15-Round Fights and a Good Right Hand: Jackie Holley’s Fleeting 1984 Title Reign

 

Jackie Holley had just done the improbable and KO’d Sue ‘KO’ Carlson to win the IWBA world lightweight title. Improbable to some, maybe. But not to Holley’s supporters. And certainly not to her.

Both hands thrown in the air, Holley was hoisted onto the shoulders of Jim Waldrop, her trainer and manager, and Ricky Rogers, a rookie featherweight who served as Jackie’s cornerman and sparring partner. A few moments after her feet touched back onto the canvas, the triumphant Floridian grabbed hold of the ring announcer’s microphone to address the hometown crowd assembled inside the Municipal Auditorium for her “Yo, Adrian, I did it!” moment. “I’ve been working for this for four years,” Holley said once she gained her composure. “I have brought a world championship to Pensacola!”  

It would be another nine years before Pensacola produced another world boxing champion—none other than future pound-for-pound hall of famer Roy Jones Jr., who, at the time Jackie Holley won her title, had just dashed out of the gate for what would be an ultimately successful run at the 1984 Junior Olympics in the 119-pound division. Jones was born and raised in Pensacola whereas Holley was a recent transplant from Detroit—the stomping ground of Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Thomas Hearns to name a few—where she was first introduced to the rudiments of fighting thanks to regular tussles with her siblings.

“You know how brothers and sisters are. I’ve got seven brothers and only two are younger,” said Jackie. “We used to fight a lot, usually Friday nights. But it wasn’t anything serious. In fact, I’ve maybe had two fights in junior high school and that’s it…until I got into the martial arts.” Holley was a natural when it came to athletics and you would be hard pressed to think of a sport she wasn’t good at. Basketball, softball, volleyball, touch football, tennis, racquetball, and field hockey. Jackie excelled at them all before turning her attention to more rough and tumble pastimes like karate and kickboxing after relocating to Pensacola.

“I love sports and I’ve always wanted to do something to make a name for myself in sports,” said Holley. “Just like when I was a little girl and I had it in my mind that I wanted to grow up and be a policewoman.” Graduating from the police academy near the top of her class, Jackie patrolled the mean streets of Detroit and performed a wide array of law enforcement duties. “Scout car, surveillance, accident prevention, even a little narcotics,” Holley said, listing her various responsibilities. Over time, both the job and the city wore her down and Jackie sought a change of scenery to give her a new lease on life.

“It was getting pretty rough in Detroit in 1980 with the unemployment so high and I was 160 pounds of pure nerve-endings. No, I don’t miss it. The work was not gratifying at all,” she said retrospectively. “When I was growing up, I thought Detroit was the best thing going. Motown, the Motor City, clubs, plenty to do, sports. But I wouldn’t go back to live. Why put your children through that aggravation?”

Within a year of moving to Pensacola, Holley had earned a brown belt in Taekwondo and placed first in four regional tournaments, winning half of her ten individual contests and getting disqualified on technicalities in the other five. “I feel like I got a bad deal in those other five fights. They said I hit too hard,” Holley griped. “But if those women can’t take the blows then they shouldn’t be out there. I mean, whenever you are fighting, whether it’s in competition or not, you should still perform your best.”

Despite her daily nine-to-ten-hour training regimen, which consisted of martial arts practice, running three miles, skipping rope, and intense stretching exercises, Jackie somehow made time to teach beginner and advanced classes at the Motley Karate School. She landed a job as a security officer at the Pensacola Naval Air Station while spending three years pursuing a rematch with kickboxing rival and legendary Hollywood stuntwoman in the making Cheryl Wheeler, the two having battled to an attention-getting majority draw three years earlier. “She has more to lose than I do,” said Holley. “I have nothing to lose, and I feel I am a better fighter than she is.”

By the end of 1983, Jackie had transitioned to boxing and was referred to IWBA founder and promoter Vern Stevenson by Pensacola matchmaker Tommy Hatcher as a potential challenger for the lightweight championship. They hammered out an agreement whereby Holley would be guaranteed a shot at the title in her hometown if she could win an elimination bout against Stevenson’s protégé, Lanay Browning. That fight would also occur in Pensacola, on December 15, 1983 at the Municipal Auditorium.

“I hate the term lady boxer,” said Browning, a corrections officer and the reigning Canadian lightweight champion, who thus far had been unable to fight in her home province of Ontario where women were banned from the prize ring, although the wheels were in motion to overturn the ruling. “I’m a boxer, period. I’m out there hitting the bag. I see myself as a boxer in the ring. Outside the ring, I’m a woman.” Competing since the age of 13, Browning welcomed the physical challenges that boxing presented but also the opportunity to dispel sexist misconceptions. “Most of them come expecting to see mud wrestling, but if you get two top women boxers together, it’s even better than watching the men,” she theorized. “Women are more graceful, have more style, and use their heads a lot more than men do. Most of the men are always looking for that one big punch to knock someone out. We have to dance and use our combinations to set up punches. It is more scientific.”

It routinely took time for Browning to get her motor running after the opening bell as it was and Holley, who was comfortable fighting with either foot out front, made it an even tougher uphill climb for the Canadian by coming out of her corner in a southpaw stance. “I really hadn’t expected it,” Browning later admitted. She spent the first four rounds pawing at Holley with a constant but noncommittal jab and following it up with the occasional looping left hand with the hope of eventually closing the distance where she was known to do her best work. Holley, meanwhile, was allowed to familiarize herself with Browning’s rhythm, get her own timing down, and wait for the opportune time to pounce.

That opening presented itself in the fifth round. Holley feinted with her right hand and unleashed a left that caught Browning with her guard down and knocked her through the ropes. “That one, I felt like she kind of ran into it,” Jackie said after the fight. “I knew she was an inside fighter, but when we got inside I just sort of put my combinations together and went for it.”

Browning climbed back into the ring and beat the count, later claiming to have been more surprised than hurt or even stunned. Indeed, she pursued Holley around the ring with a sense of urgency in the sixth round but was kept at arm’s length by Jackie’s jab and deft footwork. Holley began the seventh by connecting with two consecutive head shots and retreating out of harm’s way before concentrating her attack on Browning’s body. Backing her opponent into the ropes with a left/right combination, Holley advanced to deliver what turned out to be the coup de grace, a trio of blows to the midsection that forced Browning to her knees, doubled over with her forehead pressed against the canvas, cradling her abdomen in obvious physical distress. Browning struggled to her feet at the count of nine but was in no condition to return to combat, remaining on her stool at the commencement of round eight which gave Jackie Holley the victory by technical knockout. “She caught me with three really good punches almost consecutively to the belly,” Browning said back in the locker room. “The last one was a good right hand.”           

(Browning Doubled Over on Canvas From Holley Body Shot)

Holley’s good right hand would be the decision-maker in her next fight too. February 17, 1984 was the date circled on the calendar to mark the IWBA world lightweight championship showdown between Holley and Sue ‘KO’ Carlson, a mere two months off from Jackie’s win over Browning in their title eliminator. Not only that, but it was announced that the fight would be a 15-rounder. This was uncommon ground for women’s boxing, a trail that had been freshly blazed a little more than three and a half years prior when Carlson knocked out Tammy Jensen in the third of fifteen scheduled rounds in September 1981 in defense of her WWBA super-lightweight title.

The second and most recent occurrence was on October 21, 1983 when Darlina Valdez outpointed Holly McDaniel over an unprecedented fifteen 3-minute rounds to win the IWBA super-bantamweight title. In fact, some newspaper accounts leading up to the Jackie Holley/Lanay Browning title eliminator reported erroneously that they were vying for the chance to square off against Valdez.            

Sue Carlson, now the top-ranked IWBA contender, had previously held the WWBA version of the 135-pound world championship before losing it to Lady Tyger in March 1979 and was looking to reestablish her dominance in the division she reigned over not long ago by beating the #2-rated Jackie Holley in her own backyard. The 26-year-old Carlson was born in Brainerd, Minnesota (“Home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox,” as Marge Gunderson reminds us—and a very nervous Jerry Lundergaard—in Fargo) and was brought up with seven siblings just like Jackie Holley. An aspiring writer, Sue enrolled at the University of Minnesota to major in journalism and helped pay her tuition by waiting tables at a nearby diner where she met former Air Force heavyweight champion Bill Paul, who was putting together a women’s boxing program at the University. It took some persistence on Paul’s part, but he managed to convince Sue to make the switch from writer to fighter. Carlson was still in the food service industry, having worked her way up to chef in a Minneapolis restaurant, and was hopeful that she could cook up something special in Pensacola on February 17.

“I’m thirsty,” said ‘KO’ Carlson ahead of her matchup against Jackie Holley. “I want my title back and I’m in the best physical condition in four years. I’d say the fight will go ten (rounds) at the most. I’ve just got this feeling that it won’t go the distance,” she predicted in accordance with her ring moniker. She was right too. Just not the way she envisioned it. “I’m in the best shape of my life. I have been going 15 rounds a day, five days a week against some strong male sparring partners. My agent knows about her (Holley) and he thinks it will be a darn good fight. I know she likes to switch back and forth during a fight, going from orthodox to southpaw. I don’t think that will bother me though.”  

Jackie Holley got to size up Carlson at the weigh-in, assessing, “I was expecting somebody bigger. I respect the fact she’s had nine knockouts. I know she has power in her left hand. But I too have the ability to knock out somebody. But I won’t be looking for it,” she continued. “If the combinations are right then maybe it will happen. I know I can take a punch so she’ll have to have a lulu to stop me.”

With the fight starting out at a tentative pace over the first two rounds, Carlson didn’t test Holley’s chin with anything significant and Jackie was likewise content to feel her opponent out with a series of range finding jabs. Fifteen rounds, after all, was a long way to go. A marathon, not a sprint, as they say. No need to force the issue and get reckless or burn out too fast. Holley was the first to take the initiative, connecting with a one/two at the beginning of the third round that rattled Carlson, even if only momentarily. That was all Holley needed, and she settled into a comfort zone after taking the measure of the former world champion and finding the results favorable. Carlson applied a little more pressure in round four, landing a few powerful lefts during toe to toe exchanges. Holley shook them off with relative ease and ended the fourth with a straight right that caused Carlson to examine the arena lights overhead for a split second as her head snapped back with the force of the blow.

“After that fourth round I knew she was kind of hurt,” said Holley when all was said and done. “I noticed she seemed to be getting tired and had started breathing through her mouth.” Holley pressed the advantage in round five and deposited Carlson onto the canvas for a nine count with another right hand. Despite sensing the end was near, Holley had the presence of mind not to throw caution to the wind, especially against a renowned puncher. “She was like a hurt animal backed into a corner,” Holley said later. “I got the feeling she was telling me, ‘C’mon, what I got left I got to put on you now.’ So I didn’t want to wade in there and get hit with something.”

That said, Holley also knew that allowing Carlson time to recover was not a wise move either and came out swinging in the opening moments of the sixth. She put Carlson on the backfoot with a hailstorm of combinations and stalked her wounded prey across the ring. Carlson planted her feet and unleashed a Hail Mary left hook intended for her pursuer. Holley saw it coming from a mile away, effortlessly ducked the blow, and finished off Carlson with a lead left followed by her good right hand. “I’d noticed that earlier when she threw that punch. It was slow and, well, almost a roundhouse punch,” the new world champion told the press in her locker room. “I just filed it away for the next time.”

Carlson was magnanimous in defeat, confessing, “I got hit good a few times. She was very quick and she’s very good. She deserves the title.”

With her manager’s blessing, Jackie Holley planned to take a well-deserved month off before entering into preparation for her first title defense. “I’ve waited four years for this,” she said. “I’m going to enjoy it and then we’ll take ‘em one at a time.” Little did Holley know her championship reign would amount to one and done. One half of a set of prizefighting identical twins, who went by the nickname “Little Dempsey” due to her incessant pressure-cooker style of boxing, would make sure of that.

Three years after her sister Cora had left Florida and taken up residence in Los Angeles, where she quickly became a known quantity on the flourishing women’s boxing scene, Dora Webber followed her twin out west and into the prize ring. Dora put an exclamation point on her 1983 pro debut by scoring a second-round TKO over former world champion Toni Lear Rodriguez, who Cora had gone the distance with four years earlier. Talk about sibling rivalry.

Dora Webber had only one gear, and that was grinding forward at breakneck speed. Jackie Holley would find that out the hard way. Holley put her title on the line against the fourth-ranked Webber on February 24, 1984 in her third consecutive fight at the Pensacola Municipal Auditorium. Like her championship-winning effort against Sue Carlson six months before, Holley’s maiden defense was also scheduled for fifteen rounds. Only this time, Jackie Holley and Dora Webber would both cross the finish line. An endurance test. A Darwinian gut check. The ultimate survival of the fittest.   

“I felt I was in control from the beginning,” Webber said after her dominant performance. From the first bell to the last, she left little doubt at any point about the fact that the IWBA world lightweight title would change hands yet again when the decision was announced. “I was worried about getting tired, so I picked my shots. I wanted to relax. I didn’t want to run out of gas,” said Webber. “I just wanted to take it to her. I didn’t want to knock her out because of her experience. I kept my hands up.”

Holley’s plan to start the fight by boxing from the outside behind her jab was eradicated immediately by Webber’s stifling offense, a barrage of left hooks and overhand rights that forced the defending champion to improvise adapt or perish tactics from the get-go. Late in the second round, Holley connected with her good right hand but it just wasn’t good enough on that night. Dora walked right through it and kept coming straight ahead like a monster from one of those slasher flicks.

“I was slipping her punches and hitting her with some good body punches,” said Webber. “No one can take my cannon body shots.” To Holley’s credit, she didn’t wither under the onslaught. In fact, she countered with well-timed combinations multiple times throughout the fight. But Webber refused to tire or relent. If anything, her stamina seemed to improve as the contest wore on.

“She never hurt me,” Holley insisted, protesting that Webber was guilty of holding and hitting while in the referee’s blind spot. “It may have looked like she did. She gave me some good body shots but they weren’t clean.” Stuck in neutral, perpetually fighting with her back to the ropes, there wasn’t a whole lot Jackie could do except finish the fight on her feet and relinquish her title with her dignity intact. Both of which she did. Like a true champion. A short-term champion, yes. But a champion nevertheless. A world champion from Pensacola with a good right hand.          

 

Sources:

Sharon Moultry. On Her Way to the Top (Pensacola News, July 15, 1981)

Jeff Hand. Thrilla in Pensacola Bout Promises Big Action (Pensacola News, June 16, 1983)

Women Highlight Armory Boxing Card (Pensacola News-Journal, December 4, 1983)

Jeff Hand. Lanay Browning Breaks Boxers Mold (Pensacola News, December 14, 1983)

Jeff Hand. Browning Pales in Holley Attack (Pensacola News, December 16, 1983)

Pensacola Woman Eyes Boxing Title (Pensacola News-Journal, February 12, 1984)

Jeff Hand. Jack od All Trades Holley Fighting for More Than Survival Friday Night (Pensacola News, February 15, 1984)

Junior Ingram. Women Eye Ring Crown (Pensacola News-Journal, February 17, 1984)

Jeff Hand. Holley, Carlson Crave Victory (Pensacola News, February 17, 1984)

Junior Ingram. Pensacola’s Holley Wins World Boxing Championship (Pensacola News-Journal, February 18, 1984)

Jeff Hand. Holley Wears the Crown (Pensacola News, February 20, 1984)

David Hutchinson. Webber Stops Holley, Wins IWBA Crown (Pensacola News-Journal, August 25, 1984)

Sue Fox. Pioneer Female Boxer: Sue “KO” Carlson (WBAN Historical Database)

Heather 'The Heat' Hardy: Fighting For More Than Just Titles

 Originally published July 17, 2015

(The writer and the fighter. Me with Heather Hardy, July 2015)

 “There is no land but the land.                                                                                                                      There is no sea but the sea.                                                                                                                          There is no keeper but the key.                                                                                                                  Except for one who seizes possibilities.”

—Patti Smith (“Land”)

Unchallenged, the sun holds dominion over a cloudless July Saturday in Brooklyn.

Couples in the DUMBO section (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) spend a leisurely afternoon having a light lunch and sipping iced beverages inside an air-conditioned café, perhaps perusing the titles on the shelves of the P.S. Bookstore, or strolling hand in hand along the pedestrian walkway of the majestic Brooklyn Bridge hovering overhead.

But not Heather Hardy and Devon Cormack. On the second floor at 77 Front Street, suspended between the less populated sidewalks below and the more romantic bridge above, resides historic Gleason’s Gym where Heather rains blows upon a blue orb-shaped heavy bag while Devon, her trainer and partner, offers instruction to tighten up the loop of her overhand rights which follow left hooks that appear to be directed with decidedly bad intentions to where an opponent’s ribcage would be.

Undefeated Heather Hardy (current UBF and WBC International super-bantamweight champion, 13-0 with 1 NC) is gearing up for what I just learned is an August 1st title defense, a rematch with Renata Domsodi (to scour her record of that no contest) at the Barclays Center, their first meeting ending prematurely due to an eye injury sustained by Domsodi as a result of an accidental head butt. This will be Heather’s fourth appearance at the Brooklyn arena, her last being a split decision victory over Noemi Bosques a mere seven weeks ago on the undercard of the nationally televised Amir Khan/Chris Algieri Premier Boxing Champions main event. It goes without saying, unfortunately, that her fight was not part of the network broadcast.

“One more round,” Devon tells me, and I am content to stand back at a respectful distance and watch Heather hammer home punishing combinations for two more minutes, grunting with the blunt force of her powerful exertion as her hair comes a little more undone from her ponytail following each punch.

After Devon removes her gloves, she greets me with a smile and shake of the hand and we all make our way to the office they share to talk awhile. I respectfully ask if she would like a few minutes to cool down before we begin. Completely poised, if a little breathless, she replies, “No, I’m cool.” Indeed she is. Especially taking into consideration the fact that her fistic nickname is ‘The Heat.’

Relaxing into an oversized armchair, Heather can’t help but beam about her recent trip to upstate Canastota, New York for the 2015 International Boxing Hall of Fame induction weekend, the culmination of which was the enshrinement of Riddick Bowe, Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini, Naseem Hamed, Yoko Gushiken, Jim Lampley, Nigel Collins, Steve Smoger, and Rafael Mendoza. The highlight for Hardy, however, was being seated next to Micky Ward at Saturday night’s Banquet of Champions in Syracuse. “We really got to connect and talk and it was so awesome. I called home and was like, ‘Dad, guess who I’m having dinner with?!’”

Initially nervous and somewhat starstruck, she overcame her reticence thanks to the attention and appreciation exhibited by her pugilistic peers. “I didn’t feel like I belonged there at first but, by the time I left, I really did. I was really shy in the beginning, but all the guys really made me feel at home. I guess it’s kind of like being at the gym,” she says of Gleason’s, which only began admitting women in 1983 once then-owner Ira Becker became convinced that their money was every bit as good as a man’s. Nowadays, nearly 200 females are dues-paying, card-carrying members. “It was really intense, really intimidating when I first came in, but now I’m like everybody’s little sister.”

The walls surrounding the glass enclosure that serves as a base of operations for current owner Bruce Silverglade are covered in hundreds of photos featuring the boxers who have passed through its doors, its own hall of fame worthy of any other. Jake LaMotta, Alexis Arguello, Aaron Pryor, Sandy Saddler, Emile Griffith, Carmen Basilio, Dwight Qawi, Arturo Gatti, Gerry Cooney, Mike Tyson. Even Heather’s favorite, ‘Irish’ Micky Ward.

First opened at 149th and 3rd in the Bronx in 1937, Gleason’s moved to mid-town Manhattan in 1974, only to relocate 10 years later to Brooklyn, its third home in its third borough. Like the very gym in which she trains, displacement and resilience are conditions that Heather Hardy also knows a thing or two about.

“It’s hard to think of there being small towns in Brooklyn, but in Gerritsen Beach there’s one way in and one way out,” Hardy says of the tight-knit Irish-Catholic community that she has called home since her youth. “You spit on the street and you hit two of your cousins.” Proud as she is of her roots, Heather is contemplating a change of address for the betterment of her daughter Annie, the origins of which can be traced back to a sexual assault experienced by Hardy at the age of twelve.

“It was someone the whole family knew, and it was kind of like something you don’t talk about because we go to church with his mother or our neighbors always have their family over. What I’m finding out now, why I’m trying to get my daughter out of there, is it’s really common in my neighborhood. It’s really common because people know they can get away with it, and you wind up with a lot of lower working-class younger kids getting involved in the wrong kinds of things and the older kids are taking advantage.”

Caring for her brother and sister while their parents—both with two jobs to support the family—worked virtually around the clock, she admits to having felt like “a winning loser,” an emotional black cloud the shadow of which she could not seem to outrun for years despite her best efforts. “No matter how hard you fight, I couldn’t come out on top and I kind of went into my adulthood like that, my marriage and struggling to get control after I was divorced.”

Hardy’s turnaround came by virtue of her sister’s suggestion that she take kickboxing classes to reclaim her naturally slender pre-birth figure. More importantly, she rediscovered her fighting spirit and sense of self-worth, the determination that “I wasn’t ready to give up on being Heather yet.”

Chris Algieri, then a professional kickboxer, headlined Hardy’s amateur debut, foreshadowing his aforementioned recent loss to ‘King’ Khan before which Heather fought and, prior to that, her controversial win over Jackie Trivilino (in what Hardy described as a “dirty, unfulfilling fight,” albeit the first women's bout staged at the Barclays Center) that preceded Algieri’s bloody split-decision victory over then WBO junior-welterweight champion Ruslan Provodnikov. 

Having lost her first two amateur boxing matches, and with only four fights on her resume, Heather entered the 2011 Golden Gloves. She made it to the finals in the last class to box at Madison Square Garden, walking away with the silver pendant. “I beat a couple girls I was not supposed to beat to get there, and I beat up the girl (Sylvia Yero) so bad, but I lost.” Dissatisfied with, but not demoralized by, her consolation prize, Hardy proceeded to win seven subsequent titles including the Nationals, Regionals, and Metros en route to the 2012 Golden Gloves. Not only did she defeat Nicole Russell to win the 125-pound title, but earned the hard-won recognition as Best Female Boxer.

Less than a month away from making her professional boxing debut at New York’s Roseland Ballroom (where Heather would ultimately fight five times, her February 12, 2014 points win over Christina Fuentes being part of the last boxing card at the renowned venue), Hardy’s apartment went up in flames. On the Fourth of July of all days. “There was some ConEd problems. We got more water damage from them putting out the fire than anything else. But it was an illegal apartment, so once everything was damaged, there was no replacing anything.”

She took Annie and moved into her mom’s house, sharing the close quarters with her sister and nephew as well. “So I had the fight and then, three months later, while we’re still waiting for everything to clear for the apartment to come back,” Hardy recalls, “Sandy hit the neighborhood and my mom's house was ruined. So, it was kind of one after another. Gerritsen Beach was under about seven feet of water for maybe eight weeks where there was no power, no electricity. My daughter was living on Long Island and I was staying at the gym with clients.”

Backtracking to her pro debut, Hardy’s fight or flight instincts were put to the test a mere 40 seconds into the first round when a straight right hand courtesy of Mikayla Nebel sent her to the canvas. Asking if she had time to process what had just happened in real time, Heather responds with a laugh. “I can tell you exactly what was going through my mind. I was sitting on the floor, I stood up and looked at the ref and I was like ‘Shit.’ In eight seconds, I was thinking, ‘I sold all those tickets. All these people are here. So many people went to bat for me. I have to beat the shit out of her for every second of every round.’ And I did.”

Countless times fight fans have witnessed a boxer’s mouthpiece getting dislodged by a left cross or right hook and winding up in a reporter’s lap in press row at ringside. But how many times have you seen a female fighter’s protective breastplate get knocked out? So jarring were Heather Hardy’s body shots that it happened twice to her second opponent Unique Harris, prompting referee Shada Murdaugh to jokingly reprimand Hardy, “Hey, no more knocking that stuff out. I’ve never seen it before. I don’t want to see it again.”

Lou DiBella agreed to a three-fight provisionary contract with Heather following her next win, a four-round shutout of Ivana Coleman. “It was pretty much unspoken, knowing that I would sell tickets to my fights. Between the media I was getting at the time and the amount of people I was putting in the seats, my fan following, I became the first female that he ever signed to a long-term contract.” Hence, her proud designation as ‘The First Lady of DBE’ (DiBella Entertainment). “Our mission has since been to get me on TV, because that’s why women aren’t seen as long-term investments. The networks won’t televise female fights.”

The parade thrown the previous day just a few miles from where Heather and I now sit in honor of the victorious U.S. Women’s World Cup team notwithstanding, Hardy is pragmatic when it comes to her struggle to compete in the boys’ club of competitive sports and to survive, much less thrive, in a male dominated world.

“It brings me to tears when I sit and think about it, about how unfair it is that I’m still sitting next to a man and we have the exact same resume, only mine is better if you count ticket sales and publicity, and he’s getting four times the money I am. And once someone said—I won’t tell you who—but when I had mentioned this to someone before, earlier in my career, he said, ‘Well, I can get him on ESPN in three years. I can’t do shit with you.’ That’s really where the state of women’s boxing is. I think it needs to be part of the conversation.”

A war of words with UBF and WBA super-bantamweight champion Shelly Vincent is one dialogue Hardy is not terribly keen to participate in. “I don’t have time for that shit,” Heather scoffs. For nearly two years, Vincent has not only used the various social media platforms at her disposal to proclaim Heather “a bum and a coward” and “afraid to fight me” to anyone who will listen, but appeared ringside at the Barclays Center wearing a crown perched atop a Guy Fawkes mask (think the movie V For Vendetta, or the Occupy protestors) and taunting Hardy, who already had her hands full trying to get Jackie Trivilino to stop butting and rolling her head across her swollen eye during clinches.

“It’s just tactics for visibility, and she wants to bring attention to female boxing, give people something to talk about. So that became her hook. She didn’t really have a hook. But, you know what? She’s gotten a lot of attention for it,” Hardy concedes. “So, if I have to be the reason why, then that’s fine.”

Team Heat’s recent offer for a fight was rebuffed by the Vincent camp. “We tried to get her for the last one (May 29th), and that’s when her promoter was like, ‘Ask us in the fall’ or something. And I won’t say it, because for me it doesn’t do anything,” Heather explains. “The truth of it, the business of it, and anybody who is inside boxing knows, she has a promoter and I have a promoter. These two promoters are not going to invest a ton of money putting us on a huge show where we’re both going to get paid, because people don’t really give a fuck. We’re only signed because we sell tickets. So, he’s not going to send his cash cow to New York, Lou’s not going to send his up to Rhode Island (Vincent’s home state), and there’s nothing that benefits anyone if we do a show halfway.”

Though she is not one to engage in pointless speculation on future opponents or endeavors, Hardy’s eyes, the left brow of which is bisected by an inch-long vertical scar, a war wound earned quite possibly during the ugly brawl with Trivilino, become radiant at the mention of Jackie Nava.

“She is one of the biggest fighters in Mexico, male or female,” says Heather of the 32-4-3 phenom who, just last September, took the WBC world super-bantamweight title from Alicia Ashley, Hardy’s first trainer, Devon’s sister, and the woman Heather contends “may be the best pound for pound female fighter who will ever get in the ring.”

“She’s on TV, she’s making tons of money. Yeah, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have my eyes on her,” Hardy says of Nava. “I’m not ready for her today, I know that. I’m 33 years old, I’m smart enough to know when I’m ready or not. I’d be happy to step in with maybe 95% of the girls in my weight class, but I think I need a few more under my belt before Jackie.” A bewitching grin of the cat dreaming of eating the canary creeps onto Heather’s face before completing her thought. “But the WBC belt, I would like to take that one.”

Up and out at 5am most days for roadwork, Hardy hits Gleason’s a little after 6 to train clients before Devon walks Annie over from their place so that Heather can escort her to school. “She’s like a typical 11 year-old who is so disinterested in her mother. She loves me to no end, to the ends of the earth, but if I tell her, ‘Mommy’s in The New York Times this week’ she’ll be like (rolling her eyes) ‘Ugh, whatever.’”

Then it’s back to Gleason’s for her own regimen of “speed work, leg work, bag work, pad work” before she and Devon can go home to make a quick lunch, catch up on personal correspondence and fulfill professional obligations. After picking up Annie, who will often do her homework and enjoy a snack in Heather and Devon’s office, Hardy picks up where she left off training herself and her clients, normally until 8:00. Finally, there comes a respite allowing for a family dinner together before sending Annie off to bed, after which Heather and Devon will spend what’s left of the evening “catching up on the day, maybe looking at some sparring footage, catching one TV show before passing out.” On weekend nights, there is public relations hustling to be done as she and Devon pass out fliers at neighborhood bars hoping to stir up word of mouth interest and sell some tickets for her upcoming fight.

Heather did recently get to increase her public profile, and have fun doing it, by appearing on stand-up comedian Louis CK’s award-winning and critically acclaimed show Louie which airs on the FX network. Attempting to play the good Samaritan during a bus stop altercation, the perennially hapless Louie gets a beatdown and a black eye from Hardy’s character for his trouble. “Louis wanted somebody who was going to beat him up, but he wanted it to be real,” Heather laughs. “He didn’t want it to be an actor. He wanted it to be someone who could fight. It was something so natural, something that would so happen.” 

A self-described “action junkie” who earned her Forensic Psychology degree from John Jay College, Heather recalls that “I wanted to be in the FBI, travel the world and fight crime. Like most people in my neighborhood, I wound up getting pregnant at 20.” This disqualified her from consideration for a position with the NYPD and put her dreams of being a superhero on indefinite hold. 

And, while boxing has proven to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, where mild-mannered Heather Hardy gets to shed the trappings of her “real world” identity as mom and divorcee to don boxing trunks and sports bras in Irish-themed orange, white, and green colors to compliment the lucky shamrock socks favored by her badass alter ego ‘The Heat’ inside the ring, her ambitions extend well beyond television exposure and world titles. To something more noble. More pure.

“I have a lot of girls who come in who just want confidence, strength. And I get that from a lot of them,” concludes Hardy. “So just to be able to pass that along to other women, to be able to give that to other women, is just like being a superhero.”

Matinee Theater Transformed Primo Carnera from Former Heavyweight Champion Into Frankenstein’s Creation

 

Since the very first adaptation of Frankenstein was committed to celluloid by Thomas Edison’s movie studio in 1910, with Charles Ogle in the Monster makeup, several notable personalities have been called upon to portray Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny.” This list is comprised primarily, although by no means exclusively, of menace-makers synonymous with the horror genre like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., and Christopher Lee.

A pair of Taxi Driver costars were tasked with depicting the Creature twenty years apart from one another. Peter Boyle played it for laughs in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein while Robert DeNiro brought a composite of pathos and rage to his characterization for the more or less true-to-the-book big screen version starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Before embodying Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, David Prowse was twice cast as the Monster in the Hammer horror film series. More contemporary actors as diverse as Raul Julia, Randy Quaid, Clancy Brown, Aaron Eckhardt, Rory Kinnear, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller and, most recently, Jacob Elordi have all given distinctive and at times idiosyncratic interpretations of Frankenstein’s Creature.

One name that is almost always omitted from the discussion is short-term heavyweight champion Primo Carnera. The fact that ‘The Ambling Alp’ played the role of the Monster for a live 1957 television production is quite appropriate, not just because of his imposing stature but the fact that many believe his boxing career itself was something of a Frankenstinian creation. Carnera, boxing purists have argued, was a parody of a prizefighter manufactured from various source materials which shared an unpredictable and unfavorable correspondence with one another.

Was Primo merely a graceless, hulking brute of an automaton who was made to mimic the actions of a professional boxer with results that were mixed to put it mildly and questionable even at their best? Novelist and hall of fame boxing journalist Budd Schulberg certainly thought so, sketching a caricature of Carnera in the form of mobbed-up bruiser Toro Molina for his novel The Harder They Fall, which was later turned into a feature film starring Humphrey Bogart in his final screen appearance.

Mike Lane, whose first acting gig would come as Toro Moreno, the character based on Primo Carnera in the movie version of The Harder They Fall, would coincidentally also play Mary Shelley’s Monster—in Frankenstein 1970, starring Boris Karloff, who this time was the mad doctor rather than the misunderstood Creature. “I read the book. So did my lawyers” said Carnera on the topic of Schulberg’s alleged sendup of him in The Harder They Fall. “And if it had been about me, I would have sued. But I saw no resemblance.”

Albert McCleery, producer of NBC’s Matinee Theater, obviously envisioned a resemblance between Carnera and Frankenstein’s Monster when it came time to fill the role for its February 5, 1957 live broadcast. Carnera was no stranger to show business, moonlighting while still an active fighter in such movies as The Bigger They Are, Mr. Broadway, and The Prizefighter and the Lady along with Max Baer and Jack Dempsey. He was featured in ten Italian film productions during the war years and made a cameo as a strongman in 1949’s Mighty Joe Young. Following his appearance in “Frankenstein,” Carnera planned to tour Europe, Asia, and South America on the wrestling circuit.

Besides turning to professional wrestling when his boxing career was said and done, Primo had opened a restaurant conveniently located adjacent to the Twentieth Century-Fox studio lot. “My wife does the cooking—Russian, French, Italian food,” Carnera said of his eatery, which was frequented by Jayne Mansfield in addition to other Fox contract players. “Oh, it’s a lot of headaches. Harder than the boxing business or acting. Buying food and handling the personnel is tough.”

One of many network anthology programs airing at the time, the hour-long Matinee Theater debuted on NBC in 1956 with the not-at-all-spooky Halloween night presentation of a story called “Beginning Now” about the travails of an impressionable youth being led astray by the example of his reprobate father. Friday, June 13, 1958 would prove to be unlucky indeed for the series which wrapped production that afternoon on what would be its last ever live broadcast, “Course for Collision.”

Among its nearly 600 episodes, Matinee Theater aired adaptations of macabre literary classics like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” all of which originated from the quilled pen of Edgar Allan Poe.

Universal Studios had famously brought Bram Stoker’s Dracula and H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man to life on the silver screen during Hollywood’s Golden Age of Horror, and these stories were likewise given the Matinee Theater treatment for live television, with John Carradine reprising the role of the Transylvanian Count that he had played in Universal’s monster rallies House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. Carradine would don the black cape once more for the frightfully bad 1966 shlock-fest Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.

Though Mary Shelley’s novel has long since been in the public domain, Universal had gone to the trouble of putting a copyright on the iconic Frankenstein flattop and electrodes applied by Jack Pierce to Karloff, Lugosi, Chaney, and Glenn Strange throughout the course of eight movies in which the Monster appeared between 1931 and 1948.

“Primo Carnera, all 280 pounds of him, will scare the curlers and cold cream off the housewives Tuesday afternoon when he shows up on television as Frankenstein’s monster,” wrote UP reporter Aline Mosby in a preview of the 1957 Matinee Theater production. “The show follows the novel, not the movie, so the monster will have a heavily-veined face, but no bolts sticking out of his neck. Carnera will wear lifts on his shoes to make him even taller while he smashes chairs and throttles victims.”

The look producers opted to give Carnera’s Creature was similar to the cosmetic motif worn by Lon Chaney Jr. in the infamous 1952 Tales of Tomorrow episode and later used for Robert DeNiro’s Monster, favoring a clean shaven skull which was covered, as was the face, with a network of grisly cross-stitched sutures. This same design was also employed by director Danny Boyle for his two Monsters, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, who switched off playing Creature and creator for alternate versions of the London National Theatre’s outstanding production of Frankenstein.

An AP report printed the claim made by NBC’s publicity department that “It took five makeup men, working in shifts, three hours to give the big Italian the proper look of horror for a dress rehearsal.” A wire photo consisting of two separate images and dated January 31, five days prior to the live broadcast, shows a weary-looking Carnera enduring the process wherein makeup artists Bill Morley and Walt Schenck applied a syrupy, flammable, and slightly toxic adherent called collodion, while the other half of the picture features Schenck and Ed Butterworth carefully adding the stitching to get Primo camera ready for his first dress rehearsal at Burbank’s Color City Studios.

Since they were legally precluded from reproducing the look of Karloff’s Monster and had decided to stray far away from Mary Shelley’s description of the Creature (which pretty much every other film, television, and stage production has done—with the exception of Rory Kinnear’s faithful appearance in Penny Dreadful), the wardrobe department at NBC made a curious choice for Primo Carnera. The six-foot-six boxer turned actor was outfitted as the Frankenstein Monster in an oversized, collared, one-piece jumpsuit cinched at the waist by a large black band which was intended to embellish Carnera’s already strapping frame. As the author of the Frankensteinia blog astutely points out, the costume immediately calls to mind the garb won by James Arness as the alien in the 1951 sci-fi classic, The Thing from Another World.

Thanks to a lengthy, career-spanning retrospective interview director Walter E. Grauman gave to the Emmy Foundation in 2009, we know that Primo had only a select few speaking lines to memorize. Nevertheless, Grauman vividly recalled Carnera struggling with the timing of when exactly to interject his dialogue during the first table read of the script, initially relying on gesticulated time-cues from the director.

“Make another. Make a monster just like me. A woman just like me,” Grauman remembered Carnera having to plead with his creator. Denied his request for companionship, the Monster was supposed to lift his surrogate father up over his head and violently hurl him against a wall. At the dress rehearsal, Grauman instructed Primo to practice this scene with a stunt man, but the ex-boxer objected on the grounds that he might unintentionally injure him. Perhaps he should have prepared for the big moment in the live broadcast after all, as an overzealous Carnera picked up the stunt man “like a toy” as cameras rolled, tossing him not just at the wall, but right through it.

“I thought I was going to die,” Grauman laughed, recounting the incident. “I’m in the control room and all I hear is this crashing thud and I think, ‘Oh God, that’s the end of the show. The guy’s dead.’ Well, by the grace of God he wasn’t hurt. He was just bruised a little bit, and we went on to continue with the rest of the show.”

Despite the Matinee Theater broadcast of “Frankenstein” often being referred to as “lost,” this is not the case. The Library of Congress does have a Kinescope of the episode in its vast archives but has yet to digitize the recording. What is available to the public is an eight-minute audio file made from a surviving reel-to-reel of the NBC air-check which allows listeners to enjoy the opening and closing narration by host John Conte, as well as interviews he conducted right after the finale of the live broadcast with stars Tom Tryon, Christine White, and Vic Perrin.

“We felt that, in order not to destroy any illusion, we would not bring Frankenstein’s Monster on camera at this point,” says Conte. “But I know you all join me in a special tribute to Mr. Primo Carnera. I’m sure you three will agree with me of the gentleness of this fine man in spite of his size, and of the monumental character of his performance today.” On account of Carnera’s benign nature, the general consensus was in total harmony.

“Appropriately, the drama ended somewhat indecisively with the monster supposedly mortally wounded but at the fadeout, partially lifting himself to show that there was life in the mechanism created by a scientist bent on inventing his own private man,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram sportswriter Lorin McMullen summarized in his column. “The camera departed before revealing whether Primo then settled back in his death shudder or arose again to terrify the countryside.”

In the monster movies of old, of course, the undying Creation of Frankenstein would meet his demise but return time and again to terrorize the countryside in sequel after sequel. Furthermore, the Monster was occasionally matched against ghastly contemporaries like the Wolf Man and Dracula for throwdowns of the nightmarish variety.

But did one Frankenstein Monster ever fight another? Not on screen as far as I know. But, according to Glenn Strange, that is precisely what happened in the boxing ring.

Standing six-foot-five and tipping the scales at 220 pounds, Strange had a build not dissimilar to Primo Carnera. An eighth-grade dropout who was raised to be a cattle rancher by his father, Glenn drifted around New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas taking on a variety of odd jobs along the way as a farm hand, traveling musician, policeman, and firefighter before eventually finding consistent work as a stunt man and actor in Hollywood.

Fans of Gunsmoke remember him best as bartender Sam Noonan, but Monster Kids celebrate the aptly-named Strange for inheriting the role of Frankenstein’s Creation from Karloff, Chaney, and Lugosi in a trio of Universal monster mashes—House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Strange’s elongated facial structure gave his Frankenstein Creature a unique look which later served as the model for Fred Gwynne’s Herman Munster.

Another profession to which Strange had given a go as a young man was pugilism. Although Boxrec has only one bout listed on Strange’s resume—a second-round knockout loss to a six-foot Texan named Ox Cowan on June 24, 1930—he claimed to have once been on the same card with Jack Dempsey. After witnessing Strange evidently get knocked out on this occasion as well, Dempsey offered Glenn some friendly counsel. “He advised me to quit the ring before I got my brains scrambled,” said Strange in 1970.

“Primo Carnera had better take his fun and glory as the World’s Champion heavyweight boxer while he can,” Strange opined prophetically while being interviewed in October 1933. “It won’t last long.” Strange felt confident in providing such a brazen assessment due to the fact that, at least as he told it to the Amarillo Globe, he had boxed Carnera in 1930 while fighting under the assumed name Jack Williams.

And so it came to be that one future Frankenstein Monster laced up a pair of boxing gloves to square off against another inside the squared circle. As legend has it, anyway. And, let’s face it, when it comes to both boxing and show business, fact and fiction are very often nearly indistinguishable.

 

Sources:

AP. Carnera The Monster (Eugene Guard, January 31, 1957)

Lorin McMullen. Frankenstein Role Handy for Da Preem (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 10, 1957)

Aline Mosby. Primo Carnera to Portray Monster on TV Tomorrow (Shamokin News-Dispatch, February 4, 1957)

One-Time Frankenstein is a Bad Barkeep (Burlington Daily Times-News, June 16, 1970)

Glenn Strange profile at https://www.b-westerns.com/villain1.htm

Walter E. Grauman Interview Part 1 of 3—accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHOgxr45b4

https://www.atvaudio.com/Frankenstein.php

boxrec.com

frankensteinia.blogspot.com

imdb.com

When Women’s Boxing Was the “Maine” Event in the 1970s

(Margie 'KO' Dunson of Portland, Maine)

The state of Maine is best known for its lobster and lighthouses, the natural beauty of Acadia National Park, and being home to Stephen King. Boxing, not so much. Except that one time when the city of Lewiston played the unlikely role of host to the 1965 Ali/Liston rematch in a rinky-dink hockey arena when Boston officials ultimately balked for fear of disturbances originating from within the mob or the Nation of Islam.

Ten years later, Maine would incorporate itself in a small but not insignificant way into the flourishing landscape of women’s boxing by opening the doors of its venues to a handful of female prizefighters who were defiantly blazing trails through the wilderness of a sporting establishment that for much too long had been willfully negligent in its ability—or, you might say, responsibility—to see the forest for the trees.

Having jointly filed their applications three months prior, Lady Tyger Trimiar and Jackie Tonawanda were both unanimously denied professional boxing licenses by the New York State Athletic Commission in January 1975 under rule 205.15 which stated that “No woman may be licensed as a boxer or licensed to compete in any wrestling exhibitions with men.” On June 8, Tonawanda became the first female boxer to compete at Madison Square Garden, albeit in a mixed gender exhibition against a male kickboxer named Larry Rodania, who she knocked out in the second round. Not unlike virtually every other aspect of Jackie’s life and career, the legitimacy of this bout was dubious at best. And by no means would the subterfuge end there.

Claiming in the press to have been undefeated in 28 fights to that point, Tonawanda was scheduled to compete in the first women’s boxing match in Maine on Monday, October 13, 1975 at the Augusta Armory. Promoted by Jimmy Gagnon, who operated out of Lewiston, the show was set to open with six amateur bouts and conclude with Tonawanda boxing a six-round exhibition with an adversary fighting out of Virginia alternately identified as Dynamite Lil and Diamond Lil.  

For starters, who was Diamond or Dynamite Lil? With recorded documentation difficult to come by, your guess is as good as mine. There was ‘Dynamite’ Diane Clark, who Tonawanda would lose a split decision to four years later in her only verifiable prizefight, but she was born in Washington DC and lived in New York, not Virginia where the papers said Dynamite Lil hailed from. And anyway, Clark never mentioned being billed under such a name or contesting a bout against Tonawanda prior to their 1979 light-heavyweight title fight. There were two individuals who used the alias Diamond Lil, neither of whom, it goes without saying, are likely candidates to have been Tonawanda’s mystery opponent. One was Katie Glass, a midget wrestler from South Carolina who was trained by, and later lived with, the Fabulous Moolah. The other was a drag queen, stage performer, singer, writer, and gay right’s activist born Phillip Forrester in Savannah, Georgia.

With that matter unresolved, it was reported without explanation in the October 14 edition of the Morning Sentinel out of Waterville, Maine that the card which was supposed to have taken place the night before had been relocated to their city and rescheduled for the following Monday. It seems the real reason was that Tonawanda was a no-show. This would hardly be an isolated incident, but it appears as though the October 20 card in Waterville went ahead as planned, and with Jackie Tonawanda as an active participant no less. Dynamite or Diamond Lil too, for that matter.

Pioneering female sports journalist Betty Cuniberti, writing for the San Bernardino County Sun on October 27, 1975, provided this account: “Following a second-round knockout in a scheduled six-round bout in Maine last week over a woman from Virginia, Miss Tonawanda was granted a license in Maine. She maintains that the license gives her the right to fight outside Maine too.” Cuniberti quotes Tonawanda as saying, “According to the law, the way I see it, if you have a license to box in one state, then that license is supposed to be honored in other states.” The fallacy of this statement notwithstanding, Jackie continued, “I plan to have two more fights in Maine then move to Las Vegas for a bout there, where I hope to obtain another license.”     

Tonawanda was slated to be back in Maine in November to battle newcomer Gwen Hibbler in one of two women’s bouts at the Portland Exposition Building. The other matchup was a hometown showdown between Cathy Russo and Margie ‘KO’ Dunson. On fight night, Tonawanda was conspicuous, if predictable, by her absence. Portland Evening Express sportswriter Frank Sleeper remarked that Jackie “is now known in Maine more for her failure to appear than anything else.” He then estimated, “Miss Tonawanda, unless my figures are wrong, has been due to fight in Maine four times and appeared just once.”  

Born and raised in Alabama along with eleven siblings, Margie Dunson never received a formal education. She moved to Maine where she took up boxing under the guidance of South Portland promoter and tavern owner Eddie Griffin. Even back then, Dunson seemed to be waging an existential tug of war between the bar stool and the boxing stool. “There are really not enough sports in this city. I can’t find a bunch of girls to go down to the Y and play ball with. They’d rather go into the bar and sit around,” said Dunson before detailing her questionable training regimen. “I jog, and I punch the bag, and do sit-ups and drink a little beer to keep me going.” Dunson’s battles with drugs and alcohol would intensify after her boxing career and, in 2008, she would stand trial for aggravated assault after stabbing a male friend during an alcohol-fueled Super Bowl party. The charges were dropped when the victim, John Jackson, appeared at the Cumberland County Courthouse in an obvious state of intoxication and was unable to provide reliable testimony. Spared twenty years of prison time, Dunson embarked on a journey toward sobriety.

Her Thanksgiving night opponent, Cathy Russo, grew up in Portland and was an avid New England sports fan who cheered on the Red Sox and Patriots. She worked in construction and as a meatcutter for a local butcher and was an animal lover cherished by those who knew her as “an unforgettable character with a big heart.”

Attendance for boxing matches at the Exposition Building had dipped significantly in recent years, but they managed to lure approximately 2,000 spectators through the turnstiles on Thanksgiving night to see local light-heavyweight fan favorite Pete Riccitelli make a comeback after four years away from the ring, as well as the two women’s bouts featured on the card. Witnessing female prizefighting was a first for the city of Portland. It would not be the last, despite the wishes of Maine Boxing Commission chairman Duncan L. MacDonald, who paid a personal visit to the attorney general’s office to try and put a stop to what he referred to as “a travesty.” MacDonald’s endeavor was rejected as “discrimination,” and the show would go on.

Substituting for the truant Tonawanda was fellow New Yorker Ina Stevens, who Gwen Hibbler neutralized with an active jab to win a four-round decision in what was described as a “sedate” affair. This is thought to be the first fight for Hibbler who, in the months to come, would change her last name to Gemini and oppose Lady Tyger in a pair of historic bouts. We will touch on those again in a moment. A more spirited though less technically proficient effort was put forth by Portland’s own Cathy Russo and Margie Dunson, who were fighting for regional bragging rights. Russo and Dunson traded nonstop haymakers for the duration of their three-round skirmish, with Margie throwing the occasional body blow for good measure, and the action was said to have been “more exciting than most of the male bouts here.” Russo was awarded the unanimous decision, after which one of her aunts sitting ringside commented, “It was her first fight, and I hope it’s her last.” It wouldn’t be. In fact, Russo and Dunson would become reacquainted inside the squared circle a year and a half later. Stay tuned for more on that.

After being turned down by the New York State Athletic Commission, Harlem’s Lady Tyger ventured north of the border in December 1975 to make her pro debut in Quebec, Canada by outpointing Debra Babin. The following month, she and Gwen Gemini engaged in back to back bouts in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, the first time women had been permitted to box in both states, even if it was stipulated that decisions would not be rendered in either case. On February 26, 1976, a stopover in Portland, Maine to go toe to toe with Margie Dunson was the next commitment on Lady Tyger’s tireless winter odyssey.

“People think I’m taking out my aggression in the ring or on the bag, but I don’t think I am. I look at boxing as an art,” Tyger told Molly Bolton of the Portland Evening Express, who referred to the bald-headed boxer as “Black Kojak.” Tyger had a great sense of humor, and still does, and wasn’t bothered by the remark. In fact, she says she got a kick out of it. “They thought I was crazy—that a woman wanted to box. But finally, I was accepted,” she continued. “We’re in there to do our best.”

Dunson gave it her best against Lady Tyger but was outhustled and outworked and pulled a muscle in her shoulder at the end of the third round. The injury was severe enough that the fight was stopped and Tyger awarded the TKO victory by default. The undercard featured one other women’s bout which saw Gwen Gemini return to the Pine Tree State to duel to a three-round draw with fencer turned boxer Cathy ‘Cat’ Davis, although Gemini bloodied Davis’ nose in the process. “When I get into the ring, I only see my opponent. I love competition,” Gemini stated. “I’ll go as far as I can in boxing. I’m not afraid of hurting anybody. I know if I don’t hurt them, they might hurt me.”   

Asked to share his opinion of the female bouts, sixty-one-year-old fight fan Vernon Orchard said, “They put on a pretty good show, but I don’t think too much of women in the ring.” By contrast, front row spectator Lorraine Richardson, twenty years Orchard’s junior, raved that “it’s fascinating seeing women trying to beat each other’s brains out.”

All four women who competed on the February 26 card at the Expo Building would be back in Portland in seven weeks’ time, with three of them seeing ring action. The April 16 show, which Vern Putney of the Evening Express ridiculed as “more vaudeville than serious boxing,” saw Cathy Davis score a second-round knockout of novice Bobbi Shane from Philadelphia with a right hand that even the sardonic Putney had to admit was “no love tap.” Lady Tyger and Gwen Gemini had traveled to Maine to appear on standby in case of no-shows by either Davis or Shane or both, and Gemini wound up serving as a last-minute recruit to square off against Margie Dunson. Gwen would win a three-round decision with her friend Tyger watching from a ringside seat. Vern Putney couldn’t seem to help himself, doubling down on his scorn by calling this “the worst boxing card presented here in modern memory.”

Portland, Maine was becoming something of a home away from home to Cat Davis, whose actual home was Hopewell Junction, New York, although she originally hailed from New Orleans. Like Lady Tyger and Jackie Tonawanda before her, Davis’ petition for a professional boxing license in New York was met with only obstinate resistance. In 1978, her lawsuit would result in the decades-old ruling of the New York State Athletic Commission that barred women from competing in the prize ring to be overturned on the grounds that the gender-biased decree was unconstitutional. Tyger, Tonawanda, and Davis were granted their licenses on September 19, 1978, but that was still two years away at the time of Cat’s pair of return trips to Maine which would wrap up the bicentennial year of 1976.

The Portland Exposition Building hosted Thanksgiving festivities for a second year in a row, with attendance falling dramatically to a mere 700 fans on this night compared to the turnout of 2,000 in 1975. Margie Dunson, who wasn’t faring terribly well in her own hometown, might have wished she had opted to stay home feasting on leftover turkey and mashed potatoes like so many other Portlanders. Instead, Cathy Davis feasted on Dunson, stopping her in the third round.     

Just one week later, promoter Sam Silverman reluctantly made Davis the headliner at the Expo Building to defend her supposed “women’s world lightweight championship” in an eight-rounder against JoAnn Lutz of Phoenix, Arizona. Lutz claimed to have won six fights, all by knockout, and lost only once—by decision to Lavonne Ludian in Las Vegas. “I like swimming, tennis, and baseball. But boxing is uppermost, the only thing that matters now,” said Lutz. “My only interest is the title.” The lightweight title Davis was advertised to be putting on the line December 2 was presumably a fictional creation of her less than scrupulous manager, Sal Algieri. Be that as it may, Cat knocked out JoAnn Lutz with a right to her jaw and a left to the body at 1:04 of the fourth round.  

Life both inside the boxing ring and out in the real world had been particularly unkind to poor Margie Dunson and she was in a bit of a desperate need of a win somehow, somewhere. Margie would get it at the Exposition Building on May 26, 1977. Dunson’s first encounter with Cathy Russo on Thanksgiving night 1975 ended in a decision that didn’t go her way, but Margie saw to it that the judges’ scorecards would not be a factor this time around. Returning to the scene of that disappointing loss, and others still, Dunson employed an “unrelenting attack” which forced Russo to decide that enough was enough and remain on her stool after the third round. It must have felt good for Margie Dunson to win one.

Redemption is not easy to achieve. Nor should it be. It is hard to fight for and harder to hold on to. But the aftereffects, fleeting as they can sometimes be for the individual, can last generations and inspire others to accomplish objectives we can only dream of.

“It is something great and greatening to cherish an ideal. To act in the light of truth that is far away and far above,” said Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Civil War commander of the 20th Maine infantry whose valorous bayonet charge led to a tide-turning victory for the Union Army on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg. “To set aside the near advantage, the momentary pleasure, the snatching of seeming good to self, and to act for remoter ends—for higher good, and for interests other than our own.”

 

Sources:

Tonawanda Is Denied License (Lewiston Daily Sun, January 22, 1975)

Woman’s main Bout (Lewiston Daily Sun, October 7, 1975)

Don’t Mess (Kennebec Journal, October 9, 1975)

Women’s Champ In Bout Mon. (Lewiston Daily Sun, October 13, 1975)

Women Boxing Show at the Armory Oct. 20 (Waterville Morning Sentinel, October 14, 1975)

Women Boxing at 8:30 (Waterville Morning Sentinel, October 20, 1975)

Betty Cuniberti. Women’s Sports (San Bernardino County Sun, October 27, 1975)

‘KO’ Shows Ring Tools (Portland Evening Express, November 26, 1975)

Frank Sleeper. Girls Rekindle Boxing Interest (Portland Evening Express, November 28, 1975)

Vern Putney. This Boxing Bout Gets Badmouthed (Portland Evening Express, February 26, 1976)

Molly Bolton. In This Corner (Portland Evening Express, February 27, 1976)

Riccitelli Meets Stephens (Portland Evening Express, April 15, 1976)

Vern Putney. Why Must The Show Go On? (Portland Evening Express, April 16, 1976)

Jack Saunders. Rose Marks Thanksgiving (Portland Evening Express, November 26, 1976)

Vern Putney. The Cat Defends Title Tonight (Portland Evening Express, December 2, 1976)

Vern Putney. Davis, Burgess Win (Portland Evening Express, December 3, 1976)

Vern Putney. Macka Proves You Can Go Home Again (Portland Evening Express, May 27, 1977)

Former Boxing Champ Goes On Trial For Assault (Lewiston Sun Journal, January 24, 2008)

Catherine “Cathy” Russo Obituary (Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, September 24, 2012) 

Mary Jo Sanders and the Holly Holm Conundrum Part Three: Heartbreak in Auburn Hills

 

Eager to relitigate the matter, Mary Jo Sanders wanted to personally put the lessons Holly Holm felt she took away from their first bout to the test. Sooner than later. And, ideally, not in Albuquerque.

A return engagement with Sanders was neither contractually mandated nor foremost on Holly’s mind, however. “Everybody kept asking, ‘When’s the fight with Mary Jo?’ This is it,” Holm retorted. “It’s over and I won, and it’s a big thing for me.”

A big thing indeed, as a post-fight overture had allegedly been made to Holly’s promoter Lenny Fresquez on behalf of Laila Ali. Remember, it was Mary Jo who had originally been considered as a likely candidate to lure Laila back into the ring for the first time since Muhammad’s daughter needed less than one minute to dispatch Gwendolyn O’Neil sixteen months prior to the Holm/Sanders showdown.

Sanders was within a reasonable weight range to Ali, who was fighting at super-middleweight, but evidently a less attractive option from a marketing standpoint now that she had lost to Holm. Moving up the scales to 168 pounds, or even meeting Laila somewhere in the middle at a catchweight was simply out of the question for Holly and, anyway, Ali was seven months pregnant at the time which made it all a moot point. Laila opted to focus on starting a family and never fought again.

Which made a Holm vs. Sanders rematch the logical conclusion, right? Not so fast. Fresquez was seriously entertaining the proposal of a unification fight for Holm with undefeated super-welterweight belt holder Giselle Salandy, who possessed the WBC, WBA, GBU, IWBF, WIBA, and WIBF straps. Failing that, backup plans were also under consideration that included Myriam Lamare and Anne Sophie Mathis. This was also more or less the case throughout the contentious negotiations leading up to the first Holm/Sanders bout when Fresquez made the ridiculous claim that Mary Jo was “afraid of Holly.”

Holm would eventually scrap with both Lamare and Mathis, eking out a narrow points win over Myriam in February 2009 and getting viciously knocked out by Mathis at the Route 66 Casino on her own turf in Albuquerque on December 2, 2011 before gaining revenge by way of unanimous decision at the same location six months later. She never did get to test herself against the 21-year-old Salandy, who fought for the last time the day after Christmas in 2008, decisioning Yahaira Hernandez in front of a home crowd in Trinidad and Tobago and was tragically killed in an automobile accident nine days later.

One month removed from their first fight, it was confirmed that a tentative agreement had been reached between the camps of Holm and Mary Jo for a rematch on October 17, Holly’s 27th birthday, in Detroit. Despite the fact that they were conceding the home advantage to Sanders this time around, Holly’s trainer and manager Mike Winkeljohn pointed out that the formal contract had yet to be returned to them with Sanders’ signature. “So, we’ll see what happens,” he cautioned. During the negotiations, Holm attended the ESPY awards ceremony in Los Angeles where she was nominated as best fighter but lost to Floyd Mayweather Jr.

The following month, on August 20, the rematch was officially confirmed with a slight change in venue. Rather than Detroit’s Cobo Hall or even the Pontiac Silverdome, the fight would now occur at The Palace of Auburn Hills, which was still situated well within Mary Jo’s comfort zone. Sanders had earned the reputation of being not merely a great fighter by the Metro Detroit faithful but a goodwill ambassador for her home state which, at the time, was more important than ever when taking into consideration how particularly devastated its citizens had been by the recent economic crisis.

Local business owner Chris LaBelle, who still operates LaBelle Electric out of Mt. Clemens, was one of four major sponsors who contributed toward the estimated $400,000 it took to host the rematch in Michigan, a morale boost to the entire state as much as it was for Sanders. He was happy to elaborate on the mutually beneficial relationship he had developed with Sanders dating back to her pro debut. “The uniqueness of Mary Jo and women’s boxing has created a lot of interest. Many of my clients have gotten hooked on her and won’t miss a fight. My sponsorship of Mary Jo has resulted in name recognition—made us more visible to the public—and provides an event to invite my customers and clients to,” he stated. “We get a lot of bang for our buck on our investment. We get an opportunity to sponsor a local athlete who is just an incredible person. It makes you feel good to see someone like her succeed. It has strengthened us as a company and individuals in some pretty hard times.”

A Dodge distributor who oversaw two dealerships, Al Deeby was another of Sanders’ proud financial backers. “The return on investment is tough to measure, but I know this: we’re involved with a winning team—the loyalty, the pride, we just can’t lose out,” raved Deeby, whose six-year-old daughter was far less interested in playing princess than she was pretending to be Mary Jo Sanders, walking around their house wearing the boxing gloves and little robe given to her by her hero. “Mary Jo has done herself, the city, and her fans proud. Her appeal stretches across Detroit.”

Cliff Lunney planned on going to the fight in the company of fifteen of his 600 employees from CWL Investments out of Ferndale which owned the most substantial franchise in the Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwich chain. “We’re looking for Mary Jo to knock out Holm. We’re excited about the rematch,” Lunney exclaimed. “When Mary Jo does well, it reflects on the city. I want my store and my employees to share in that.”

Ric-Man Construction in Sterling Heights was responsible for the welfare of as many as 200 employees and was owned and operated by Steve Mancini, a lapsed boxing fan who had previously followed the career of the ‘Motor City Cobra’ Thomas Hearns. “We love her to death. My wife and I will be at The Palace to watch her win that fight,” said Mancini about Sanders, to whom he gave full credit for reigniting his passion for the sport. He had been enthusiastically sponsoring Mary Jo for the past three years. “She brings so much energy to her bouts. It’s the same energy that might just get this city back on its feet and turn this economy around,” he concluded hopefully.

As was the case with the first time around, the referee and judges would all be from neutral locations to help alleviate potential concerns over hometown partiality. Well-respected hall of famer Steve Smoger drew officiating duties for the rematch, replacing Kenny Bayless whose overly-cautious approach dictated the less than fan-friendly stop-and-go pace in Albuquerque.

Never one to openly criticize or speculate, Sanders remained characteristically quiet through the fallout from the first bout as well as the haggling over every minute detail leading up to the second. This, of course, was a different story from her voluble manager and trainer Jimmy Mallo, who had offered wildly differing evaluations of the first scrap.

“The fight should have been judged a draw. Holly did a very fine job, but Mary Jo threw the cleaner, crisper punches,” Mallo opined in the days before the rematch. “Mary Jo had a night off, and Holly got a gift.” This stands in stark contrast to earlier comments in which he stated that Sanders hadn’t looked like her normal self in that contest, jokingly suggesting that perhaps it had been a twin sister he didn’t know she had who stepped into the ring in her place. “The whole of Team Sanders was shocked. Mary Jo was shocked,” admitted Mallo. “When you’re in someone’s backyard, you can’t let them make early deposits. We just didn’t stick to our game plan.”

“This is going to be bigger than our fight in Albuquerque,” acknowledged Holly Holm. “Mary Jo will be a different person. She’ll fight with heart and aggression. She’ll get after me. I expect to hear a lot of boos, but I’ll use that as motivation.” Holm watched their first bout on a portable DVD player during the flight from New Mexico to Michigan while jammed into the middle seat between two other passengers in the back row of the plane. Though this was her third viewing, Holly had to excuse herself and get up to walk off the jitters coursing through her body, confessing that it was too “nerve-racking” to get through the entire fight in one sitting.

“I know Mary Jo is feeling the pressure too. As boxers, we are fully exposed when we climb into the ring,” said Holm. “It’s the unknown you face every fight. You gain a lot of respect for your opponent, and it’s mutual.”

Not until the day of the weigh-in did Sanders break her silence and was, unsurprisingly, in nearly complete agreement with Holm’s sentiments. “I’ve got a lot of respect for Holly. Her work ethic is great; she works very hard,” said Mary Jo. “If anything, she’s the one under pressure here. Detroit isn’t the kind of place you hit and run. They’ll boo you out of town if you do.”

Asked to assess her performance in the first fight, Sanders simply mentioned having been “so, so far off who I am, what I do” and more or less left it at that. “I don’t talk backwards. I don’t think backwards,” Mary Jo stated defiantly. “I’ve left Albuquerque in the past. I rely on my tools—my fists—and I’ve been taught never to run away.”

As content as Sanders and Holm were to carry on speaking of one another in congenial platitudes, their trainers were just as happy to continue to jaw with one another like kids trading verbal  barbs in a schoolyard. “People get disgruntled—they complain they can’t hit Holly, that she runs away. But they always walk away with black eyes themselves,” said Mike Winkeljohn. “Ok, she moves, but she hits hard. How many famous boxers have done just that? Why that’s a bad thing for Holly to do, I don’t know.”

Jimmy Mallo fired back by insisting, “She didn’t hurt Mary Jo. She didn’t beat Mary Jo.” About any adjustments which were implemented during training for the rematch, Mallo had this to say: “We tweaked a few things, and we saw a lot of vulnerabilities in Holly that we’re gonna capitalize on this time.”

Fight fans not attending in person would have to wait to see the return bout on a tape-delayed FSN broadcast, largely owing to the disappointingly lackluster pay-per-view buy rate for the first fight as reported by Holm’s promoter Lenny Fresquez. Banking on 10,000 purchases at $24.95 a pop, Fresquez was optimistically hoping for 15,000 which was more than twice what the number of national buys turned out to be—7,000 to be exact. He believed this had to do with the fact that the show had been an all-female card, concluding that he would be disinclined to pursue a similar venture in the future if there was no money to be made.

This bout was sanctioned by the IBA (International Boxing Association) which was putting its vacant super-welterweight world title up for grabs. It had first been worn around the waist of Ann Wolfe courtesy of a TKO win over Gina Nicholas back in 2001, and the belt had been unclaimed ever since she vacated it soon after. Sanders was the first to make her ring walk, bouncing on the balls of her feet and shadowboxing in her corner while Holm came barreling past the camera crew and proceded to pace and then jog from one side of the ring to the other during the pre-fight formalities.

Anyone who questions Holly’s intensity needs only to behold her stoic, almost grim countenance as she stares daggers at Mary Jo Sanders before Steve Smoger instructs, and finally commands, an apparently reluctant Holm to touch gloves with her opponent. Say what you will, Holm has always taken the hurt business very seriously.

Mary Jo didn’t need to concern herself with chasing Holm around the ring in the first round. After a tentative thirty-second period of reacquaintance, Holly was the first to instigate an encounter and, despite some of her trademark kinetic energy which was certainly to be expected, she was extraordinarily quarrelsome. Letting her hands go all the while, Holm bullied Sanders across the ring and into a corner with twenty seconds left of the opening frame. Mary Jo promptly punched her way out, but it was clear from the get-go that Holly came to Auburn Hills to prove that she was a fighter, not a runner.

One takeaway from their first skirmish was obviously that Sanders learned to throw leather while Holm was in the process of closing the distance. Even while being bumrushed into the turnbuckle in the first round, Mary Jo connected with an uppercut which was an arrow she would pull from her quiver on a consistent basis throughout the evening. As Holly tended to rush forth with her head down, the implementation of these adjustments would prove very effective.

If only Jimmy Mallo had worked with Sanders to step to the side when Holly would streak toward her rather than retreat in a straight line, opportunities would have presented themselves which may have precipitated a more advantageous outcome. Her right being her dominant hand, it would have served Mary Jo well to pivot to her left in such circumstances, forcing Holm to step to her own left and, theoretically, into a Sanders right hook she couldn’t see coming. Mary Jo had come up with some much-needed responses to questions left unanswered six months prior, but the enigmatic Holm would be bested only if all of the pieces were present and fit together perfectly. This trick may have been the gamechanger that Sanders and Mallo overlooked and left behind in the metaphorical puzzle box.

Sanders hit the reset button between rounds and emerged from her corner with three consecutive jabs followed by a straight right to establish control over the next two-minute stanza. In a repeat of what transpired in round one, Holm railroaded Mary Jo into the same corner but couldn’t take advantage of the situation as Sanders blasted her way out.

Unlike Kenny Bayless, Steve Smoger was more than willing to let the two combatants engage one another from close quarters, something which occasionally favored an aggressively driven Holm such as when she scored with a three-punch combination with her back to the ropes in the last thirty seconds of round two, though Mary Jo got the better of the very next exchange while also fighting off the ring strands.

Holly’s attacks were still unorthodox, but less frenetic than in the first fight when it often seemed as if she was devising her strategy even as it unfolded. Perhaps, though, that was part of Holm’s genius—making it appear as though not having a plan was her plan. Maybe her apparent unpredictability had actually been pre-determined and repeatedly practiced. With Holly, it was hard to tell, keeping you on your toes and second-guessing everything.

Nevertheless, Sanders had not only seen this movie before but been a co-star in the original six months ago. Privy to the intimate knowledge of how the plot was likely to play out, as well as the twists and turns it would take along the way, Mary Jo was no longer mystified by the unknown and the outcome of this action-packed sequel was in no way inevitable. By the middle rounds, Sanders was seizing the momentum and making it work for her.

Both getting hit more frequently and missing her mark more often, it was Holm who became visibly flustered, looking set adrift and lost at sea heading into the final three frames. But, make no mistake, she would find her way back to shore and into the thick of the action which intensified over the final six minutes in a give-and-take struggle for supremacy.

Exhibiting remarkable stamina to complement their gutsy performances, Holly Holm and Mary Jo Sanders delivered on the promise of a thrilling fight that went largely unfulfilled six months before. Naturally, each woman believed she had outworked her adversary to an extent sufficient to have secured the victory.

“I felt like I controlled the center of the ring,” said Holm. “I felt I did enough to win the fight. I was the aggressor.” During her post-fight remarks, Mary Jo had to admit, “She’s not a runner anymore. She came to fight. I told her she should be proud of herself.”

Judge Paul Smith was in agreement with Holm’s self-evaluation, scoring the bout 97-93 in her favor. His verdict was overruled by Marty Denkin and Steve Weisfeld, both of whom arrived at tallies of 95-95, regrettably deadlocking the decision. Both women were disappointed but neither one bitter. “I think I won, but Holly is a great girl. We’ll do it again,” vowed Sanders.

Holm was immediately agreeable to a third fight as well, but the rubber match in what would have been a memorable trilogy was, unfortunately, not meant to be. Instead, Holm would go on to defeat Myriam Lamare the following January, as alluded to earlier, before closing out 2009 by stopping undefeated Duda Yankovich in the 4th round and easily outpointing Terri Blair in Las Vegas.

With a third scrap against Holly Holm seeming less likely and a mega-bout opposite Laila Ali no longer a viable option, Team Sanders entered into talks with undefeated phenom Giselle Salandy toward the end of 2008. “She was such a young woman and a champion. It was a tragic turn of events,” lamented Mary Jo concerning Salandy’s untimely death in January 2009. “I felt sick.”

Having adopted a “never say never” attitude toward another fight, Sanders kept plenty busy as a personal trainer. In early 2011, she had been mentioned as a potential opponent for Canadian former WIBA world lightweight champion Kara ‘KO’ Ro who was likewise looking to make a comeback. This never materialized, nor did the opportunity to coach Team USA’s women’s boxing squad which was preparing to make its historic debut at the 2012 London Olympics. Mary Jo had reached out to offer her services, but her calls were not returned. What a shame, as this would have allowed Sanders to impart her wisdom onto the likes of Mikaela Mayer, Marlen Esparza, Tiara Brown and, of course, fellow Michigan native Claressa Shields.

“I asked my father how he dealt with that when he retired from football, how he dealt with not playing anymore,” reflected Sanders in March 2010. “He told me he had dreams for years about it, and that when he’d wake up, he was sure he’d played a game—smelled the turf, felt the hits. It’s tough to retire or think about it.”

Once a fighter, always a fighter, Mary Jo was among the Class of 2018 honored by the International Women’s Boxing Hall of Fame and entered the ranks of IBHOF inductees this past June in Canastota, joining Holly Holm in both esteemed institutions.

 

Sources:

Mike Brundell. Sanders: Sponsors Are Big Fans Too (Detroit Free Press, October 14, 2008)

Mike Brundell. Holm Ready For Sanders Rematch (Detroit Free Press, October 16, 2008)

Mike Brundell. One Ferocious Fight Ended With a Draw (Detroit Free Press, October 19, 2008)

Mike Brundell. Ring Star Sanders Wants to Stay Active (Detroit Free Press, March 3, 2010)

Mike Brundell. Sanders vs. Ro: Great Fight for Silverdome? (Detroit Free Press (January 30, 2011)

Rick Wright. Boxer Lovato a Hero in Her Hometown (Albuquerque Journal, October 1, 2007)

Rick Wright. Duke City Star Did Her Homework (Albuquerque Journal, June 15, 2008)

Rick Wright. Condit to Defend Crown (Albuquerque Journal, July 20, 2008)

Rick Wright. Holm—Sanders II Set for Oct. 17 (Albuquerque Journal, August 20, 2008)

Rick Wright. Holm in Hostile Territory (Albuquerque Journal, October 17, 2008)

Mary Jo Sanders/Holly Holm II (YouTube, uploaded February 10, 2009)