For prizefighting ladies of the 1970s, the matches they
contested against one another were only half the battle. Before ever stepping foot
inside the squared circle, women were first required to make an appeal to
obtain a boxing license within the often unwelcoming confines of an athletic
commission office or, in some cases, a courtroom.
Having acquired the right to fight, a formidable struggle
unto itself, female boxers were routinely subjected to misogynistic scorn and
ridicule. Widely regarded as sideshow attractions or novelty acts, women were laughed
at, heckled, and made a mockery of for having the audacity to pursue a personal
ambition which dared to transcend domestic servitude.
Many men made it crystal clear that they considered the
opposite sex good for three things only—cooking, cleaning, and fornicating. Sadly,
some still do. For them, there is absolutely no room for boxing on this list,
and the majority of 1970s fight fans were all too happy to voice their displeasure
at what they considered their exclusive domain being trespassed upon.
Boos and jeers were all but obligatory. Sexist insults?
You bet. It appears as though men felt their paid admission entitled them to
shout any crazy remark they could desperately conjure. But surely something so
seemingly mundane as protesting the presence of females inside a boxing ring
never escalated to the point where anyone’s life was potentially in jeopardy,
right? Guess again.
Three days before a return bout between Theresa Kibby and
Diane Syverson scheduled for May 27, 1976, a letter declaring malicious intent in
the form of bodily harm was delivered to the Olympic Auditorium. Specifically
addressed to matchmaker Don Chargin, the death threat extended to promoter
Aileen Eaton, as well as Kibby and Syverson.
Postmarked in San Bernardino five days prior, the missive
was typewritten and badly misspelled according to information released to the
press from the joint investigation being carried out by the Los Angeles police
and U.S. Postal Service. Affixed to the envelope were three 6-cent stamps
bearing the likeness of Dwight D. Eisenhower which had been out of circulation
for several years.
“If the women boxers aren’t taken off the card, people
like you, for putting them on the card, and the women boxers will have to be
killed,” reads the most chilling portion of the ultimatum directed towards
Eaton, Chargin, Kibby, and Syverson. “This letter is by no means a joke.”
Needless to say, it was not treated as such. But,
ultimately, the show would go on.
Fighting was a family affair
for then-22-year-old Theresa Kibby. Managed and trained by her adopted father Dave Sr.,
Theresa was featured on the same bill as her brothers, Dave Jr. and Roger
‘Chief’ Buckskin, on multiple occasions. The three boxing siblings welcomed
their sister Darlene ‘Bluebird’ Buckskin into the prizefighting fold in July 1976
when she made her pro debut with a four-round win over fellow novice Marsha
Cruz on a show at the Del Norte County Fairgrounds in Crescent City that also
saw Dave Jr. outpoint Bonnie Necessario, Roger drop a unanimous decision to
Babilah McCarthy, and Theresa come out on top of a split verdict over Lady
Tyger Trimiar.
Dave Sr. boasted that the 175-pound Darlene could punch
like Jack Dempsey and said of Theresa, “I believe she hustles a lot more than a
lot of male boxers I’ve trained. And she listens well.”
Members of Fresno's Mono Tribe, the Kibby and Buckskin clans
shared a spacious mountaintop dwelling in Smith River, California that
overlooked the Pacific Ocean. From the age of ten, Theresa would constantly tussle
with her brothers, and later sparred with them, as well as Darlene, when she chose
to seriously pursue boxing after watching Caroline Svendsen defeat Jean Lang in
Portland, Oregon in October 1975. Kibby hoped that the opportunity would
present itself for her to fight the 34-year-old Svendsen, who obtained her
boxing license from the Nevada State Athletic Commission three months prior to
her bout against Jean Lang, but Theresa would be left wanting in that respect.
“I can keep up with my brothers now,” she said in 1976, although
they were rough enough on her at first to make Theresa strongly consider
quitting for a brief time. Theresa kept fit by playing basketball, softball,
and volleyball to augment her regular training regimen which consisted of daily
two-mile runs, skipping rope, and rigorous workouts with Dave Jr., Roger, and
Darlene. “I’ve been around boxing all my life. Even if California hadn’t
legalized it for women, I’d still be doing it just for fun,” she avowed.
Theresa, who wore glasses, objected to using contact
lenses during her boxing matches, opting instead to remove the spectacles the
morning of that night’s fight to give her eyes the necessary time to adjust.
“Then I don’t have any problems with blurring inside the ring,” she insisted.
There was nothing particularly restrictive in regard to her diet. “I just watch
what I eat,” said Theresa. “On the day of a fight I eat steak and salads and
avoid soft drinks.”
Steve Sneddon, a sportswriter with the Nevada State
Journal, referred to Theresa as a “Quiet Killer” in the headline of his
March 20, 1976 From My Corner column, which was dedicated solely to her. Though
proposing that Kibby’s sobriquet Princess Red Star “smacks of big-time
wrestling” and “sounds like a showman’s name,” Sneddon fully acknowledged that
there was nothing about the softspoken Kibby that was at all suggestive of the
garish aspects of the entertainment industry. More than just her ring moniker,
Princess Red Star was the ceremonial name Theresa was given by tribal chief
White Buffalo Man.
Most impressed by how focused she remained despite the
boisterous atmosphere that permeates boxing, Sneddon cautioned to make no
mistake about the fact that a killer instinct lurked beneath the surface of
Theresa’s “polite, but not overwhelming” smile. After witnessing Kibby handily
dominate Pat Pineda at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel for an easy points victory, the State
Journal scribe surmised that “as a fighter, she may not have a woman equal
in the United States.”
The Pineda fight had been Theresa’s third to that point.
She debuted on February 12, 1976 by overwhelming and stopping fellow novice, karate
black belt, and future women’s boxing historian Sue ‘Tiger Lilly’ Fox in the
penultimate stanza of their four-rounder in front of 1,250 spectators at
Portland’s Multnomah County Expo Center, the very same venue where Theresa had
attended Caroline Svendsen’s win over Jean Lang three and a half months
prior.
Kibby and Fox both learned just before bell time that the
rounds would be three minutes in duration and not two which was, and still is, the
standard for women’s bouts. “When you plan on fighting two minutes, that extra
minute seems like centuries,” remarked Fox. “I think we showed the public women
can hit, and be hit.”
Theresa was back in action the very next week, this time
to hit and be hit by Johnnie Stanton at the Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene.
As in Kibby’s previous bout, her brothers Dave Jr. and Roger once again
appeared on the same card and with mixed results. This was to be both Stanton’s
first and last fight, in which she was beaten by Princess Red Star by point
totals that added up unanimously in her favor.
Kibby’s fourth fight, held at San Jose’s Civic Auditorium
on May 4, served also as the rites of initiation into the ranks of professional
prizefighting for former roller derby sensation Diane Syverson. For the
blonde-haired, brown-eyed Canadian known to roller derby aficionados as the
‘Slugger Queen,’ the transition from the skating rink to the boxing ring was
not at all an unnatural one.
“Violence is the key part of the sport I’m in, so it’s
understandable that violent I’ve got to be,” Syverson professed in the National
Police Gazette while still active on the roller derby circuit in 1975. “I
don’t know if I’m the toughest girl in the league, but I do admit I’m one of
them.”
Born in Watertown, Ontario, Diane moved with her parents
to Los Angeles where she excelled in track, baseball, softball, and volleyball
as president of her high school’s Girls’ Athletic Association. Drawn to roller
derby as a young girl, Syverson would study the mechanics of the skaters on
television or at live events, and accumulated her fair share of bumps and
bruises as she began to practice in preparation for enrolling at the Los
Angeles Thunderbirds’ training school.
Before she had even completed high school, Diane was
invited to participate in a summer tour of Australia with the Detroit Devils.
Recognized as the squad’s most valuable defensive player in her rookie season,
she would continue to skate with the Devils when time permitted as she finished
school. Syverson began traveling with the Texas Outlaws the day after high
school graduation for roughly one year before becoming a freelancer, skating
for any team at any time as needed.
It wasn’t long before Diane was asked to rejoin the
Devils for a longer tenure. At the age of 19, she became the youngest female to
captain a roller derby team to that point and led Detroit past the rival Los
Angeles Thunderbirds for the Devils’ first championship.
Syverson later became an all-star with the Montreal Fleur
De Lys, traveling the world while earning the reputation as one of the league’s
foremost competitors, and one certainly not to be trifled with. During one
especially heated contest, Diane and a nemesis by the name of Margie Laszlo
were “into it hot and heavy at the rail,” in Syverson’s own words, when a fan intervened
by yanking on Margie’s hair. Her personal disregard for Margie notwithstanding,
Syverson spontaneously calculated this misguided assistance as a big mistake on
the fan’s part. “I swung and clouted this dame,” Diane remembered. “Boy, was
she shocked! She didn’t think I’d belt her, but I did!”
Syverson’s dedication to the sport paid off financially,
if not romantically. By her own estimate, Diane and other elite roller derby
girls took home as much as $50-75,000 annually for competing in roughly 300
games a year, perhaps as many as ten in a row without a night off in between.
“My owner is no fool, and has been paying me well,” she
stated. “I’ve got no complaints.” Her love life, however, was a different
story. “Not too many guys are chasing you because it seems they’re afraid of
you,” Syverson hypothesized. “It’s an impossible way to keep a romance
flourishing.”
After hanging up her roller derby skates, Diane had been
studying Criminal Justice with an eye toward a possible future in law
enforcement, and kept money coming in by working as a bricklayer. But she
wasn’t done indulging her predilection for the rough and tumble sports world quite
yet, only now as a professional prizefighter.
Pat Pineda was the first woman to be granted a boxing
license by the state of California, followed shortly thereafter by Kim Maybee,
against whom Pineda would contest her second pro bout at the LA Forum, and
Diane Syverson, who was asked to stand by in case either Pineda or Maybee
missed weight or no-showed. That fight went off without a hitch, so Syverson’s
debut would have to wait until a week later when she was matched against
Theresa ‘Princess Red Star’ Kibby on May 4, 1976 in San Jose.
“I got to her in the fourth. I thought that may have won
it for me, but it appears not,” a disappointed but not deflated Kibby said
after the judges arrived at a deadlock on their scorecards and the bout was
declared a draw. “I think I landed some good punches throughout most of the
fight.”
Syverson concurred in part with Theresa’s postmortem.
“There is no question about it, she had a good fourth round and that did it.
She got in some good punches, but none of them really hurt me,” claimed Diane.
Despite sporting a fresh shiner encircling her right eye, Syverson coolly
assessed that “I’ve had worse in roller derby competition.” Furthermore, she
admitted, “I didn’t think I was in as good shape as I should have been. That
too may have made a difference.”
The spectators expressed their appreciation for the
spirited effort put forth by both Kibby and Syverson, who not only received a
standing ovation at the conclusion of their four-round stalemate, but were
showered with coins thrown from the crowd.
Soon after, it was announced in the papers that their
rematch at the Olympic Auditorium would take place on the 27th, a
mere three weeks removed from the first fight. “I’ll step up the
tempo in the second round. In that first fight I held back. This time I’ll
press more,” vowed an optimistic Kibby. “I have to mainly concentrate more on
my punches in the future. I also need to work on my combinations.”
Unfortunately, one other thing Kibby would have to
concern herself with—not to mention Syverson, Aileen Eaton and Don Chargin—was
the anonymous death threat issued three days prior to fight night.
“They are objecting to women fighting. They don’t want
the fight to go on,” remarked Dave Sr., speaking on behalf of Theresa. “The
letter was read to me over the telephone. But I’m not worried about that. We
have a contract to fulfill and we intend to honor it.”
Dave Sr. doubled down on his defiance by saying, “I’m
just sorry I can’t carry my bow and arrows along on the plane. Theresa is
confident she is going to beat Syverson. She has been working hard for this night.”
Due to the Memorial Day weekend travel rush, the Kibbys
were unable to book a direct flight from Eureka to Los Angeles, so Chargin
somehow arranged for them to get there by way of Portland, Oregon and back to
California again. “Theresa wanted an airplane trip,” laughed Dave Sr. of
Theresa’s very first experience flying the friendly skies, “and she sure got
one.”
Theresa and Dave Sr. were met at the airport by boxing
manager Mario Silva, who had fought as a heavyweight and served as the Kibbys’
escort and, ostensibly, bodyguard for the duration of their stay. This was just
one of several preventive security measures put in place by Chargin and Eaton
to ensure the fighters’ safety.
“They took good care of us,” affirmed Dave Sr. “Nothing
occurred.” One thing that did occur was Princess Red Star getting jobbed by the
judges. “It was the damndest thing I’ve seen in all my born days,” grumbled the
Kibby patriarch. His daughter, Dave Sr. maintained, accepted defeat graciously.
“Theresa went straight in, around and in back, and punched from the opening
bell to the end. In the third round she rained punches on Syverson and had her
so confused she didn’t know what was going on.”
Don Chargin made his disapproval of Syverson’s
questionable victory known to Dave Sr. afterwards. “It was Theresa’s fight.
Don’t blame me,” the matchmaker told Kibby. “They performed professionally. Sure,
we’ll bring them back.” Promoter Aileen Eaton was also content with how the
women handled themselves. “I’m happy and proud the way things turned out,” she
said. “They were good, weren’t they?”
Eaton would later sing a different tune about women’s boxing,
however. “People might come to see a novelty, but not hardcore boxing fans. I
won’t say I wouldn’t use women again, but most likely I would not,” she
responded in 1979 when asked if she would continue to promote female
prizefights. “I didn’t like it to start with,” she contended irritably, stating
that she had reached her wit’s end with women’s difficulty making the
contracted weight and demanding more money. “There was a lot of curiosity at
first when the California Commission approved women pros, but after a few
times, it wasn’t that big a thing.”
All things considered, Theresa Kibby refused to give in
to death threats or capitulate to an overall discouraging lack of support, offering
a much more affirmative and prescient counterpoint to Eaton’s bitter argument. “As
more and more women get into it and improve,” said Princess Red Star, “the
interest will mount and the purses will make it more attractive to more women.”
It appears that no record exists to verify whether or not
the letter writer who issued the death threat was ever apprehended. As for
Theresa Kibby, she never did get to avenge the pair of blemishes on her record
put there by Diane Syverson, who, after losing two out of three fights to Lady
Tyger Trimiar, quit boxing in 1977.
Sources:
Loretta ‘Little Iodine’ Behrens. The Toughest
Girl in Sports: Diane Syverson (Derby Memoirs—accessed at https://derbymemoirs.bankedtrack.info/Syverson_Diane.html)
Dave Fielder. Sue Fox Loses By TKO (Vancouver
Columbian, February 13, 1976)
Jack Hawn. Carlotta Hurts ‘Em, Heals ‘Em (Los
Angeles Times, February 10, 1979)
Rich Roberts. Overheard (Long Beach
Independent, June 2, 1976)
Steve Sneddon. Quiet Killer (Nevada State
Journal, March 20, 1976)
Ben Swesey. Kibby Clan Likes It in the Ring
(Sacramento Bee, September 12, 1976)
Don Terbush. Princess Red Star Eyes Next
Battle (Eureka Times Standard, May 19, 1976)
Don Terbush. Death Threat Bout Went Off
Smoothly (Eureka Times Standard, May 30, 1976)
Death Threat to Aileen Eaton (Long Beach
Independent, May 25, 1976)
Death Vow Won’t Stop Kibby Gal (Eureka Times
Standard, May 26, 1976)
Former Watertown Girl Stars in Roller Derby
(Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, December 17, 1971)
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