Book Review

Christy Martin: Fighting for Survival / Book Review by Thomas Hauser

Published

2 years ago

July 17, 2022

Christy-Martin-Fighting-for-Survival-Book-Review-by-Thomas-Hauser

More than any other fighter, Christy Martin was responsible for legitimizing women’s boxing in the public eye. She was also a closeted gay woman married to a man who physically and psychologically abused her for years before stabbing her multiple times, shooting her in the chest, and leaving her for dead on their bedroom floor. Fighting for Survival, written with Ron Borges and published by Rowman & Littlefield, is her story.

Martin was born in Mullen, West Virginia, on June 12, 1968, and grew up in the coal-mining town of Itmann. Her father was a miner. “All you need to know to understand the limits of Itmann,” Martin writes, “is your cellphone won’t work there.”

When Christy Salters (her name before she was married) was six, she was sexually molested in the basement of her parents’ home by a 15-year-old cousin who forced her to perform oral sex on him. Other than her future husband, she didn’t tell anyone about it for 37 years.

She was a troubled adolescent. “I started associating drinking with popularity,” she acknowledges. “I was running around with thirty-year-olds when I was still a teenager. I sold speed to friends of my parents. I was a bad kid doing things I shouldn’t have done.”

She was also gay.

Christy had sex with a girl for the first time when she was thirteen. In high school, she ventured back and forth between the sexes.

“I wasn’t together at the time when it came to totally understanding my own sexuality,” Christy acknowledges. “Can I be straight if I try? Should I be who I am or try harder to please everyone else? You doubt sometimes the direction you’re going. Other times, you’re totally sure. I’d been with men and women in high school so I’d say I was bi-sexual at that time. But to me, being in a relationship with a woman was easier. It was always where I was most comfortable.”

In towns as small as Itmann and Mullens, people talk,” Christy continues. “I knew they wondered about me. It is exhausting hiding who you are from your family and your friends and the world around you. You’re always afraid someone knows the truth. You may tell yourself you don’t care. But if you really didn’t care, you wouldn’t be hiding what you’re doing or what you’re feeling, would you?”

Coming out wasn’t an option. Christy’s mother was vehemently homophobic, a view shared by many people in that corner of the world. “Put it this way,” Christy says. “You weren’t coming out in Itmann, West Virginia. Not unless you were planning on leaving the same day.”

Then, to further complicate matters, Christy got pregnant at age 21. Chris Caldwell had been her “sort of boyfriend” since they were in fifth grade. As the years passed, they saw each other from time to time.

“One night,” Christy remembers, “we went out as friends, had a few drinks, and had drunken sex. I was in love with Bridget [her girlfriend of the moment], so why did that happen? I was selfish, that’s why. There’s no other explanation. I never told my parents. I didn’t want the added pressure of them saying they’d raise the baby while I finished school, which I know my Mom would have done.”

So she chose to have an abortion.

“It’s one of those things that will always bother me,” Christy writes. “But it’s the decision I made. I still feel guilty about it. But I made a choice and I had to move forward.”

Meanwhile, Christy found a safe haven in sports. Despite being only 5-feet-4-inches tall, she excelled in basketball, averaging 27 points and six rebounds per game during her senior year of high school. In her junior and senior seasons, she was designated first team All-State.

“I had a pent-up rage inside about having to hide that I was gay from the world as I knew it,” she recalls. “You’re so angry that you can’t be who you want to be and you can’t change who you are. You’re trapped and it makes you mad without understanding what you’re really mad about. In sports, it’s acceptable to be overly aggressive so you can let some of those emotions out in a safe place. At times it even gets rewarded.”

That led to boxing.

“I’d been going to Toughman shows for years with my friends and family,” Christy reminisces, “and always wondered what I’d do if the bell rang and I found myself standing all alone in one corner of the ring.”

Then, at age nineteen, she saw a poster inviting women to participate in a “Mean Mountaineer” tournament.

“That,” Christy recalls, “is how, on October 1, 1987, I found myself standing in the wings at the Raleigh County Armory wearing a pair of 16-ounce boxing gloves and leather headgear, waiting to try something I knew nothing about.”

But Christy Salters had an advantage over the other women in the tournament. “Many of them were muscular,” she remembers. “They looked stronger than me. But I was in better condition and I was an athlete. Most of them were just tough girls.”

Christy won her first fight by decision and, the next night, came back for more. In the finals, she knocked out an opponent who was heavier and five inches taller with a single punch.

“She wasn’t staggering around and kind of woozy,” Christy recounts. “She was out and the crowd went into a frenzy! It was awesome. I could feel the adrenaline rush from the crowd, and that was it for me. I was hooked on boxing. The first thing I thought of when they gave me the champion’s jacket and the $300 [prize] was, ‘When’s the next one?'”

Soon, a boxing ring was one of the few places where Christy felt safe.

“I won’t sugarcoat what boxing is about,” she writes. “You don’t find too many well-adjusted prizefighters. We all have our demons, something driving us to run toward pain when human nature says run away. You don’t find many fighters who weren’t spawned out of some kind of dysfunction. If you’re normal, whatever that means, you’re not likely to choose a sport that involves getting hit in the face.”

But Christy continues, “I loved boxing more than anything in my life. The ring was where I could be me. In the ring, who I chose to love didn’t matter. I felt able to get out my frustrations and the anger that was locked up inside me. It was okay for me to go in there and be as aggressive as hell and as competitive as I wanted to be. They might laugh at us on the way into the ring. But if we fought hard and did some damage, they’d cheer us on the way out. They didn’t care if you were gay or straight. Whatever it was that drove you to fight was fine to the people watching as long as you could fight. I just wanted to be a boxer. It became all that mattered to me. For too long, I didn’t have control of anything but the 20-by-20-foot area inside those ropes. Maybe that’s why I loved it in there so much.”

On September 9, 1989, at age 21, Christy turned pro. “Women’s boxing was not yet a truly legitimate sport,” she acknowledges. “It was still a freak show, but at the time I didn’t give it a thought. I just wanted to fight.”

Soon after, her promoter suggested that a man named Jim Martin become Christy’s trainer. On March 20, 1992, Christy Salters and Jim Martin were joined together as husband and wife. Much more on that later.

By the end of 1993, Martin had 19 wins as a pro against a single loss and one draw. Then she was brought to the attention of Don King who signed her to a contract calling for five six-round fights a year at $5,000 a fight. Prior to that, she’d been making roughly $500 per fight and her biggest purse had been $1,200.

Christy’s inaugural fight with King was a first-round knockout of Susie Melton on January 29, 1994. Five more victories followed. Then, on December 16, 1995, King matched her against a sacrificial lamb named Erica Schmidlin who was making her pro debut. As expected, Martin won on a first-round knockout. That night marked a turning point because Christy’s bout was on the undercard of Mike Tyson vs. Buster Mathis Jr.

Martin fought on Tyson undercards six times. Those fights, she says, “were my stepping stones to a world I never knew existed – the big-time side of boxing.” Tyson, she writes, was “like a magic carpet ride for me, providing a platform to show my skills and a huge audience that turned me into someone I never thought I could be.”

After destroying Schmidlin, Martin defeated a no-hope opponent named Melinda Robinson and Sue Chase (who would end her career with a 1-23-1 record). The Chase fight was significant because it was on the undercard of Felix Trinidad vs. Rodney Moore at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and was televised by Showtime – the first time that a fight between women boxers aired nationally in the United States. That was followed by a first-round knockout against another no-hoper named Del Pettis.

Then, three weeks later, everything changed. On March 16, 1996, Christy was matched against an Irish boxer named Deirdre Gogarty on the undercard of the rematch between Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno on Showtime-PPV.

Christy was a natural 135-pounder. Two hours before the weigh-in, Gogarty (who would finish her career with 8 wins in 13 fights) weighed 124. After stuffing rolls of quarters into her bra, socks, and underwear, Deirdre tipped the scales at 130.

A 60-53, 60-53, 59-54 beatdown followed. But Martin was about to become famous, not because she won but because Gogarty broke Christy’s nose. It gushed blood throughout the fight. Writing for the Associated Press, Ed Schuyler later called it “the most lucrative bloody nose in the history of boxing.”

“That fight,” Christy says, “turned in a matter of seconds from being an event that was being laughed at and ridiculed in the arena to one that absolutely thrilled people who were watching. That drippy nose and the uniqueness of the story of the husband-and-wife fighting team [by that time, Jim Martin was Christy’s husband] turned me into a national phenomenon.”

In the weeks that followed, Christy appeared on dozens of national television shows and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

S.I.

“You could not get any bigger in the world I was inhabiting than to be on a Sports Illustrated cover,” she writes. “And there I was, staring back at myself from every newsstand in America. You dream about some things, but other things are so big you don’t even think about them happening because just the thought would be ridiculous. That’s what being on SI’s cover was for me.”

After beating Gogarty, Martin defeated Melinda Robinson for the second time followed by a first-round knockout of Bethany Payne. Then she signed a new contract with Don King calling for a minimum purse of $100,000 per fight. All told, she fought 27 times over the course of eight years with King as her promoter. Writing about a memorable moment in their relationship, she reveals, “Don did try to proposition me once in Venezuela at a WBA function. I asked him to go into another room because I needed to talk to him and he came on to me. After he made his pitch, I laughed and told him I only wanted to fight my way to the top. He started cackling and said, ‘You’re already at the top.’ Then he came to hug me and poured his drink down the back of my dress.”

After leaving King, Christy fought eleven times over the course of ten years. But the good part of her career was over. Her record in those eleven fights was 5 wins, 5 losses, and a draw. Age and a higher level of opponent had caught up to her.

The worst of the defeats was a fourth-round stoppage at the hands of Laila Ali in 2003. Laila was six inches taller than Christy and outweighed her on fight night by at least twenty pounds. Christy’s announced weight of 159 was as phony as Deirdre Gogarty’s had been seven years earlier. Why did she take the fight? For a $400,000 purse. And to use her word, she was “massacred.” The fight ended when she took a knee and chose not to rise before the count of ten.

Looking back on that night, Christy writes, “I was totally embarrassed and ashamed. I’ll never get over it. I’d be more accepting of losing to her if I’d been knocked out or took a beating for six more rounds. To quit on my knees is not who I was.”

Virtually all boxer autobiographies focus on a fighter’s ring career. This one does it better than most. But what separates Fighting for Survival from other fighter autobiographies is the horrifying nature of Christy’s life outside the ring coupled with the brutally honest way in which she recounts it.

When Ron Borges met with her to discuss the possibility of their working together, one of the first things he told her was, “I’m not interested in working on a dishonest book.”

Neither was Christy. Later, as she began opening up about the horrors of her life, Borges counseled, “You don’t have to tell me everything bad that happened.”

But she did.

“I’ve never dealt with anybody who was more open about her life than Christy Martin,” Borges says. “There were times when we had to stop because the memories overwhelmed her. I don’t think I could do what she did with me. But Christy really believes that she survived the murder attempt and everything that came before it as part of a larger plan. And her goal now is to reach as many victims of abuse as possible.”

Christy’s decision to marry Jim Martin (her trainer) was a watershed moment in her life. He was 24 years older than she was. Why did a gay woman marry a man old enough to be her father?

“I have to admit, I was intrigued by him and his boxing stories,” Christy writes. “Now that I’m free and looking back thirty years, it makes no sense. But when I remember the girl I was then, a naïve kid from Nowhere, West Virginia, I can understand what I did. I wasn’t attracted to him. I was never passionate about him. The night Jim Martin proposed to me, I was ill-prepared to do what would have been best. I wasn’t strong enough to declare to the world who I really was.”

“When we first got married,’ Christy continues, “I was still a little confused about my sexuality. Deep inside, I knew I was gay. I spent a lot of years trying to figure out how I felt about that. But the longer we were together and the better I understood who I really was, the more it weighed on me. So there I was; a closeted gay woman athlete in a sport that barely existed with a boyfriend older than my Dad. All my passion came out in the gym because there was none at home. We got along all right in those days because we had boxing in common and that was our main focus. I’d say, in those years we were married, I was really asexual. It got to the point where I didn’t care about sex at all. I wanted to be in love with someone but I replaced that desire with a love for boxing.”

Christy’s rise to stardom after the Gogarty bout threatened to upend the applecart.

“I was now a gay woman in a phony marriage suddenly under the microscope that is the American hype machine,” she recalls. “Thankfully, it was the American hype machine before social media. I have a lot of things to be thankful for. And the absence of things like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and the like back then are some of them because, had they existed, I would have been ‘out-ed’ long before Jim put a bullet in my chest and destroyed my hiding place.”

Also, Christy reminds readers, “Part of the boxing sell for us was that I was a married woman, trained and managed by her loving husband, so how could I be gay?”

The deception came with a heavy price attached. Christy says that, without her knowledge, her husband skimmed large amounts of cash off the top of her fight purses. There were what she describes as “almost daily emotional beatdowns.” And at times, Jim was physically abusive. “But when the abuse is mostly emotional manipulation,” she explains, “you see it differently. You question what you can do to fix things. You start to think he’s right about you. You’re the problem. It often takes a long time before you realize who the victim really is. That’s the kind of emotional control someone can have over you. You know you should leave, but you’re ashamed of the situation you’re in and afraid of the consequences if you go.

“A lot of women end up in similar situations to the one I was in,” Christy continues. “We stay out of fear, out of obligation, out of believing it’s all we deserve. The brave ones don’t stay. But would an openly gay female get the same chances I got if I wasn’t hiding who I really was? I hadn’t seen anyone who did, and I wasn’t about to risk it all to find out. I was a lesbian locked in a sham marriage designed to protect me from a sporting world I’d come to believe would never accept me as I was. [So] you compromise. You lie. You hide. You try to fit into a world that isn’t your own creation. You accept things you never thought you’d accept. You replace boxing for love and try to equate financial success with personal happiness.”

It didn’t work.

Writing about her husband, Christy states, “Protecting his wife never factored into his thinking. I was just a human ATM machine to him. He kept telling me I’d become a star and make him a lot of money but until that happened we needed another way to supplement what the fights brought in. And Jim came up with quite a solution. He wanted me to fight men in their hotel rooms. He said he’d heard there were guys who got off on it and they’d pay me to beat them up. When he first suggested it, I hollered at him, ‘Bitch! Get a job!’ But it didn’t take him long to convince me to do it, like he did with so many things I wish had never happened.

“The first time was in a hotel room in Fort Lauderdale,” Christy remembers. “I’m in this guy’s room, ready to fight, and all he kept trying to do was grab me and hold while I beat the bejesus out of him. The guy seemed to like it. Go figure. When it was over, we took his money and left. I felt like a prostitute must feel the first time. I felt dirty. I knew that hadn’t been about boxing. It was a sex thing from the start for the guy. I said I’d never do it again. But of course, I did. When you need money and all you have to do is go punch some guy around in his hotel room, it’s easy to find an excuse to do it again. The second time, it was easier to accept. I still didn’t feel right about it but you find ways to justify it. I told myself, whatever it is for the guy, it’s just boxing to me. Every time I did something like that, I left a little piece of myself back in that room. A piece of my dignity had disappeared.”

Christy’s unhappiness and confusion caused her to cross over other lines of propriety as well. Prior to fighting Andrea DeShong, she labeled her opponent a “dyke bitch.”

“I said what I said,” Christy admits. “I should never have done it. But I did.” Making matters worse, she later told DeShong, “I’m going to put something on you that your girlfriend can’t get off.”

“It was another part of my self-destruction,” Christy acknowledges. “I paid a price for those kind of statements and still do to this day with some people in the gay community.”

She also got into a fistfight with a woman in a parking lot and wound up paying $30,000 to settle a lawsuit that arose from the incident.

Worse, she got hooked on cocaine.

“My whole life, I’d been against using drugs,” Christy writes. “I tried marijuana in high school but I didn’t like the high. Same with speed. Tried it. Didn’t like it. So I stuck with drinking to excess instead. But as my life and my career unraveled, so did my resolve. One night, Jim came home with a baggie and dropped it on the table in front of me. He said that a fighter announced he was done with cocaine and there was the proof. I took the bait. The bag sat there for a day or two, looking at me. I didn’t care about myself and I hated Jim and what my life had become. What did it matter if I tried cocaine just once? I was alone the night I finally grabbed that baggie and opened it. I snorted a line and it was like the first time I knocked someone out and the crowd went crazy. I loved the feeling it gave me. At first, I only did it on Friday nights and weekends. Pretty soon, it was Mondays too. Then it became every day. It took a month until it had me. Pretty quickly, I’d do anything for coke. Jim would do it occasionally with me but mostly it was me, alone in the house. I was also taking pain pills for all the injuries I’d had in boxing and drinking, too. I overdosed so many times I should be dead. Basically, if I was awake in those years, I was high.”

Christy was hooked on cocaine for more than three years. Then, through the muddle that her mind had become, she had an epiphany.

“I was walking through my house, high, when I saw my reflection in a mirror and stopped dead in my tracks. I thought, ‘You really look like an addict.’ At that moment it hit me. What was looking back at me wasn’t Christy Martin. It wasn’t the Coal Miner’s Daughter. It wasn’t the WBC world super-welterweight women’s champion. It was a drug addict. That’s what I’d become. I immediately went and did a line to try and erase that thought but it wasn’t the same. By the next day, I’d decided things needed to change and I had to be the one to make the change. That day, I realized if I bent over and did one more line of cocaine, I’d do it until I was dead.”

Then Christy told Jim that she was going to leave him.

“Five days later [on November 23, 2010],” she writes, “stone cold sober, I was lying on my bedroom floor with a bullet in my chest, stab wounds all over my body and blood everywhere. I was finally free, if I didn’t die first.”

Jim Martin was tried and convicted of attempted murder in the second degree and sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years in prison. He won’t be eligible for release until 2035.

After recovering from the attempt on her life, Christy had two more fights and lost both of them. She also suffered a stroke while in the hospital undergoing surgery for a broken hand after the first of those two encounters.

“I stayed in ICU for a week,” she recalls. “When I finally left, I couldn’t walk right, talk right or see right. My words were slurred and I had double vision which remains a problem for me at times to this day.”

She needed a cane to get around. But she was allowed to fight again. “The California State Athletic Commission [which oversaw the bout] didn’t have a clue,” she notes.

But Fighting for Survival has a happy ending. Martin has steered clear of cocaine for more than a decade. And in 2017, she married Lisa Holewyne. Their marriage is unique in that, on November 17, 2001, they had fought each other at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas with Christy winning by decision.

“I was one hundred percent sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Lisa,” Christy writes. “And five years later, nothing has changed. I was surer of that than anything in my life, including my decision to give over my life to boxing. I still love boxing but it isn’t my first love anymore. Lisa is.”

Fighting for Survival is written the way Christy fought. Straightforward and don’t hold anything back. It goes beyond being a boxing book and is as honest as any autobiography I’ve read.

There’s an art to capturing another person’s voice, and Borges has it. One never gets the feeling that he’s putting words in Martin’s mouth. Rather, he’s helping her organize her thoughts and putting them on paper. There’s no need to over-sensationalize. The facts are lurid enough.

Christy is active today in working to combat domestic violence. She also promotes fights in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. Summarizing her journey, she writes, “Let’s be clear about one thing. Trust and believe when I tell you, this is not a victim’s story. Although a lot of folks might see it that way, it is not a victim’s story at all. It’s a survivor’s story.” And she adds, “I’m not looking for a pity party for Christy Martin. A lot of things that happened in my life before I was free to be me were great and I wouldn’t trade them for a different path because this is the path I had to walk to be who I am today. All I’m saying is, you don’t have to go as far down that road as I did to be free.”

One wishes her well on the journey ahead.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – Broken Dreams: Another Year Inside Boxing – was published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, he was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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Thomas Hauser

Thomas Hauser is the author of 52 books. In 2005, he was honored by the Boxing Writers Association of America, which bestowed the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism upon him. He was the first Internet writer ever to receive that award. In 2019, Hauser was chosen for boxing's highest honor: induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Lennox Lewis has observed, “A hundred years from now, if people want to learn about boxing in this era, they’ll read Thomas Hauser.”

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Book Review

“The Knockout” and More from Thomas Hauser

Published

4 months ago

August 4, 2024

Thomas Hauser

The Knockout by Andy Clarke (published by Aurum) is a thoughtful book that encourages readers to think more deeply about boxing’s most violent spectacle, described by Clarke as, “The greatest finish in all of sport . . . Boxing’s money shot . . . Sport’s most decisive moment . . . The ultimate sporting cataclysm . . . A public sporting execution . . . The ultimate expression of sporting victory and defeat.”

Clarke focuses on two types of knockouts that he labels “type one” (the single-punch knockout) and “type two” (when a fighter has been beaten down over time to the point where he can no longer properly defend himself).

“Type one is spectacular,” Clarke writes. “The suddenness of it is shocking. It almost doesn’t seem right or fair that something that until so recently was so full of potential and possibility can just end like that, without warning, without consultation. But that’s boxing and that’s the knockout and you won’t find anything like it anywhere else in the world of sport. Type two is slow by comparison, gruelling, and, at least in theory, much more preventable. Torture. Breaking the will. That’s what a type-two knockout is about.”

“There is no response to a knockout,” Clarke continues. “There is no other moment in sport that can rival it for its utter finality. No opportunity to come back. It renders the clock irrelevant. Other sports can provide moments of great drama. But a last-second goal or basket on the buzzer to win the game requires whoever scores them to be within striking distance, to be close enough to their opponent’s score for that final act to be decisive.”

Clarke examines knockouts from multiple perspectives. He starts with fighters – both winners and losers – keying on conversations with Carl Froch, Ricky Hatton, Amir Khan, Matthew Macklin, Jamie Moore, David Haye, and Tony Bellew. Then he broadens his inquiry to consider the role played by third parties such as trainers and referees and the response of fans to a “traumatic physical event” that often redirects the trajectory of a fighter’s career and, for the loser, can change him physically and mentally for life.

Here, the thoughts of two trainers are instructive.

Joe Gallagher, talking about whether or not to stop a fight when his charge is taking a beating, told Clarke, “There’s a very fine line. You’ve got to understand what your fighter is capable of or not capable of. And if you’ve got to ask them to do something that he’s never done in his career before, never done in the gym, than why do you keep him in there? We’re beginning to get into a highlight-reel knockout situation and he shouldn’t be in there. It’s very hard.”

And Billy Graham opines, “Fighters might say they don’t want to hurt their opponent. But let me tell you, when you’re in there, you absolutely f***ing do. You want to knock them out. You want to keep hitting them until they drop so they’ll stop f***ing hitting you and you can get yourself out of that hellhole. Yeah, a few seconds later, when you’ve done it, when it’s over, you might start to think about if they’re okay. But whilst you’re in there, you just want to finish it, to knock them the f*** out.”

To Clarke’s credit, his book is not a tedious compendium of boxing’s greatest knockouts. But a little more historical perspective would have been welcome. The most celebrated one-punch (“type one”) knockout in boxing history was a left hook to the jaw delivered by Sugar Ray Robinson on May 1, 1957, in his second fight against Gene Fullmer. Rocky Marciano’s one-punch knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott to seize the heavyweight throne on September 23, 1952, runs a close second. More recently, on November 5, 1994, George Foreman solidified his place in boxing history with a one-punch knockout of Michael Moorer. It would have been nice had Clarke acknowledged those moments.

Also, “type one” knockouts come from body punches as well as head shots. Clarke largely ignores that phenomenon.

That said; The Knockout is a good book.

“Boxing,” Clarke observes, “is as old as sport gets.” He reminds us that, “In boxing, the ability to survive is the cornerstone around which everything else can be built.” And he cautions, “The ultimate aim for all boxers is to leave the sport having taken more from boxing than boxing has taken from them. It’s a straightforward ambition but one that few achieve.”

****

One of the sad things about the craziness that enveloped Mike Tyson for much of his ring career is that it obscures what a remarkable fighter he was when he was young. Consider this one statistic.

Tyson knocked out Trevor Berbick on November 22, 1986, to claim the WBC heavyweight crown. He was undefeated in THIRTEEN fights that year. Some of his opponents were easy outs. But others – like James Tillis and Mitch Green – posed credible challenges.

Compare Tyson to his brethren.

Larry Holmes fought three times in the twelve months before he defeated Ken Norton for the heavyweight crown. Evander Holyfield had two fights in the year prior to his beating Buster Douglas. Lennox Lewis, two before beating Tony Tucker. Riddick Bowe, four before beating Holyfield.

What about “throwback fighters”?

Rocky Marciano had five fights in the year before he dethroned Jersey Joe Walcott. Joe Louis had seven fights in the year before beating James Braddock. Gene Tunney, three before toppling Dempsey. Dempsey, ten before beating Jess Willard. Jack Johnson had one win the year before he beat Tommy Burns.

And recent heavyweight champions?

Oleksandr Usyk had one fight during the year before he dethroned Anthony Joshua . . . Joshua, four before beating Charles Martin . . . Tyson Fury, two before beating Wladimir Klitschko . . . Deontay Wilder, two before beating Bermane Stiverne.

So to repeat the number: Mike Tyson’s knockout of Trevor Berbick to claim the WBC heavyweight title was his THIRTEENTH fight of 1986. That’s a lot of fights.

****

At the kick-off press conference at the Hunt and Fish Club in New York for his largely-ignored August 24 rematch against John Gotti III, Floyd Mayweather bragged, “Last time I checked, I’ve beat more fighters that are in the Hall of Fame than any fighter in history.”

Floyd should check again.

Floyd beat Diego Corrales, Arturo Gatti, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Juan Manuel Marquez, Shane Mosley, and Miguel Cotto. That’s victories over seven Hall of Fame opponents. And let’s assume that Manny Pacquaio will be inducted into the Hall of Fame some day which will give Floyd eight (although the number now stands at seven).

Now let’s look at two men who Mayweather often compares himself to.

Pacquiao defeated eight opponents who are now in the Hall of Fame: Marco Antonio Barrera, Juan Manuel Marquez, Eric Morales, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Miguel Cotto, Shane Mosley, and Tim Bradley.

And Sugar Ray Robinson defeated eleven: Henry Armstrong, Kid Gavilan, Carmen Basilio, Jake LaMotta, Rocky Graziano, Gene Fullmer, Fritzie Zivic, Randy Turpin, Bobo Olson, Joey Giardello, and Sammy Angott.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – MY MOTHER and me – is a personal memoir available at Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/My-Mother-Me-Thomas-Hauser/dp/1955836191/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5C0TEN4M9ZAH&keywords=thomas+hauser&qid=1707662513&sprefix=thomas+hauser%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1

In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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Book Review

Literary Notes from Thomas Hauser

Published

4 months ago

July 19, 2024

Thomas Hauser

Literary Notes from Thomas Hauser

Bernard Fernandez has written thousands of articles during his 55-year career as a sports journalist. Championship Rounds: Round 5 is the fifth (and Bernard says, the last) collection of his articles to be published in book form.

Fernandez has a way with words. He also has an ear for quotes as evidenced by the following thoughts from Championship Rounds: Round 5:

Alex Rodriguez (speaking about his brother, Francisco, who died after being knocked out by Teon Kennedy at the Blue Horizon in Philadelphia): “My brother had a perfect heart, perfect lungs, perfect kidneys, perfect pancreas. Because of him, other people will have a chance for better health, more birthdays, the fulfillment of their own dreams. Paco is going to continue walking through this world through them.”

Johnny Tapia (after Don King completely dominated the final prefight press conference for his fight against Nana Yaw Konadu in Atlantic City): “I don’t understand this. I mean, I’m the one who’s fighting, right?”

Archie Moore: “A legend is something between fact and fable. Some people might say that that is an accurate description of me.”

George Foreman (on Roy Jones): “The better he is at his craft, the less people understand it.”

Mike Tyson (on Sonny Liston’s gift for weakening opponents through intimidation): “He was a menacing force. Sonny could pull it off. I could pull it off. Not a lot of people could pull it off.”

Bert Sugar (reflecting on some of the unsavory characters who have been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame): “You can always make a case for someone’s exclusion. It depends on how moralistic you want to be. But remember, this is boxing we’re talking about.”

Ferdie Pacheco (after watching 47-year-old Roberto Duran get knocked out by William Joppy in three rounds): “What happened tonight happens too often in boxing. How often do we need to see Joe Louis knocked out by Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali beaten to a pulp by Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Robinson losing to everybody? How much longer do we need to see these legends take beatings like this? This wasn’t a boxing match. It was a licensed execution. I hope it’s the end of the line for Roberto. It should have been the end of the line ten years ago.”

Seth Abraham (reflecting on having signed Roy Jones to a multi-bout contract with insufficient quality control regarding opponents): “In retrospect, I wish I had taken a harder line with him. He wanted to make the most money. That’s fine. He wanted to take the fewest risks. That’s not fine if you want the most money.”

Matthew Saad Muhammad (on his hyper-aggressive ring style and growing older): “You can’t fight the way I did unless you got something to back it up. I couldn’t back it up anymore.”

Archie Moore. “Boxing is magnificent. It’s beautiful to know. But you’ve got to marry it. And so I did. Boxing was my lover. It was my lady.”

Earnie Shavers (on knocking Larry Holmes down and near-senseless with an overhand right. Miraculously, Holmes rose from the canvas and, four rounds later, knocked Shavers out): “I was the heavyweight champion of the world. All my troubles were finally over. It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had. And it lasted for five whole seconds.”

Dan Goossen (on Michael Nunn leaving him for a new manager): “Am I hurt that he decided to leave me? Of course. It’s kind of like being married to a beautiful woman. Guys are going to whistle at her, try to pick her up. It’s up to her to do the right thing and come home. Same thing with Michael. People are going to constantly hit on him. This time, he didn’t come home.”

* * *

Women’s boxing peaked with Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden on April 30, 2022. It was a superb fight between two skilled fighters in an atmosphere that was electric. In Malissa Smith’s words, that night “set the stage for a new era of elite female boxing” and “legitimized” women’s boxing.

Six months later, Claressa Shields and Savannah Marshall squared off at the O2 Arena in London with Mikaela Mayer vs. Alycia Baumgardner on the undercard. Like Taylor-Serrano, the fights in London were a platform for women’s boxing to build on.

Smith’s new book – The Promise of Women’s Boxing (Rowman & Littlefield) – focuses on women’s boxing from the 2012 Olympics to date and is a sequel to her first book – A History of Women’s Boxing (published a decade ago).

Smith has put a huge amount of research into her work. But she recites the details of fight after fight after fight. After a while, the fights tend to blur together and reading about them feels like reading a 224-page encyclopedia article.

Also, when Smith’s writing isn’t too dry, it tends toward hyperbole. Words like “great” and “spectacular” are overused . . . Amanda Serrano is a very good boxer. She is not “one of the hardest-hitting fighters in boxing, male or female.” (Amanda’s last seven opponents have gone the distance against her) . . . And as good a fight as Taylor-Serrano was, it was not “one of the greatest boxing matches in the history of the sport.”

Here, the thoughts of promoter Lou DiBella are instructive. As recounted by Smith, DiBella cautions that fans should “stop comparing women’s boxing contests to men’s and start appreciating them on their own terms.”

* * *

Every fighter has a story. And every fighter’s story is interesting. But some fighters’ stories are more interesting and more artfully told than others.

Land of Hope and Glory by Maurice Hope with Ron Shillingford (Pitch Publishing) has some worthwhile moments but falls short of the mark.

Hope (30-4-1, 24 KOs, 2 KOs by) fought professionally from 1973 through 1982. The high point of his career came in 1979 when he stopped Italian-born Rocky Mattioli in San Remo to claim the WBC 154-pound title. Two years later, he lost his belt to Wilfred Benitez.

The loss to Benitez ended with a frightening highlight-reel knockout that left Hope unconscious on the canvas for an extended period of time. In an ugly coda, when Wilfred was told that Maurice had lost two teeth in the battle, Wilfred responded, “He can put the teeth under his pillow.”

There are some entertaining passages in Land of Hope and Glory. Recounting the prelude to his championship-winning fight against Mattioli, Hope recalls, “Walking to the ring was frightening. Shady figures in the crowd in dark suits and sunglasses were walking around with hands on their breast pockets. Whether there was just a handkerchief there or a loaded gun, the impact had the desired effect – intimidation. I pretended not to see them but it was hard to stay focused and calm. Gangsters with bandages around their hands seemed to be everywhere. It seemed like the Mafia had taken over the whole venue.”

There are also poignant recountings of the death of Hope’s son in a car accident and Maurice visiting a horribly disabled Wilfred Benitez in Puerto Rico long after Wilfred had descended into a hellish dementia.

But sixty pages pass before Land of Hope and Glory gets to a boxing gym. Hope doesn’t turn pro until page 93. And overall, the treatment of boxing is superficial. The book doesn’t explain with nuance or in depth what’s involved in being a fighter or what the business of boxing is about.

There are too many factual errors. For example, Las Vegas is described as being “in the middle of the Arizona desert.” And there’s some fuzzy math. Hope complains about an 80-79 decision that he lost to Mickey Flynn, writing, “The 80-79 decision meant Flynn won two rounds and the other six were draws.” That leads to two thoughts; (1) It’s more likely that Flynn won one round with seven rounds being called even; and (2) Since Maurice was the A-side fighter in that bout and Flynn had thirteen losses on his record, one might speculate that referee Benny Caplan (who was the sole judge) leaned over backward in Maurice’s favor and marked his scorecard “10-10” for rounds that Flynn should have won.

To his credit, Hope got out of boxing at the right time. After losing to Benitez and in his next fight to Luigi Minchillo, he retired from the ring at age thirty. He understood the risks of the trade he had chosen and now writes, “In my mind, boxing is the hardest sport out there. Once you get in the ring, you know your head’s going to hurt.”

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – MY MOTHER and me – is a memoir available at Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/My-Mother-Me-Thomas-Hauser/dp/1955836191/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5C0TEN4M9ZAH&keywords=thomas+hauser&qid=1707662513&sprefix=thomas+hauser%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1

In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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Book Review

Thomas Hauser’s Literary Notes: Dave Kindred and Robert Seltzer

Published

6 months ago

May 12, 2024

Thomas Hauser

Midway through reading Dave Kindred’s most recent book – My Home Team (published by Public Affairs) – I said to myself, “Kindred is such a good writer.”

Kindred, now 83 years old, has won virtually every sports journalism award worth winning. My Home Team is a memoir that weaves together three love stories – Kindred and Cheryl Liesman (his high school sweetheart and wife for more than fifty years) . . . Kindred and sports journalism . . . And late in life, Kindred’s immersion in a high school girls basketball team (the Lady Potters of Morton, Illinois).

The book is divided into two parts. The first (“Act One) details Dave’s career as a sports journalist and his personal life from early childhood through his retirement from big-time journalism. “Act Two” deals with the Lady Potters and the tragic stroke that ravaged Cheryl, leaving her bedridden and unable to control her environment or speak more than a few words in her final years. A short coda puts the final pieces in place.

Kindred wrote more than six thousand columns during his years at the Louisville Courier-Journal, Washington Post, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As his reputation grew, he covered virtually every major sporting event in the way he chose to cover it.

“Newspapers were never better nor did they matter more than in those days when they were rich with cash and ambition,” Dave writes. “Before the Internet, before Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, newspapers were important in ways that social media could never be – as trusted messengers of the day’s news.”

“I was not a fan of a team, a coach, a player,” Kindred continues. “That relationship could only end badly. I was a fan of reporting and writing. Journalists root for stories. Whatever happens, good or bad, just make it something we can write. Sometimes we get lucky and the best story is the one we want to write.”

I met Kindred in 1989 when I was researching a biography of Muhammad Ali. Dave had just written a remarkable piece of investigative journalism about a lawyer named Richard Hirschfeld who was exploiting Ali and imitating Muhammad’s voice in telephone calls to members of Congress. It was a notable example of the ways in which Ali was being used by hustlers to advance their own economic interests. Kindred pieced the story together brilliantly. In later years, I got to know him better as a writer and a person.

Dave was with the young Ali in Louisville when he was king of the world, the old Ali in Las Vegas when he was brutalized by Larry Holmes, and each incarnation of Ali in between. He wrote that Ali in his prime was “as near to living flame as a man can get” and added thoughts like:

* “You could spend twenty years studying Ali and still not know what he is or who he is. He’s a wise man and he’s a child. I’ve never seen anyone who was so giving and, at the same time, so self-centered. He’s either the most complex guy that I’ve ever been around or the most simple. And I still can’t figure out which it is. We were sure who Ali was only when he danced before us in the dazzle of the ring lights. Then he could hide nothing.”

* “I never thought of Ali as a saint. He was a rogue and a rebel, a guy with good qualities and flaws who stood for something. He was right on some things and wrong on others, but the challenge was always there.”

* “Rainbows are born of thunderstorms. Muhammad Ali is both.”

In 2010, when Kindred’s sportswriting days on the national stage came to an end, he and Cheryl moved back to their roots in rural Illinois. They bought a house on a big plot of land and envisioned a comfortable old age surrounded by family and friends.

Then, in December 2010, Dave went to a Lady Potters basketball game to see the daughter of friends play.

Three years earlier, Kindred recalls, “Carly Jean Crocker [had been] thirteen years old, blonde and blue-eyed, tall and trim in blue jeans, stylish in a denim jacket and red canvas sneakers.”

This was long before Caitlin Clark set the basketball world ablaze.

A neighbor had asked, “Carly, are you going to be a cheerleader?”

“No,” Carly answered, “I’m going to be the one you cheer for.”

Now Carly was on the Lady Potters roster.

“I climbed three rows up at the Morton High School Gym,” Kindred recounts. “The game was the first sporting event for which I ever bought a ticket. Though I resisted saying the word, friends counted me as, quote, retired. With newspapers and magazines dying in the Digital Age, there was also the unhappy circumstance of nobody looking to coax geezers out of retirement. Without a press credential for the first time since I was seventeen, I was an official spectator.”

Before long, Dave was hooked. He began writing about the Lady Potters for the team website and Facebook. “I had no agenda,” he recalls. “It got me out of the house. It made me pay attention to something other than growing old.”

His pay?

Before each outing, the team gave him a box of Milk Duds to eat in the stands during the game.

“But I like Milk Duds,” Kindred notes.

Then tragedy struck.

Cheryl was the only girlfriend Dave ever had. Her place in his heart was sealed at their high school senior prom when the awkward young man confessed, “I’m a very bad dancer.”

“She took my hand and squeezed it,” Dave told me decades later. “And then she said, ‘Bad dancing is better than no dancing.'”

On December 6, 2015, Dave and Cheryl were at the movies. She was eating popcorn when a massive stroke hit.

“It’s like a bomb exploded in her brain,” one of her doctors said.

For the next five years, Cheryl lay in bed in a nursing facility – in Kindred’s words, “her spirit gone, her body smaller and smaller, life disappearing.” He made the 36-mile round-trip from their home to her bedside more than a thousand times.

“Some days, I don’t even think she knows who I am,” Dave told me after one of his visits. “But I hold her hand and talk to her. I hope it comforts her. And it makes me feel better to be there.”

Cheryl died on June 24, 2021.

Meanwhile, the Lady Potters had become a very good basketball team. During one five-year stretch, they won 164 games and lost only 13, leading Kindred to refer to them as “the Golden State Warriors, only with ponytails.” In 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019, they won the Section 3A Illinois State Championship.

“Basketball is beautiful when people move the ball quickly and surely to places where it can be put in the basket easily,” Kindred writes in My Home Team as he looks back on his journey. “It is beautiful, too, when people play defense as if it is the most fun a teenage girl can have. A couple of years in, I understood my real reason for writing about the Lady Potters. No professional athlete ever introduced me to his parents or asked about my family’s well being. Slowly, I understood that I cared about the Lady Potters games in ways I had not cared about all those that came before. We met good people and shared good times. I loved the little gyms, loved the games. [And] writing was my life. Writing anything gave me a reason to stay alive.”

Kindred’s writing is as smooth as silk with some sharp barbs woven into the fabric. In that vein, I’ll close this review with an anecdote from My Home Team that Dave shares in chronicling his days as a national journalist.

Jenny Keller (a reporter for the New York Daily News) was assigned to cover the New York Jets and found herself in the team locker room confronted by a huge defensive lineman who held his male organ up for inspection and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

“Looks like a penis,” Jenny answered. “Only smaller.”

—

Ted Williams – arguably the greatest hitter of all time – had a Mexican-American mother. But he rarely talked about that part of his heritage. After retiring from baseball, Williams said of growing up in San Diego, “If I had my mother’s name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.”

As Williams’s mythic career was winding down, a 17-year-old named Ritchie Valens from California’s San Fernando Valley recorded a love song called Donna – one of the most popular love songs of its time. One year later, his life was cut short when he died in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson. Valens’s real name was Richard Valenzuela. But he’d been told to anglicize it so his records would be more saleable to mainstream America.

This is the world that Robert Seltzer was thrown into at age ten when he moved with his parents from El Paso to Bakersfield, California. His mother was a Mexican woman from Chihuahua. His father was a “gringo,” originally from Cleveland, who preferred Mexican culture to his own and took the pen name “Amado Muro” for much of his writing.

Amado Muro and Me recounts Seltzer’s first year in Bakersfield when he experienced racism for the first time and was mercilessly picked on as the only Mexican-American in his fifth-grade class. Through the prism of that year, he explores his relationship with his father, wrestles with his own self-identity, and recreates the multi-cultural world that he came from.

Seltzer is known to boxing fans as a past recipient of the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism. There’s not much boxing in this book. But it’s a wonderful read with a particularly reprehensible bully. And it reinforces the view that families are families regardless of race, religion, or national origin.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – MY MOTHER and me – is an intensely personal memoir available at Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/My-Mother-Me-Thomas-Hauser/dp/1955836191/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5C0TEN4M9ZAH&keywords=thomas+hauser&qid=1707662513&sprefix=thomas+hauser%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1

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