From the opening bell of “Ali-Frazier IV,” there is electricity in the air. The two fighters are standing toe-to-toe and swinging recklessly, abandoning jabs, defense and caution.
Ali comes up big in Round 3, rocking Frazier backward with a series of lefts to the head. Frazier’s mouthpiece drops to the canvas. Eager to press the attack, Ali throws another left that clips the referee’s chest . . . .
Frazier vs. Ali: Those are fighting words. They can still rouse emotions among boxing fans and conjure memories of the three stirring clashes between fabled heavyweight champions Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
But the fourth matchup, staged in a casino in upstate Verona, N.Y., is unfolding without “The Greatest” and “Smokin’ Joe.” Instead, the two gladiators pounding each other in the ring are Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, daughters of the two legends.
No title is at stake, and the eight-round bout is subdivided into two-minute rounds, rather than the three minutes standard for male fighters.
Nonetheless, considerable pre-fight buzz was apparent among the sellout crowd of 8,000 in the arena–plus a surprising TV audience of 100,000 pay-per-viewers. That buzz reached a crescendo as Frazier, clad all in black from halter top and trunks to shoes and hooded robe, and Ali, similarly attired in white, made their way into the ring.
One concern was that the combatants’ lack of boxing experience and skills might sully the coattails they are riding. After all, unbeaten 23-year-old Ali is only nine fights removed from owning a manicure salon and attending business school, while 39-year old attorney Frazier-Lyde is undefeated in just seven fights.
With the fight underway, however, it is clear they are determined not to embarrass their elders. Although neither woman seems able to sustain momentum, each has flashes of excellence. Ali is faster with her jabs, which sets up her power punches, while Frazier is landing solid left hooks to the head and body.
And so it went on this raucous night in June of 2001. By the time it was over, Ali had won a narrow majority decision–one of the three judges scored the fight a draw–and the crowd seemed satisfied.
So did Frazier-Lyde. Father Joe was at her side with a kiss and a congratulatory whisper. “My father says I’m a winner,” Jacqui repeated, smiling. “That’s what it’s about.”
Ali, whose father did not attend, did not look like the winner. She was disappointed that the fight was so close. When her husband and promoter, Johnny “Yahya” McClain, said he was proud of her effort, she blurted, “He’s not going to be proud when we get home.”
Whatever the combatants’ assessment, the fight was successful in two ways: The boxers showed enough grit and skill to entertain their audience, and Ali-Frazier IV gave a much-needed boost to women’s boxing, which had languished for most of the century following its debut as an exhibition event at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis.
The matchup cashed in as female boxing’s “most notable and lucrative” bout, says Jackie Kallen, the first major female manager of male fighters. There has also been national publicity for welterweight women fighters Christy Martin, a solid practitioner, and Mia St. John, a flashy performer, both often outfitted in pink. But that wave of interest in women’s boxing–which carried Martin to the cover of Sports Illustrated, St. John to the cover and inside pages of Playboy, and Ali to a rare six-figure payday–was, to the chagrin of many, not sustained.
“And the sport has been sputtering along ever since,” says Kallen, whose experience in boxing inspired “Against the Ropes,” the new movie release starring Meg Ryan.
Without a rivalry between two or more talented women, or sponsor interest beyond Ali–she has an endorsement deal with Adidas that includes a cleverly edited commercial in which she appears to be fighting against her father in his prime–“few people will follow the sport or care who wins or loses,” Kallen says.
Proponents of women’s boxing argue that there is a growing cadre of talented female fighters, bolstered by newcomers who have better amateur training than their predecessors. And, the same advocates say, interest in women’s boxing is growing along with increased recreational programs for women that include boxing techniques.
It is TV exposure, they say, that the sport needs most. And that’s a real problem, because among the most prominent foes of women’s boxing are the gatekeepers at the two networks that are boxing’s prime outlets: HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg and Showtime Senior Vice-President Jay Larkin.
“Putting women’s boxing on TV as it is now is putting the cart before the horse,” Greenburg says. “There needs to be a depth of talent in the sport to make it viable. It is still viewed more as a carnival act.”
While Larkin feels that “watching women punching each other is a visceral voyeurism that I find repellent,” he insists his is not a moral judgment against women’s boxing. “My biggest concern is the administration of it, especially all the lesser shows that are poorly regulated and supervised,” he says. “There are far too many negatives outweighing any upside.”
He says he has been assured that properly trained women boxers face no more risk from punches than men do, and that chest protectors offer sufficient protection from blows in that area. Nonetheless, he said, “When you get a mismatch, you have greater health and safety risks.”
Since there are fewer women than men in boxing, they have not suffered as many serious injuries in the ring. But among some 70 boxing-related deaths in the past decade, there was one woman, Stacy Young, a 30-year-old mother of three. She died last June after being knocked out in her first Toughman amateur fight in Sarasota, Fla. She had been grossly overmatched.
While that raises questions about safety precautions and regulations, Tim Luekenhoff, president of the Association of Boxing Commissioners, echoes the assessment that mismatches are the biggest problem in women’s boxing.
“The difference between a world-class fighter and a club fighter is huge, even greater than among men,” Luekenhoff said. “And unlike men, those women do fight each other sometimes.”
He cited brain injuries suffered by former kickboxer Katherine Dallam, after she was knocked out in her 1996 pro debut against Sumya Anani. That same year Sue Chase was knocked out in her pro debut by Martin, who had 28 prior fights.
All of which prompts boxing historian Bert Sugar to ask, half-facetiously, why women would want to fight each other. “Growing up, we were taught that men were stronger and women were smarter,” Sugar says. “But if they’re so smart, why do they want to get their features battered and their ears cauliflowered until they need to be covered with hollandaise sauce?”
Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, is not a proponent of the sport, but she defends those women who want to box. “In the 18th Century, the question was, ‘Do women really want to play tennis?’ Later, it was basketball and soccer. Now, it’s boxing. And now, as then, if women choose to go into it, they have every right to do so.”
But HBO’s Greenburg insists “there is a larger question here: Is our society ready to watch two women beat each other up in a boxing match?”
With non-cable networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC all but absent from boxing (NBC is currently seeing how well a limited series of prizefights does in the ratings), and HBO and Showtime less than thrilled with females fighting, the major telecast partner of women’s boxing has been ESPN, which has included women’s bouts on some telecasts and shown a few all-female cards.
The network is now interested in a bout between Laila Ali and rising challenger Ann Wolfe, according to ESPN’s matchmaker Bob Yalen. “But,” he adds, “there are no women’s bouts now on our schedule.”
Ex-champ Valerie Mahfood, a Texas prison guard who once fought inmates in a morning disturbance before boxing in the ring that night, has lost to both Ali and Wolfe.
Recalling that Wolfe hit her harder, but Ali hit her more often, Mahfood predicts Ali-Wolfe “would be a great match. How will Laila respond when Ann hits her with a big shot?”
Sue Fox, a former boxer who maintains a Web site on women’s boxing, says the excuses by TV executives “are worn, they’re old.” She concedes that mismatches have harmed the reputation of women’s boxing, and continue to do so. But, she adds, “There are women with 40 to 50 amateur fights who are the future of the sport. There are real women fighters out there who only need better matchmaking, more consistent TV exposure and a chance as an Olympic sport.”
Optimism that women’s boxing might be included at this year’s Athens Olympics was just idle chatter, though, says Julie Goldsticker of USA Boxing, the national governing body for Olympic boxing.
Fox’s point about the wealth of fighters is not off-base, however. Waiting in the wings is a cast of well-qualified boxers, such as Wolfe, Anani, Lucia Rijker, Chevelle Hallbeck, Chris Martinon, Ada Velez, Melissa Del Valle, Melinda Cooper, Mary Jo Sanders, Janaya Davis, Nikki Eplion and Chicagoan Leatitia Robinson.
But they are overshadowed by Ali, and those near her 168-pound weight see their prospects brightening mainly by going up against her.
Whether women’s boxing, dominated by one woman and limited in its exposure, is a sport in trouble or one that is just in transition remains to be seen.
Laila Ali’s high profile is not just due to name recognition. She is acknowledged by boxing observers as disparate as Larkin and Fox as one of the best female fighters, perhaps the best. She also gets a grudging nod from ex-baseball star Dean Chance, who now heads the International Boxing Association sanctioning body and thinks Vonda Ward, a 6-foot 6-inch former college basketball player who fights as a 190-pound heavyweight, should also be listed as among the top fighters.
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Ali has come a long way since her fight against Jacqui Frazier-Lyde. But that night almost three years ago still bothers her. She insists that, if not for a delay in the third round while referee Robert Fenocchi retrieved and replaced Frazier-Lyde’s mouthpiece, she could have ended the fight right there. “I would have knocked her out then,” she says. “After that, I got tired and hurt my left shoulder.”
She is far more satisfied with the outcome of her last fight, a fourth-round knockout last August of the former ruler of women’s boxing, Christy Martin. While Martin had more experience and only two losses in 49 previous fights, she was, at 35, nine years older than Ali. More than that, she was a bulked-up welterweight, giving away six inches in height and reach. It quickly became apparent that she was also giving away a large advantage in power. She was pummeled to her knees, and then nearly stepped on by Ali, as she clung to the ropes while the referee gave her the 10-count to end the fight.
Martin, who left the ring quickly after the devastating loss, later critiqued Ali as amateurish but simply too big for her.
“She said I fought like an amateur, but I jumped on her because that’s what you do when you’re bigger,” Ali says. “I didn’t need to worry about boxing and defense because she couldn’t hurt me. She’s heavy-handed for her weight and cocky enough to think I hadn’t been hit as hard as she could hit. She also thought she was faster than me, but she wasn’t.”
Martin was never Ali’s idol, but was her role model. The moment Ali first thought about becoming a boxer came on the night of March 16, 1996, when she saw Martin win a tough undercard fight against Deirdre Gogarty on TV before Mike Tyson KO’d Frank Bruno in a less-than-thrilling main event in Las Vegas.
Surprised to see women fighting on TV, Ali recalls identifying with the sport almost immediately. “I thought, ‘I could do that,’ ” she says. “It took me awhile to act on that thought, but I did.”
She says she knew she could fight as a youngster, and proved it in scuffles with other girls. She also knew, when she began training for a pro career, that she would not go unnoticed. “I knew it would get attention because I was Muhammad Ali’s daughter,” she says. “I didn’t feel pressure because I knew no one would expect me to be as good as my father or as any good male boxer.”
Aware of her boxing peers’ criticism that she is just out for herself and not a good ambassador for the sport, she responds: “I’m not trying to give back to the sport. Boxing is not a team sport. I’m not in boxing for boxing. I’m boxing for me.”
She says she is not enamored of the sport because “boxing doesn’t love me” and she knows fans can be fickle if she loses. “I’m bigger than boxing,” she concludes, then adds with a smile, “and I don’t want to sound conceited.”
More seriously, she says hers is a “brutal” sport. “If someone wants to get into the ring, they have to be a little off,” she declares. Asked if she includes herself in that assessment, she says: “My crazy self is why I do it. I have an attitude that if somebody challenges me, I won’t back down. I wouldn’t recommend it to others.”
On the other hand, she says, “I’m a competitive person, a fighter at heart. I’m an athlete but I don’t like team sports. “And,” she adds, “it’s in my blood.”
Ali grew up in the glow of her father’s name and the luxuries that came with it, but not in his physical presence. She and her sister, Hana, lived with their mother, Veronica Porche, after their parents divorced.
Although her famous father did not attend Ali’s fight against Frazier-Lyde, he has become more encouraging of her career. “Now, he talks with me about fighting,” she says. “And he thinks everything I’ve got came from him.” He was ringside for the Martin fight and was among the celebrants inside the ropes afterward.
Her toughest fight, Ali says, was against Kendra Lenhardt in her sixth pro bout. “I was hurt and dazed by a punch,” she says, wrapping her hands in gauze before working out on the speed bag at a Los Angeles gym called the New York City Boxing Club.
As Ali relates how she survived Lenhardt’s big punch en route to a unanimous decision, she suddenly exclaims with some defiance: “I got everything else from my dad; you think I didn’t get his chin, too?”
Later, after lunch at Jerry’s “Famous” Deli–another venue with an East Coast personality–she says she plans to be a better ambassador to black neighborhoods than to boxing, mainly through community service and business startups. Then she utters words that might upset her peers more than the prospect of fighting her.
“Retirement is right around the corner for me,” declares Ali, now in her fourth year as a prizefighter. “It may sound like what other fighters say, but I mean it. I’ve always said I want to be in boxing five years.”
Besides, she says, “I’m running out of opponents.”
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At the age of 33, training in the Austin, Texas, boxing club that bears her name, Ann Wolfe is not that far from her childhood home in Louisiana. But her personal journey has taken her through California and Florida and a series of emotional turns that cast her into abject poverty.
She had her first child, Jennifer, 12 years ago and her second, Latania, two years later. When they moved to Austin a decade ago, it was months before Wolfe could make her first investment in their future. She bought a truck.
Living with her children in that roofed camper with the mattresses in the back was a step up. Prior to that, Wolfe had found shelter by riding with her daughters on a bus, back and forth on its entire route. “In the summer, we’d sleep in the park,” she recalls. “I tried to make being homeless as happy as I could.”
She worked day-labor jobs, often alongside men, digging ditches, cutting grass, or at construction sites. But she couldn’t afford the truck until she got her first earned-income credit for being a single mother. When that truck was rammed and totaled, the insurance enabled Wolfe to get a newer truck and finally an apartment.
By then, she had had her first exposure to boxing and begun training in an Austin gym. “I went to a hospital waiting room once just to get out of the cold and saw women boxing on TV,” she says. “I had played all kinds of sports . . . basketball, baseball, football in a women’s semipro league . . . but I never knew there were women boxers.”
She had developed her strong, athletic body by chopping wood and hauling water while growing up in rural Oberlin, La., where her mother had been left by two husbands to raise six children on her own. The experience made Wolfe an imposing fighter. In her first year, she advanced to a national amateur championship, eliminated only by a rules violation, when her cornermen entered the ring before a round had ended.
She was sparring in Waco, Texas, when a wealthy local businessman and boxing fan named Brian Pardo spotted her and was impressed with her power and physique–especially when he learned she was the aggressive fighter he had mistaken for a man, hidden as she was under her protective headgear.
Wolfe, 16-1 in her pro fights, says she has earned only $25,000 in her five-year pro career. But she praises Pardo for helping to promote her and paying her expenses.
“Brian told me I’d never sleep outside again,” she says. He also promised that her daughters would have the chance to go to college. Wolfe was a 6th-grade dropout.
She’s never wanted to wed, she says. “I did not want the married life my mother had.”
She helped care for her mother until she died of cancer at age 45, and she credits her mother with helping her succeed. “Even though she couldn’t give us things,” Wolfe says, “she instilled strength in me. She gave me heart.
“The reason I had kids was because I had nothing growing up, and I wanted to have something of my own,” Wolfe says. “We never had new clothes, never went to the movies. I just wanted to get away.”
Proud of the Ann Wolfe Boxing Gym, located in a small shopping mall north of downtown Austin, she spends up to 12 hours a day there. Besides working out with her trainer, Don “Pops” Billingsley, she trains young male fighters and leads a coed exercise class in the evenings.
Though widely touted as one of Ali’s next opponents, she concedes that her boxing skills are not as good as Ali’s. But, she adds: “Hitting hard, being in condition and having heart makes up for a lot.”
Besides her life of poverty, Wolfe has also done time: six months in prison for selling drugs on the street. “But I never used them,” she insists. “And after that experience, I told myself, ‘I’m never, ever, coming back to jail.’ “
Wolfe stays in shape at or below her super-middleweight division weight limit of 168 pounds. Her sparring partners usually are heavier men, such as 224-pound Freddie Gatica. As they sparred on a recent afternoon, trainer Billingsley encouraged Gatica not to take it easy.
“Slow that girl down, don’t let her get her steam up,” Billingsley exhorts. “This is a man’s world!”
After a strenuous three rounds, she complains, “In here, he always sides with the opponent over me.”
The next morning, on an isolated stretch of roadway, she faces a far more impersonal opponent. For a mile, she shuffles backwards while throwing punches at a heavy bag suspended from the top of Billingsley’s 1980 Chevrolet truck.
As he nurses the truck along at less than five miles an hour, she bobs, weaves and punches the 75-pound bag. At one point, the truck chugs to a halt and she raises her arms triumphantly and shouts, “I stopped this truck with a jab!”
Wolfe and her trainer agree she sometimes overtrains. She attributes that to knowing how critical boxing is to her life. “I have so much pent-up emotion, I like to fight,” she says. “If I weren’t a boxer, I think I would have killed somebody by now.”
The Wild Card Boxing Club sits above a laundromat in a mini-mall on Vine Street in Hollywood. Freddie Roach is behind a counter near the gym’s front door.
A tough former featherweight, the slight, bespectacled trainer is one of boxing’s most successful. He has worked in the corners of champions such as James Toney, Mike Tyson and Manny Pacquaio. With Toney and Tyson, he proved himself able to gain the respect of two of boxing’s most temperamental fighters.
But today, he is waiting to work with a vastly different kind of boxer, one he trained for seven years. As he surveys the room where young men shadow box and a young woman runs on a treadmill, Roach awaits one of the sport’s elite female fighters.
Lucia Rijker, 36, unbeaten in 16 fights but having fought only twice in the past four years, is coming in for workouts after spending time with her ailing mother in Holland.
Roach has a special place in his heart for Rijker, even though her official trainer now is Emanuel Steward. “I teach Lucia at the same level as my world champions,” Roach says. “Nobody listens to me better than she does.
“Her only downside is inactivity,” he adds, as she enters the gym and slips into boxing apparel. “She needs to fight and get exposure. She’s been out of the picture too long.”
Even though Rijker’s fighting weight is 140–20 to 30 pounds lighter than Laila Ali’s–Roach would like to see the two fight. Speaking like a confident trainer, he says, “I think Lucia could beat her.”
Despite her layoff, Rijker looks sharp as she throws jabs and power punches into the big mitts worn by Roach. Her high-pitched grunts and the loud pops of her best shots turn heads in the gym and bring words of approval from Roach.
After her workout, Rijker admits she thinks about fighting Ali but wants a compromise on weight so she isn’t giving up as much as Martin did in that size mismatch.
“I’ve never focused on Laila, but she minded my business when she fought Christy,” Rijker says. “She took that fight away from me, and that was my ultimate fight.” Indeed, Rijker once tried to publicly egg Martin into the bout that has now lost its luster due to Martin’s lopsided loss to Ali.
Rijker grew up in the Netherlands, the youngest child of mixed-race parents. Her mother was a waitress, her father a mechanic “who was discriminated against because he was black,” Rijker says. She and an older sister took judo as youngsters before her older brother, a kickboxer, first brought her into the gym. “When I was 15, I thought, ‘I want to be a pro athlete and a champion,’ ” she recalls. “I lost interest in school, but I was passionate about learning my sport.”
She became a kickboxing champion before turning to boxing in 1996. But when she came to the U.S., she was “tired of my routine,” so she tried teaching and acting. “It’s like boxing; I love the performing,” she says.
When movie auditions left her frustrated — “I spent so much money on acting and dialogue coaching”–she returned to boxing.
“In the beginning, when I came to Freddie’s gym to train, the whole place stopped and looked,” she recalls. “There weren’t always the nicest comments. I was reluctant to come when Freddie wasn’t here.”
Now, she and other women are far more accepted, whether they come as fighters or simply seeking strenuous exercise.
Rijker’s ultimate goal is to open her own gym and “coach a new generation of fighters. I have a passion to teach and mentor.”
She regrets her sport “didn’t teach me how to enjoy the journey” to success, or leave her time for a relationship with a boyfriend. “I’ve been married to my sport for 20 years.”
She has another regret, one that keeps her in boxing. “If I retired today,” she says, “I’d have all this talent and it would be a shame that I couldn’t excel in a high-profile fight.”
Realistic or not, she sometimes envisions that being a fight with Laila Ali: “Either I beat her and get what I’ve worked for for 20 years, or I pass on the torch.”
One-story Stateway Park Boxing Gym is at the corner of State and 37th Streets, in the shadow of what’s left of Chicago’s Stateway Gardens housing project, now being razed.
Leatitia Robinson, 23, knows the destructive force of life in the projects. Once she was arrested after inadvertently hitting a policeman who intervened when she was fighting “seven girls who jumped me,” she says. The youngest of five sisters, she was raised by a single mother in the Cabrini-Green project, where she was attacked more than once.
Although she now lives in an apartment and her mother, Jalaine, is in a nursing home, the two talk every day. “She won’t come to my fights, but she prays for me,” says Robinson, a five-time Chicago Golden Gloves champion and national amateur champion in 2000. She is now a middleweight titleholder, unbeaten in 10 fights.
“I’m still very angry about what happened to me in Cabrini,” she says. “I take my anger out in the ring.”
The sport “is my whole life,” she admits. “I see myself as a millionaire, but I still have mountains to climb. I want to win every title belt at 160 pounds, then move up to fight Laila Ali. I want it so Laila can’t ignore me.”
Her two strongest supporters, as she trains inside the mustard-colored walls of the Stateway gym, are trainer Frank Smith, a former amateur boxer, and Chicago police officer Gerald Sheppard, her manager-adviser.
“Female boxing suffers because they’re not putting the most skillful fighters like Leatitia out there,” opines Sheppard. After a substantial amateur career with 37 victories in 38 fights, Robinson turned pro in 2001 and won nine straight bouts before her rapid advance was stalled. She had five bouts called off in 2003, she says, leaving her idle for more than a year before she won a unanimous decision over Yvonne Reis on Jan. 30 in Worcester, Mass.
“I was discouraged and angry last year,” says Robinson, whose ambition after she leaves boxing is to become a cop. “I wanted to quit because I couldn’t get a fight.”
Sheppard and Robinson met while jogging in the park. He attributes his interest in her career, which extends to financial assistance, to his being a fan of the sport and its history. Confident Robinson can beat other champions in her 160-pound weight class and move up to fight Ali at 168, he says, “I want to be there when Leatitia makes history.”
As he talks, she stands behind him, wearing his policeman’s hat. “Just trying it out,” she says with a smile.
