that they also build a facility with areas just for women: a separate locker room, bathroom, and shower area. Even given the locale in a sparsely inhabited industrial area, the women’s program took off through word of mouth.

  The popularity of the women’s program at Gleason’s rubbed off on other local boxing gyms, and larger health club chains even began putting up heavy bags and speed bags, and offering rudimentary boxing training.

  But in Silverglade’s estimation, the popularity of the sport really took off once amateur boxing became legal for women in the early 1990s. Opportunities to compete in the Golden Gloves in particular—spurred on by a lawsuit by Dee Hamaguchi, a graduate of Gleason’s female training program—were particularly inviting to younger women because of the Golden Gloves’ storied history. This gave Gleason’s a decided edge over other gyms in the first several years, since they had been the first to develop women’s boxing talents and had a long history of training amateur fighters aiming to be Golden Gloves champions.

  As Silverglade pointed out, while in some things women and men are intrinsically different—such as the physical attributes of the body that may make a male heavyweight that much bigger and stronger than a female of the same weight class—it doesn’t take away from having equal skill sets in the ring or the savvy to outfox an opponent through ten grueling rounds. With the experiment, Silverglade had wanted to give women the opportunity to box. What he found was that the opportunity profoundly changed how women were viewed as athletes and competitors, a view that continues to reverberate to this day.

  The Problem of Recognition

  When you say “girls boxing” you think that they just slap each other around. But . . . it ain’t like that at all.

  —Bob Silver, boxing trainer, August 15, 1987[42]

  A brief article that appeared in the Sacramento Bee in the spring of 1985 seemed to sum up the state of women’s boxing ten years after it was legalized in Nevada: “Women Fight Discrimination in Battle for Bouts.”

  Johnny Dubliss, a former boxer who became involved in promoting women’s boxing in the mid-1970s and went on to start the Women’s Boxing Board (WBB), was frustrated with the state of women’s boxing.

  “You run into discrimination all over the country, things like you can’t use women fighters a certain time of month. . . . The result of this is it’s hard for women to get matches. There are no more than 100 active women fighters in the U.S.”

  To further his point, he emphatically stated that “fans like it” when women fighters are on a card. “They provide something special in lieu of a big main event,” and should be getting on more cards, not less. He added, “We had a recent card in Baltimore that made money that way. . . . It’s a novelty. It could turn into something profitable.”

  For her part, Lady Tyger Trimiar said, “When you’re a pioneer, it’s hard to get going. I’ve gone as much as two years between fights. I’m a lightweight, but I fought in Baltimore as a middleweight because I wasn’t in the best condition.”

  The money for fights was also very low, ranging from $300 to $1,200, with fighters, even of Lady Tyger’s renown and prowess, being pressured into turning up at fights without their own trainers to save the promoters money. At the Baltimore fight, Lady Tyger was in that exact position. It proved to be a big mistake. With “no cornerman there for me,” she said, “I had to borrow another fighter’s, an old man with shaky hands. He lost my $60 mouthpiece. I didn’t come home with much money; just enough to buy a jogging suit. It’s discouraging.”[43]

  The early stars of the ring in Nevada had also left the sport, and the will for promoters to put on fights in those locales had also petered out. Venues such as the Hyatt Tahoe at Incline Village were barely putting on fights for male fighters—never mind female bouts—and even Las Vegas had many fewer boxing shows, with no women’s bouts on the cards.

  Women fought where they could, places where small pockets of boxing activity were creating a “buzz” among the women who picked up the gloves. One such place was the Benton Bombers boxing club in Waterville, Maine. Promoter Jerry Thompson actively put on women’s bouts in Waterville, and the state of Maine permitted an active amateur program to flourish.

  Newcomers Cheryl Brown and Laura Holt excited the crowds in Maine with at least six bouts against each other in 1983 and 1984, including a fight for the North American Women’s Super Featherweight title, which Holt won. Both Brown and Holt had also won state boxing championships during the period. Brown even set a record during her second ring appearance as an amateur by scoring a TKO win ten seconds into the fight over fighter Pat Poland, the fastest in the history of boxing in the state of Maine for men or women.[44]

  Holt started boxing when she was about twenty, having called up a local gym to ask if she could come in and train. She came from a family of fifteen children and had long since been “boxing” in one fashion or another with her five brothers.[45] Brown, on the other hand, had been an all-around athlete, running cross-country and playing softball and basketball. What intrigued Brown was an ad placed by Jerry Thomson seeking a heavyweight fighter. Although she was a lightweight she “went down anyway,” one of “15 women answering the advertisement.”[46]

  Other fighters that were doing their best to continue boxing were Lady Tyger, Toni Lear Rodriguez, Diane Clark, Britt Van Buskirk, and twin fighters Cora and Dora Webber. Cora Webber and Laura Holt, ranked number one and two respectively, met in a fifteen-round Super Featherweight WWWB Championship fight in March 1986. Their main event was held at the Radisson Hotel in Denver, Colorado, and, by all reports, was a war. In the end, Holt took the unanimous decision by ten rounds to Webber’s four—with one round being called a draw.[47] Maintaining her home in Maine, Holt’s win even made the local papers, proving that in some locales, female boxers were still newsmakers.

  Fighter Del Pettis from San Diego also started having some success in the early 1980s fighting other women who had entered boxing between 1979 and 1983 such as Nancy Thompson, Louise “Frisco Kid” Loo, Joann Metallo, and Brenda Myers. Pettis won her early fights, but began running into trouble when she stepped up in class to fight the likes of Toni Lear Rodriguez and Laura Holt.

  In 1987 Pettis was slated to fight Laura Holt in Johnny Dubliss’s WBB Super Featherweight Championship main event bout held on August 15. In the presser the day before the bout, Pettis was in a fighting mood, remarking, “I’m good-looking and I can fight. People who think pro women boxers are ugly and do more slapping and wrestling than boxing will be in for a surprise. I plan to knock out Holt and win the first of four titles before I retire and get married.”

  Holt’s response was short. “She'll be in for a long evening,” she said, adding, “The only other thing I’m saying is that I will win the title. I prefer to do my talking in the ring.”[48]

  The fight proved to be a tough one for both with Pettis bearing the brunt of the punishment. Women still were required to wear breast protectors, which meant that fighters typically did not go to the body much. In the case of the Pettis-Holt fight the pair went toe to toe, with Holt connecting the majority of her punches to Pettis’s eyes. By the fifth round, one eye had nearly closed into a “bloody mess.” Clearly concerned that any more battering might lead to serious ocular damage, referee Stanley Berg waived off Holt and stopped the f
ight. A reporter who viewed the bout wrote, “It should have been stopped a round or two earlier.”

  Pettis, however, refused to go down. Holt stated afterwards, “I don’t think I ever hit anyone that solid before. I’ve never seen a woman who could take a punch like that.” She went on to say, “It’s hard when you hit someone with everything you’ve got and then she just smiles and comes right back at you.”[49]

  The fight was the first women’s bout held at the Lakeshore Athletic Club in Chicago. With around two hundred excited fans in attendance, most were satisfied, some finding it to be the fight of the night—and at least as good as the other fights on the undercard: four- and six-round bouts between male boxers, with three ending by TKO.

  Both women had earned a $1,200 payday for the fight, with Pettis taking a long retirement before coming back to boxing in the mid-1990s. Holt also hung up the gloves shortly thereafter, but had already won the esteem of her trainer and the owner of a boxing gym in Maine, Bob Silva.

  With the paucity of women’s professional fights, even when women could get bouts, they faced enormous pressures. The women’s side of boxing was routinely ridiculed in the press, noting everything from whether a fighter was physically attractive to what her hairstyle was (or wasn’t) to minute dissections of her skill sets. Women were also forced to wear uncomfortable and thoroughly unnecessary breast protectors. Depending upon what state they fought in, women had to abide by whatever limitations were set: from the number of rounds they could fight (still four in some jurisdictions), to the duration of rounds (generally two minutes), to the type of medical information they had to divulge (including the need to get a pregnancy test before being allowed to fight). The major promoters—who thought nothing of issuing strong statements condemning the sport in the press—were also ignoring them.