Rijker’s next three fights demonstrated her growing abilities and added to the fame she was beginning to gain for herself. Back in the United States, she fought a relative newcomer, Chevelle Hallback, handing her a TKO loss in the fifth round after knocking her through the ropes. The fight commentators considered it a “closely contested match” of two skilled fighters at a time when there was a perception was that there were not a lot of competitive fights between women.
Against Dora Webber—the seasoned pro from the late 1970s who had taken a break from the game in the 1980s and then returned as opportunities opened up in the 1990s—the six-round fight went the distance. Webber was a tough, savvy fighter—and likely Rijker’s most competitive opponent up to that point. Rijker clearly dominated. The judges agreed, giving her a unanimous decision on all six rounds. The ringside crowd was also clearly in Rijker’s corner and referee Steve Smoger said in response to a query from the press, “I thought Rijker could fight. She was technically sound. She threw good combinations. I was very, very impressed.”[34]
By the end of the summer of 1997, having knocked out Gwen Smith (a fighter out of Charlotte, North Carolina) with another fourth-round TKO in June, Rijker was poised to fight one of the better names in women’s boxing, Andrea DeShong, whose long history of fights with Christy Martin clearly placed her in Rijker’s league.
Given how fast and how far Rijker was coming up in the sport, the question of a Martin-Rijker fight was becoming the topic du jour among sportswriters whenever the two were interviewed.
Ahead of her upcoming fight against Andrea DeShong, Rijker told a reporter, “I don’t need Christy Martin to make a name for myself. It’s just that people keep asking me about her. . . . I’ve been asked the question 1,000 times, ‘When are you going to fight the girl?’ I don’t know.”
Martin’s perspective was “there’s no reason why those fights can’t be made. Personally, though, I’m willing to fight anybody.” Along with her seeming willingness to fight Rijker, however, were the questions she raised about Rijker’s gender, insisting that she’d only fight her if she took a chromosome test to prove she was a woman.[35] This last was in keeping with Martin’s “pink” boxing motif—where “real” boxers were “girly” women, not muscle-bound specimens of indeterminate gender or sexual orientation. To the boxing world, however, the question was more a matter of who had skills—and who didn’t—as Rijker began to supplant Martin as the “best” woman boxer on the scene.
In the ring against DeShong in Las Vegas, Rijker spoke with her fists and was fierce. She outboxed and outclassed DeShong, taking the fight with a third-round TKO and leaving no doubt that she would be a formidable opponent against Martin.
With her win against DeShong, Rijker was now set to fight for the WIBF World Super Lightweight Championship in November against a German fighter named Jeanette Witte back at the Olympic Theater in Los Angeles. Within the first few seconds of the fight, it was clear that Rijker was in control, although she’d been hit on the ear and lost her hearing from the first round. Rijker was able to win the title easily with a third-round TKO at 1:25 and displayed masterful boxing technique—devastating her opponent with body shots, a developing signature of her recent fights.
Rijker had established herself as a strong force for the sport. Here was a fighter with undisputed skills on par with male fighters and a fighter who was elevating the level of the game and garnering respect along the way. Even Bob Arum, who continued to denigrate all women’s boxing except for Rijker’s matches, was firmly in her corner, along with trainer Emanuel Steward, who was also fast becoming a fierce advocate for her.
Along with Martin and Rijker, other female fighters were making a mark. Boxer Deirdre Gogarty (after losing to Martin) went on to win the WIBF Super Featherweight Championship over former kickboxer Bonnie Canino (with a kickboxing record of 28-4-1). Canino, since making the jump to boxing in 1996, was fighting some of Rijker’s old opponents such as Beverly Szymanski and Cora Webber. Against Szymanski in particular, she had won a unanimous decision after ten rounds of superb boxing, thus netting Canino the IFBA World Featherweight Championship and the chance to fight on lucrative televised cards.
Based out of Dania, Florida, Bonnie Canino had gone the route of kickboxing in part because boxing had been closed to her. She had always wanted to box and watching Muhammad Ali’s fights had inspired her to pursue it. She walked into a gym in 1979 hoping to make a go of it, but she said, “I wasn’t one of the guys [and] was a little bit discouraged.” She sought out a karate gym next, and said, “Within a week I had gloves on and was fighting. I didn’t really care at the time if it was boxing or karate or what. . . . My dream was to pack an arena like Muhammad Ali.”
Having studied karate, she took a job as an instructor and in 1984 partnered with trainer Burt Rodriguez. Canino credits him with teaching her how to be a fighter and with inculcating into her the three things he was looking for, “heart, conditioning and skills.” Later she said, “That’s what [he] liked about me, when the going got tough, I got going.”
Rodriguez pushed Canino, showing her the intricacies of the game, and in the process she said, “I got into his heart because I wouldn’t stop. . . . I used to train for six hours.” The partnership between Canino and Rodriguez was to last throughout Canino’s career as both a kickboxer and as a boxer when she made the transition in 1996, as opportunities for women began to open up.[36]
With the scramble for fighters and the slots open for women to try their luck at professional boxing, the results were mixed and problematic. Women like Rijker and Canino were in their late twenties and early thirties when they entered boxing—both with a long pedigree of kickboxing behind them. The women who’d reentered the game, having boxed in the late 1970s and 1980s, were older. Dora Webster was boxing at forty. But these were the women who had developed superb skills in the ring, having been boxing for a long time, and having put in the time in the gym in between the earlier fights and the matches opening to them in the Martin and Rijker era.
Fighters who were coming into boxing from the Toughwoman contests were less skilled. That didn’t seem to matter though. Promoters were eager to put women on fight cards, and if their skills weren’t as crisp as the elites, it didn’t seem to matter much as long as there were crowds in the stands and television audiences that kept tuning in.
Floridians Chevelle Hallback and Melissa Del Valle (Salamone) and the former Argentinean kickboxing champion, Marcela Eliana Acuna, were among the younger fighters entering the sport who found themselves on fairly important fight cards and who did bring skills.
In the case of Acuna, her visibility was huge in just her first two contests as a boxer. In her debut bout she fought Christy Martin, losing a unanimous decision after ten rounds, but acquitting herself very well—so well that the questions continued to swirl around Martin’s standing as being at the “top” of the heap in women’s boxing. As a debut fighter, it was obvious she’d been brought in as a walkover, but Acuna was anything but that, fighting in the mold of Canino and Rijker.
In Acuna’s second match she lost to Lucia Rijker by KO in the fifth round of the Women’s International Boxing Organization’s light welterweight title fight, but only after having impressed the ESPN commentators (including Al Bernstein) with her strong boxing skills. Another mismatch—given that Acuna was only fighting in her second boxing match—her background as a kickboxer had certainly given her the skills to acquit herself well and impress the commentators at ringside. Acuna went back to Argentina and later became an important figure in the growth and popularity of the sport there, which continues unabated into the 2010s with many well-known figures and champions.
Other boxers who were considered “real” fighters by 1998 included Kathy Collins, a former shot-putter from Long Island, New York, who began boxing as a form of exercise at a gym and participated in the finals of the Golden Gloves in New York City in 1995—fighting alongside Dee Hamaguchi. (One of Collins’s opponents
in her fight leading up to the finals was filmmaker and director of Shadow Boxers, Katya Bankowsky, whom she defeated.) Collins’s trainer was Frankie “G” Globuschutz, who had founded the IWBF in 1992—and had helped Collins steer her career as her manager before the pair eventually married.
Boxing as a pro, Collins continued to train and became a better and better fighter, defeating Andrea DeShong in Collins’s third fight as a pro in August 1996 at Madison Square Garden (a month before DeShong met Rijker in the ring), and again in 1998 when she defeated DeShong at the Tropicana. That fight proved to be momentous for Collins. She won the ten-rounder by unanimous decision and captured the IWBF light welterweight title in the process.
Sumya “The Island Girl” Anani was another fighter with excellent skills, who turned professional in 1996 and was considered in the same league with Martin, Rijker, and Collins. Anani came to boxing having started as a competitive weightlifter with a background in yoga. She quickly amassed an 11-0 record (with seven KOs) when she faced Christy Martin.
The women’s pound-for-pound championship fight was originally scheduled for November 13, 1998, but due to Martin’s ongoing contract dispute with Don King, it was finally held on December 18 at the Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale on a card that also featured Melissa Del Valle fighting Tawayna Broxton in an eight-rounder. The fight card was broadcast on the U.S. Satellite Broadcasting network.
Commentators forecast that the fight would be a war—a tribute to Anani’s fighting capabilities. From the beginning, both fighters came out swinging, with Anani bloodying Martin’s nose and giving her a small “mouse” under her left eye. While not the most elegant of fights, both fighters threw bombs. Anani backed Martin into the ropes in the third round to galvanize the crowd, and the two fighters went toe to toe in the fourth. In the fifth, both fighters switched back and forth to southpaw stances and continued to throw bombs. Although Anani didn’t show the same level of skills as Martin, she was game, and later commended for the heart she was showing by the commentators. The fight was dead even after six rounds.
By the tenth round, Anani had taken control of the fight, having battered both of Christy’s eyes until they puffed up. The judges gave the win to Anani by split decision.
Asked about her keys to victory, Anani said, she’d been told to “stay on her and don’t get off.”
Martin said, “She was just the stronger fighter, she hit me with her head a lot and it wore on my face so bad, I just couldn’t keep taking the punishment so I couldn’t stand in there and exchange punches.”
Martin had also been asked if she wanted a rematch. Her response was anything but positive after pushing back tears. “If we can’t fight Rijker and we can’t fight Kathy Collins, I’m done. . . . You know what, I’ve made over a million dollars and no other woman is going to come close to that, and I would have had to taught school for forty years to make that much money so I’m way ahead of the game.”[37]
Her career was far from over and she had just suffered the second loss in her career to an up-and-coming fighter who had out swarmed her in the ring. She eventually went on to fight Collins in Madison Square Garden, winning the ten-round bout by decision on an HBO pay-per-view fight card that featured title fights with the likes of Felix Trinidad, Chris Byrd, and Vernon Forrest.
Anani continued to fight professionally for another ten years before retiring. Earlier in her career (in her fourth fight) she had defeated boxer Katherine (Katie) Dallam—a boxer making her pro debut, who outweighed Anani by about thirty-five pounds—for a $300 payday. Dallam, a recovering alcoholic who made a living as a counselor for people suffering from substance abuse, had only recently turned to boxing. (Prior to boxing she had been a marathoner and a kickboxer.) Within a few weeks after beginning her training, she decided to try her luck in a pro fight with a newly minted license she received the day before the fight.
Dallam had been in a minor car accident prior to the bout, but seemingly had not suffered any ill effects after spending a night at a hospital for observation. On fight night, however, neither Dallam nor Gallegos—a seasoned denizen of the sport who had trained world champion boxer Stacey Prestage—reported the car accident to the officials at ringside.
During the four-rounder—with both boxers wearing fourteen-ounce gloves due to the weight discrepancy—Anani continuously battered Dallam. In total, Anani scored between 120 and 140 direct hits to Dallam’s head before the referee waved Anani off, giving her the win by TKO in the fourth and final round. Dallam was profusely bleeding from the nose, a condition neither the referee nor the ring doctor attended to.
After the fight, Dallam collapsed in her dressing room and was taken by ambulance to a hospital where she immediately underwent surgery to alleviate the bleeding in her brain. According to Dallam’s sister, “What [the doctor] found after opening Katie’s head was not a ‘slow brain bleed,’” which might have indicated an effect from the car accident, but a “complete and utter shredding of the main blood vessel in her brain.” She had further been told that this was “caused from repeated battering of the brain from blows hitting her from both sides of her head.”[38]
Dallam never fully recovered from the severe injury, suffering from memory loss and other problems. She spent years in rehabilitation attempting to gain back even a modicum of functionality including relearning how to walk. No one blamed Anani for the tragic circumstances of the aftermath, but the incident brought to the fore the extreme consequence of allowing novice fighters with no appreciable experience to fight as professionals.
The incident was seemingly forgotten, save for Anani’s prayers for Dallam before her fights. Forgotten, that is, until the release of the film Million Dollar Baby, which told the story of a fighter who was paralyzed during a very rough fight—a storyline purportedly inspired in part by Dallam’s story.
By the late 1990s, Lucia Rijker had seemingly solidified her place at the top of the pound-for-pound list with two championship belts to her credit, and was now on the cusp of dethroning Martin from her position. However, such success did not necessarily mean that Rijker was now the “darling” of boxing.
Mia “The Knockout” St. John, born the same year as Lucia Rijker, 1967, was a Tae Kwon Do black belt who began competing in amateur tournaments at the age of eighteen. She’d gone to college and earned a BA in psychology, but decided somewhere along the way to try boxing and went directly into the pros. She was also a beauty with long flowing black hair and a voluptuous body.
Her debut was in February 1997, fighting another novice, Angelica Villian, whom she defeated by a first-round knockout after swarming Villian with wide windmill punches. She came to the attention of Don King, who immediately signed her to a contract.
St. John was equally successful in her next series of fights—four-rounders with other fledgling boxers whom she readily dispatched in the ring. While she was winning, her skills showed no apparent improvement, but that didn’t seem to bother Don King or the audiences who watched her fight.
After about a year and a half with Don King, St. John switched to Bob Arum at Top Rank on a contract that would have her opening for all future Oscar De La Hoya fights, De La Hoya being one of Arum’s hot boxing properties at the time. Arum also had something in mind for St. John, something very different than his management style with Lucia Rijker, whom he dropped after signing Mia St. John.
She and Arum came up with the idea of promoting her as a truly “feminine boxer”—in essence “out-pinking” Christy Martin—by having her appear “feminine and soft and sweet” and wearing hot pink instead of baby pink. As St. John put it, “[Martin] came out on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and so I came out on the cover of Playboy.” They had also cooked up countering Martin’s boxing on the undercard of Tyson fights, with St. John opening for the reigning ring king, Oscar De La Hoya.
“The marketing worked,” St. John said, “And so basically, Bob Arum and I were geniuses.”[39]
For Rijker, the switch from Arum�
��s support of her as a solid boxer to Mia St. John’s silly froth was a harsh blow. Rijker was by all accounts the pound-for-pound best female fighter in the business and the antidote to every negative comment about the skills female boxers showed in the ring.
The fact was simply that she was being passed over to sell sex in the ring. And whereas Martin had used femininity as a means of making men more comfortable with the idea of women fighting, Mia St. John’s brand of femininity was sexual in nature.
The selling of female boxers as sex objects was also indicative of the changes women’s boxing was undergoing as promoters looked to find more ways to capitalize on putting female fights on pay-per-view cards, and even though selling sex was one of the strategies, more and more women were spurred on to enter into the fight game despite the hype.
1. Thomas Hauser. “Christy and Laila.” SecondsOut.com. 2003, n.p. [Secondsout.com]
2. “Sergeant, Welder, Clash in Women’s Boxing Match.” Star-News, August 28, 1986, n.p. [Google News]
3. Bob Raissman. “Martin Punishes Deshong.” Daily News, June 29, 1997, n.p. [New York Daily News Archives]
4. Richard Hoffer. “Gritty Woman.” Sports Illustrated, April 15, 1996, n.p. [Sportsillustrated.com]
A History of Women's Boxing Page 37