Women in the ring
A fatal attraction?
By Linda Rutherford
Guyana Chronicle
June 13, 2004
MUHAMMAD Ali is now but a shadow of his former ebullient self at just 62, and Sugar Ray Leonard nearly lost his sight in one eye, all because of injuries they both sustained to the head over time during their long and illustrious careers in the ring.
And, never mind the strident calls in some quarters to ban the sport entirely because of the sheer brutality of it and the high incidence of injury leading to permanent brain damage, even death, among its practitioners. Yet still professional boxing is as glamorous and awe-inspiring as it was more than a century ago when the first set of rules came into force, and is still one of the most highly-paid sports as evidenced by the opulent lifestyles led by many of the more famous pugilists.
What has been cause for concern over the years, however, is the growing number of women who seem attracted to the sport, particularly of late, in spite of the gore; the derision; and the many efforts by promoters to frustrate them at every turn from reaching their true potential.
A classic example of what some of the older hands had to endure before they turned pro, according to the American, Kathy Rivers, whom the Sunday Chronicle caught up with a few Fridays ago, was former World Boxing and Kickboxing champion, Bonnie Canino’s uphill struggle to get where she is today.
“She had it tougher than I did, because when I came up, they were starting to readily accept women on boxing cards. She came up with having to pretty much take whatever fights she could get, regardless of who her opponent was. Even if they were 50 pounds heavier than her, she had to fight,” said Rivers of her mentor.
In a solidarity message, penned in September 2000, to fellow women boxers, Canino wrote: “When I first got started 20 years ago, no-one took me serious about wanting to box, and boxing coaches at clubs wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
Forced to turn instead to karate and kickboxing, Canino, who retired from the ring in October 1999 and now devotes her time to training aspiring boxers, said it was through the latter medium that she was eventually able to get into the ring, which is where she’d always wanted to be.
“Kickboxing allowed us to get into the ring and compete at a time when boxing was still barred to us. I could get mainline kickboxing fights then, but I was still doing gym fights in boxing because the doors were closed to us,” she is quoted as saying in another article.
Asked about the kinds of comments she has had directed at her in the seven to eight years she has been around the game, Rivers said the most common was: “You’re too pretty to be a boxer.” And this was because “a lot of men didn’t feel that women should be in the ring,” she said. “But, again, it’s just that we have to prove ourselves as women; in everything that we do, we have to do it twice as hard.”
It’s a sentiment that strikes a chord with First Lady, Varshnie Jagdeo who feels that women are just as good as men, if not better, at anything they put their minds to.
“I am fully in favour of women in not only boxing but in any sport in which they choose to compete. I see no difference between men and women when it comes to sport, and if an individual has the discipline, and the heart to go into such a sport, I think that sex is irrelevant,” she said two Saturdays ago in response to the question of what she thought about women being involved in boxing.
As to why she chose boxing above all the other more moderate sports, Rivers, who turns 37 in October, said she hasn’t a clue.
“I don’t know what drives me to be in that sport; it’s just women in sports in general. It’s just a sport….like basketball; football; hockey or whatever. Guess, I’m just good at it,” she said.
We put the same question to her protagonist in the historic ‘Clash in the Park’ bout of on May 29, our own ‘Stealth Bomber’, as Gwendolyn O’Neil is known in local boxing circles, and her response was: “Because I like the game. I like fighting; I like being rough.”
Like Canino, she too was into martial arts before she turned to pro boxing. She was introduced to the sport by her husband, she said late last month while a guest on the ‘At Home With Roger’ show on HBTV Channel Nine.
Hailed from the Barima River in the North West District, ‘Gwen’ said she owes her toughness in the ring to the long hours spent on her parents’ farm from a very early age.
“As a small child, ah grow up farming; so ah ‘custom to hard wuk,” she told the Sunday Chronicle after the HBTV show.
She had also had to fight her way through school, so as not to be taken advantage of.
“As a child going to school,” she said, “I use to tek beat from dem big boys than m’self. An one day I seh hear, dem boys ain’t beatin’ me no mo’. I gon beat dem.”
She said that many times when the fight broke out, by the time the teacher arrived to part it, it was all over.
“I done knock dem out lang time,” she said.
The penultimate of 21 children, among them two sets of twins, of which she is one, she herself has five kids of her own, the eldest of whom is 12. Her mother is still alive and came down from the ‘North-West’ to watch her fight for the first time. Her father, who was a St. Lucian, she said, died when she was around five. This is the fifth year since she has been in the ring.
The decision to turn pro, she said, was inspired by a fight she saw on television. “One day I lie down pon me bed an see two woman fightin’. An I tu’n an tell meh husban’: Eon, they can’ beat me; I goin’ an box.” He not only agreed, she said, but also promised to give her his full support.
Asked whether the thought of being seriously injured ever crossed her mind, she replied in the negative saying that while there was a strong possibility, she is always on her guard.
Rivers, on the other hand, was more practical in her response.
“You tend to sustain more injuries in training,” she said, “as opposed to the fight itself. But it’s the basic injuries that you get playing any sport…”
As to the whereabouts in the body that is the most vulnerable during a fight, she said: “My mind! Because if you’re not focused, you’re not gonna win. So, it’s all mental, man; comes down to all about attitude, baby.”
For the state of women’s boxing in Guyana today, we turned to Secretary of the Guyana Boxing Board of Control, Mr. Trevor Arno, who said that the prospect has never been better.
“Women’s boxing has brought life once again to boxing in Guyana; it is the women that have brought back out the spectators; the supporters and sponsors back to boxing again,” he said.
For some reason or the other, he said, they have been able to gain more attention; more attraction; even more so than the males have in recent times.
“We find that when people enquire about fight cards, the focus is on the women. And for some reason or the other, within recent times, their fights have been more exciting, too, than those of the males,” he said, as was the case with the recent bout between Guyana’s Pamela London and Crystal Lessy of Trinidad and Tobago.
“That was the best fight for the night,” he said, adding: “To put it in a nutshell, women (are) the boxing pinnacle in Guyana today.”