With her prizefighting opportunities having unfortunately
dried up for the foreseeable future, Britt enlisted in the Army, spending six
years with the National Guard, and additionally took up rugby. “I ended up
playing twenty-two seasons, two seasons a year,” she says. “So, I played eleven
years, and went on to coach for five seasons.” Unable to ignore her boxing
instincts, she also kept fit to fight by making use of the SIU Recreation
Center where she would jump rope and hit the heavy bag.
In 1995, VanBuskirk opened a boxing gym in Carbondale
called Tough Enough. “I took around six of my best friends to St. Louis and we
took tests and we all got USA Boxing certified so I could run my own shows at
the gym. A man came from St. Louis from USA Boxing and supervised a fight night
we put on and then gave my gym a certificate,” recalls Britt, whose primary
objective was getting troubled youths interested in fighting in the ring rather
than in the streets. “Every other Friday night we had fight night. The gym was
a popular place and we changed lives there,” she says with understandable and
well-deserved pride. Tough Enough boasted a membership of right around 100, a
dozen of whom, including three women, were mentored by Britt.
Little did she know then that change was in the air, and the
very near future would find her involved in the fight game not just as a
teacher but, once again, as a practitioner. Along came Christy Martin and, with
her arrival on the scene, a resurgence of interest in women’s boxing which eventually
pulled open the curtain on the second act in VanBuskirk’s lengthy pugilistic
career.
“I turned on the TV and there was the Martin vs. Gogarty
fight. I was very surprised!” she exclaims. “The fight was great to the
unknowing eye, but Martin was much bigger than Gogarty and Martin bullied Gogarty
around the ring. Gogarty fought a great fight and made the fight by hanging in
there. But Christy came out of the fight a superstar.”
Despite the fact that the Gogarty fight and the Sports
Illustrated cover story that resulted from it made an overnight sensation
of Christy Martin, women’s boxing in general still struggled for mainstream
recognition and acceptance.
“This is where it starts to get tricky,” illustrates
Britt. “In my mind, people have to show up and fight so the public can see
women’s boxing. If no one will fight, the sport won’t make it. We must get out
there and fight.”
The motivations and methodologies of Don King have always
been as questionable and controversial as the promoter himself—the one with the
unmistakably Barnumesque flair for showmanship, trademark nursery rhyme ballyhoo,
and a hairdo that resembles a Halloween fright wig. Nevertheless, Van Buskirk
is willing to give credit where she feels it is due.
“Don King did the biggest service to women’s boxing when
he decided to start to allowing women to fight on his televised boxing cards,”
Britt opines. “With the world watching, women’s boxing became very popular just
like we always knew it would. Don must have been listening. In Don King style,
champions are made not born, and unfortunately his choice for our slot were Jim
and Christy Martin.” Aesthetically speaking, the pairing of King with the
Martins appeared to be a match made in Heaven. And it was, until it wasn’t. As
with many marriages both personal and professional, there was trouble in
Paradise.
“These two were played right into Don’s hands. Both were
arrogant with large mouths that demanded attention,” VanBuskirk elaborates. “Christy
was a raw-mouthed twenty-something youngster that couldn’t say anything right.
Don kept televising her fights, and over the years she became a good boxer. But
with it came trouble. Drugs, attempted murder, and prison. On this level, the
sport was dragged around once again but it was resuscitated by Laila Ali. She
spun better than Martin and had a bigger name in the sport. She really gave the
sport the spokeswoman it needed. She stayed within her boundaries and kept the
Ali name shining and encouraged a lot of youth to the sport. Overall, I must
thank Don King for the hand up he gave women’s boxing. He had the vision to do
what was right and then stayed out of it.”
Despite a few serious flirtations with a high-visibility
comeback fight for Britt opposite Christy Martin, ultimately it was not to be. “My
phone rang maybe three separate times for fights with her,” she estimates. “All
three times the fights fell through.”
However, after sixteen years away from boxing,
VanBuskirk, the former California State welterweight champion who had racked up
knockout wins like it was second nature in the 1970s, would eventually mount a
return. Her short-notice opponent would be none other than Martin’s chief antagonist,
the ‘Dutch Destroyer’ Lucia Rijker.
“In 1999, I was sitting at my favorite bar and the pay
phone rang. I was sitting right next to it, so I answered it. It was Marshall
Christopher. Marshall said he had a fight for me,” recalls VanBuskirk. Marshall
was a Chicago-based manager and trainer whose wife Chris Kreuz had been knocked
out by Christy Martin in her fourth pro fight five years earlier. “He seemed
desperate, so I asked who. He said Lucia Rijker.”
Britt was so far removed from the boxing scene at that
point that she had never heard of her, but the promise of a $6,000 purse for a
six-round fight was not one to be taken lightly. Besides having no prior
knowledge of Rijker, who in April 1999 was 12-0 with only one of those wins going
the distance, there were two other troubling factors. For starters, time was
most definitely of the essence, as the bout was scheduled to take place in only
three days.
The other crisis was an existential one, which saw
VanBuskirk having to cope with the tragic passing of her beloved trainer and
mentor, Howard McCord. “By this time, Tyger had called me and told me that the
pride of my life had died of bone cancer,” Britt remembers. “Howard was gone
forever. I miss him to this very day.”
Nevertheless, Britt heeded the call to arms,
rationalizing her decision by thinking to herself, “Damn here’s another fight
that won’t go off if I don’t show up.” Marshall hastily secured VanBuskirk a
train ticket to Chicago where she had to play a game of beat the clock to get
the necessary documentation in order.
“When I got to Chicago he sent me to the boxing
commission to get my federal ID. The head commissioner was not happy to see me.
He said, ‘Why are you here and who the hell is Marshall Christopher?’ I knew I
would need an EEG to get my license and didn’t have the $500 to get one,” Britt
explains. Her solution to this dilemma was creative, if not legal.
“Before I left, I made my own off one I had from another
fighter by whiting out the name and putting in mine, then copying it,” says VanBuskirk.
“Because I was so prepared, it mellowed him. I explained I was a female that
was heading to a fight, and by the time I left his office I had his blessings.”
While she is well aware of how harshly this sort of illicit activity might be
judged these days, Britt contends that to have a complete understanding of the
situation, you simply had to be there to experience firsthand the survival-of-the-fittest-type
conditions the previous eras of female fighters were often forced to compete
under in the daily struggle just to get by, much less evolve. “Desperate times
call for desperate measures,” she says.
VanBuskirk had only one day to prepare herself for Rijker,
which she did at the Windy City Gym, before departing the next morning for
O’Hare Airport to catch her flight to Florida. The airline lost Britt’s
luggage, the result of which would give new meaning to “Moon Over Miami” at
that afternoon’s weigh-in.
“I was so late getting to the weigh-in that they wouldn’t
allow me to go to my hotel room first, instead insisting I go straight to the
weigh-in,” recounts VanBuskirk. “I had no underwear on. I told the weigh master
my problem. He said, ‘Just hold a towel up in front of you.’ They did, but
there was a restaurant behind us with a big window and when I dropped my pants
all the people that were eating in the restaurant got a huge viewing of my bare
butt.”
A natural welterweight, Britt weighed in at 145, five
pounds over the junior-welterweight limit, which was overlooked. It was an
anomaly with her typically perfect blood pressure, no doubt due to all the less
than ideal extenuating circumstances, that put the bout in jeopardy. Despite
the temporary scare caused by the initial reading, prompting the doctor to disallow
her to fight for fear that she would die in the ring, he agreed to take a
second, and this time normal, test in the more relaxed atmosphere of her hotel
room fifteen minutes later. Not only would the fight go on, but Britt learned
that it would be televised on Fox Sports.
“I saw Lucia in the hall. She spoke to me. She recognized
my last name as being Dutch. I agreed that it was,” says VanBuskirk of her
brief pre-fight interaction with Rijker. “She’s smaller than I, with a thick
accent. That’s all I knew about her. I passed my time alone.”
Marshall Christopher was supposed to work Britt’s corner
but was missing in action on fight night. “I found a Mexican man and
asked him to help me. He said ok,” she recalls. “He started to warm me up on
the mitts. I could tell that he took Lucia very seriously. He could tell I
wasn’t in shape, and he kept telling me to watch out for the left hook.”
VanBuskirk had gone from barstool to boxing stool in
three days and was being instructed by a stranger wandering through the locker
rooms of the Miccosukee Indian Gaming Resort. Lucia Rijker, on the other hand,
was being guided by the great Freddie Roach and prepping for a potential
super-fight opposite Christy Martin.
“Archie Moore and Howard were friends,” says Britt about
the legendary Old Mongoose and her recently deceased trainer. “Archie used to
come to the gym and watch me spar. Archie told me to always throw the first
punch and from that day I always did. So, I went out there and threw a couple
jabs. They both landed and from there it went downhill. In the second round she
came after me, but I fought back and landed a right hand. That really pissed
her off. She threw me in a head lock and stuffed her glove up my nose a couple
times. She got a warning from the referee for holding and hitting.”
It didn’t take long for things to go from bad to worse. “I
began to tire. In the third round she hit me with a left hook. It buckled my knees,
and I recognized the beginning of the end for me,” admits VanBuskirk. “It’s a
very scary situation. It will send the toughest person into uncontrollable
fear. You see your whole life go circling down the toilet and can’t do anything
about it but take more punishment until it’s finally over.”
A fighter’s first loss, especially one so devastating in
nature, is unthinkably difficult to process, as Britt articulates. “It’s like
watching someone die in front of you that you love, and you realize for the
first time there are some things in life that are beyond your control. It all
happens very, very fast and stays intimately close for the rest of your life.
It’s so hard some people quit,” she philosophizes. “I was in a complete daze. I
felt six inches tall. When I got off the plane my friends were there to pick me
up. I was so shocked that they still liked me. I said, ‘I lost in front of you,’
and they said, Hell we don’t care. We are just proud of you for going. We
turned on the TV and there you were, Britt, on TV.’ They gave me a group hug. I
felt alive again and part of this world, but I still feel it (the knockout loss)
to this day.”
What did VanBuskirk do with the purse money? “I went home and paid off a DUI,” she says. “Thank you, Lucia Rijker.”
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