Talking with Women's Boxing Trailblazer Cora (Webber) Degree About Fighting For What's Right

 

“You know, this is a man’s world. We live in a man’s world. We have to constantly defend what we believe in,” Cora Degree, formerly Webber, said to me during our recent talk. “But that’s a good thing, because we’ve proven ourselves quite a bit from where it was.” She’s referring to the evolution of women’s boxing and the significant role she played in its advancement throughout the course of a twenty-year career.

“It’s come a long way, and I’m a pioneer, so I can appreciate it even more now because I can look back and see how we got all of this started. If it wasn’t for a lot of us, it probably wouldn’t be where it is today. The women are accepted more and more,” she says proudly, while acknowledging that growing pains are a natural and necessary part of the maturation process. “It’s not like we made millions. I got $3,000 for fighting 15 rounds. What fighter today do you think would even do that?,” she asks rhetorically. Just as previous eras of female prizefighters blazed trials that paved the way for Cora’s generation, the hardships she and her peers literally and figuratively fought through in the 1970s and 80s splintered down doors for the next wave of indomitable women to come crashing through.

“To me, it wasn’t about the money,” Cora insists. “I just loved the sport and I wanted to show people we could do it.” Her own personal journey from a teenaged runaway to International Women’s Boxing Hall of Famer to a coach and mentor for kids is a testament to the fact that, with intense enough focus, drive, and perseverance, not to mention the iron-willed determination to apply all of those characteristics to the given task at hand, anything is possible. Not just in boxing, but in life.       

“I started in martial arts when I was like 12 years old, because I wanted to learn to protect myself because I had a rough childhood. A really rough childhood,” Cora told me. “So, we’ve got to know how to protect ourselves or, God knows, we could be in a grave at an early age.” Competing as a novice in the karate discipline known as kumite provided the angst-ridden pre-teen with its own unique challenges. “Being a white belt, I didn’t know how to pull my punches, so they would disqualify me,” said Degree. “I was already a tomboy, playing softball and football with the brothers and always outside playing some kind of sport. Me and my sister Dora always filled in when the guys didn’t have enough football players.”

Cora grew up with her identical twin sister Dora and their four siblings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with their supportive mother and abusive father until she finally decided she couldn’t stick around and take the mistreatment anymore. “When I was fifteen, I ran away from home because I didn’t want to go back home and get another beating. So I split,” she says. “It took them three years to find me but the only thing I regret was doing that to my mom, making her worried to death. But she pretty much understood. Enough is enough. Enough beatings. If one kid got a spanking, all six of us got one. And it really wasn’t a spanking. It was more like getting your butt beat by a man.”

Settling in Los Angeles, Cora took up kickboxing and would soon after make a name for herself in the women’s boxing scene that was beginning to gain serious momentum, especially on the west coast. “I just kept training and training and fighting whenever I could get a fight,” said Degree, whose first professional outing was a four-round decision over another accomplished kickboxer turned prizefighter, Lilly Rodriguez.  

Cora’s next fight would be a momentous, though anticlimactic, one. On February 11, 1979, she was matched against bantamweight phenom Squeaky Bayardo in Hawthorne, California as part of the first ever all-women’s boxing card which also featured Shirley ‘Zebra Girl’ Tucker in one of the other two prelims and the always popular Lady Tyger taking on Carlotta Lee in the main event.  

“I won that fight,” Cora stated defiantly when I asked her about it. “In the middle of the fight, I hit her with a straight right hand and she put me in a headlock. I could not break free. It took the referee like two minutes to break us. At the end of the third round, the beginning of the fourth, they announced the fight was going to be five rounds. It was supposed to be six rounds, so they ended up giving me a draw. But I won that fight. I had only had one fight and she had maybe seven or eight if I remember right and she was top ranked, maybe number two in the world, and I beat her.” In the 2023 documentary Right To Fight, Bayardo told a story about her manager and trainer Dee Knuckles betting on Webber and trying to convince Squeaky to take a dive for the under the table payoff. An offer, by the way, Bayardo refused. Cora hadn’t heard about that but she didn't seem too surprised. She’s been around long enough to know what a backstabbing, cut-throat business boxing can be.      

Carlotta Lee, who had dropped a decision to Lady Tyger in Hawthorne and had also been a kickboxer, was Cora’s next opponent for what would be another all-female show promoted by Sammy Sanders, this time at the LA Sports Arena on July 13, 1979. “I went in there and fought eight rounds. I won every round, and won the California State championship,” remembers Degree. The super-featherweight title wasn’t all Cora would get out of winning that fight. “He (Sanders) gave me $800 like he promised and I went out the next day and bought me a 250 Yamaha Enduro dirt bike, which was street legal. And I was hooked. It was easy for me.”

What wasn’t so easy was putting her undefeated record to the test against Women’s World Lightweight Champion Lady Tyger in a non-title fight in 1981. Following a tactical six-round skirmish, Cora’s unbeaten streak would remain intact. “It went the distance. I won the fight. It was a good boxing match because she was a technical fighter too. I just outboxed her that day,” said Degree, whose admiration for Lady Tyger runs deep. “I give Tyger her props. I love that girl to death. She helped a lot of people. She was there in the beginning, and if it wasn’t for her and some of us, it (women’s boxing) wouldn’t have gone really anywhere else. My hats off to Lady. She’s good people too. She’s down to earth. I really like that girl. She helped women’s boxing so much. She really did.”

Cora expressed the appreciation she had for everyone she stepped into the ring with and that there were never any hard feelings. “We have a job to do, go in there and do the best you can do. Before and after, you give them respect. You don’t judge them, you do what you’ve got to do,” she philosophized. “I was never like that, man. I’m old fashioned, you know, I respect everybody. I’m good and you’re good and let’s go in there and do the best we can do and prove ourselves. Build it up and build it up and keep fighting for what’s right.”

After extricating her sister from their terrible living situation back home in Florida, the twins were eventually able to reunite in Los Angeles. “Dora came up one year. I finally got her out of Fort Lauderdale and got her out of trouble, and I trained her and took her to a friend of mine,” Cora recalled. Degree reminisced enthusiastically about the many roughhouse sparring sessions she and Dora would engage in at the Olympic Gym, sharing the same space with the likes of the Baltazar brothers, Frankie and Tony, Danny ‘Little Red’ Lopez, and Salvador Sanchez. “We were there all the time. We had a lot of wars there with a lot of different people,” recounts Cora. “We would spar fifteen rounds, twenty rounds a day. We ran seven miles a day, six days a week. We ran the hills. We were old school. We’re old-time fighters. That heavy bag is your bread and butter.”

(Cora and Dora with Smokin' Joe Frazier)

Following in her sister’s footsteps in more than ways than one in 1983, Dora would debut by notching a second-round stoppage of Toni Lear Rodriguez, who Cora had outpointed in Salt Lake City a little over three and a half years earlier. Meanwhile, Cora hadn’t been in the ring since beating Lady Tyger two years prior and wouldn’t see action again until 1986 when she would take on the pride of Waterville, Maine, Laurie Holt, in a history-making fifteen-round title fight with the vacant IWBA world super-featherweight championship on the line.

“I showed up because I was young and I was prideful but I was sick in that fight. She won the first six rounds,” concedes Cora, who came out on the wrong end of a split decision in the high altitude of Denver for her first defeat. “I won rounds seven to fifteen easily. I totally outboxed her,” she was quick to add. “I was a technical fighter and I took her to school after that and it took me that long just to warm up. The people just wanted a brawl. They didn’t really understand about the art of boxing. They just wanted two pitbulls to go at it. I don’t take nothing away from her, but I won that fight. Easy fight because I wouldn’t stand there and brawl with her. I outboxed her and outsmarted her.”

Cora feels that the decision going against her was a de facto punishment for refusing to sign a long-term contract with the fight’s promoter. Why would the security of such an arrangement not appeal to her, you might wonder? “Because they wanted to own you,” she explains. “You have to do that or else they can cause you a lot of losses, they can cost you money, and they want to rule you. And I’m not like that. I told them ‘No, I’m staying a free agent.’ That’s how they try to control fighters. Once you sign a contract, you’re obligated to them and they can sue you and they can stop you from doing so much. And I said, ‘No, I’m not signing my frickin’ life away to nobody.’ Because it’s all about money and who owns who. And it ain’t really ever going to change. The root of evil is money and the love for money.”

Dora would score a TKO victory over Betty ‘Mean Jean’ Garner five months after Cora’s loss to Laurie Holt but neither one of them would step between the ropes again until eleven years later. Degree contends that the frustration of promised fights falling through and opportunities dwindling down to nothing paled in comparison to the continued resistance of the general public and mainstream media to view women’s boxing as a legitimate sport.

“Even when I started boxing back then, they would throw matches together like mud wrestling, girls in bikinis, and that would just put another damper on it. Because then the guys would think it was all like that,” Cora elaborated. “That’s where the men’s mindset was, so we had to constantly fight to prove ourselves and show them we can be as good as the men. If not better. And we are better than some of the men fighters and we proved it. Then there was nobody for a while, then Christy Martin came along and the girls started coming along and it just picked it back up.”

The 1990s revival of women’s boxing, precipitated by the aforementioned emergence of Christy Martin onto the worldwide stage, not only opened the floodgates for a new era of rising stars such as Jane Couch, Lucia Rijker, Regina Halmich, Ann Wolfe, Layla McCarter, Sumya Anani, Chevelle Hallback, Laura Serrano, Alicia Ashley, and Laila Ali to name just a few, but provided an open invitation for the return of a few familiar faces from the recent past like welterweight standout Britt VanBuskirk and the Webber sisters.

After embarking on their joint comeback, Cora and Dora would share the bill together on two all-women’s boxing cards, the first of which took place at the appropriately named Lady Luck Casino in Lula, Mississippi on October 24, 1997. Unfortunately, Lady Luck did not smile on Cora that night and defending IBA world featherweight champion Bonnie Canino walked away with the split decision and her title belt. Dora, however, had her hand raised at the end of her six-rounder against then-unbeaten Jane Couch, the future Hall of Famer who would shortly thereafter make history as the first licensed female boxer in Great Britain after emerging victorious over the BBBofC in a lengthy court battle.   

Dora would prove her win over Couch was no fluke when the two squared off again three months later on another all-women’s show in Atlantic City and Webber’s second consecutive victory over the ‘Fleetwood Assassin’ would earn her not only bragging rights but the vacant IWBF world super-lightweight title. Both Webber sisters could have been crowned world champions on the same night, but they were denied this watershed moment when Cora suffered yet another split decision defeat, this time to Zulfia Kutdyusova with the IWBF world lightweight title up for grabs.   

“When I fought in Atlantic City, almost every girl on that card came in overweight. Let me say half of them. Except me. Seven or eight of them came in overweight. Even Dora,” Degree told me. “I took the girls out the night before because they gave us several hours to lose the weight. Not me, but them. So, I took them out and we ran probably six, seven miles. My fight was at 135. When we went to re-weigh in, I weighed in at 122 pounds. I’m telling you, my corner could have killed me. But I didn’t let it stop me. It was a hard fight and she was bigger than me. I lost a split decision but it is what it is. I still went out there and performed good. I don’t really see it as a loss. I did the best I could. So, I might have lost on paper, but I didn’t really lose.”

Just as the sisters had a common opponent in Toni Lear Rodriguez during the first act of their parallel boxing careers, Dora had fought Kutdyusova previously in this second incarnation. That bout had occurred on Kutdyusova’s home soil and Cora recounted for me some tense moments Dora had experienced in Moscow. “She (Dora) said when she would go and do her road work, they used to take her back to the hotel with firearms at her back,” said Degree. “She just took off running and whatever area she was in, you weren’t allowed to go leave the hotel. She took off running and she said they brought her back with weapons drawn. Life’s a journey. It’s all about how well you handle it.”

(Cora with Sugar Ray Robinson)

Lasting a little over two decades in total duration, Cora’s stop and start prizefighting journey reached its final port of call on February 20, 1999 at Madison Square Garden of all places when she lost an eight-round decision to undefeated (16-0) Melissa Del Valle on the Felix Trinidad/Pernell Whitaker undercard. “Well, we all know Don King was all about owning people and money,” was all she had to say on the subject of the show’s infamous promoter. As for getting to compete in the ‘Mecca of Boxing,’ Cora reminisced, “Madison Square Garden was really big, lots of famous people and, you know, some rowdy. But it was a great experience and I met a lot of cool people. I was mostly about business and the flight home was early the next morning, but it was a great honor being selected to fight there.”

Four months later, Dora also hung up the gloves for good following her second straight defeat at the hands of Sumya Anani (on another all-female card, incidentally) but the sisters still maintain a strong and lasting presence in the boxing community. These days, Cora and Dora coach and mentor as many as fifty kids at a time, from the age of four years old and up, at DogHouse Boxing & Fitness in Ocala, Florida.

“Every age bracket is in that gym. We treat everybody the same whether they’re going to compete or not. No matter what, I teach them discipline and respect. Make them a better person,” said Cora with regard to her personal mission statement. “Even if they don’t compete, they’re going to be a good person in life because they’re going to understand the hard work and discipline and loyalty it takes to accomplish things. Once you set them straight and they start doing good, their schoolwork is good, the parents are happy, the frustration is gone and they’re a much better person than they were before they came in. The kids are comfortable because they find somebody that cares and gives them direction. The kids want that and they don’t have that. Kids today need to be brought back down to earth. They don’t know what it’s like. They think they do but they really don’t.”

And if anybody should know, it’s Cora. “I’ve been coaching ever since I was boxing because you’re always coaching somebody. I’ve got over 55 years’ experience. I always tell them mind over matter. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Clint Eastwood, he always used to say that,” she remarked. “You’ve got to adapt to things that happen inside the ring and overcome if you get nailed or you get knocked on your butt. You get up and prevail from that. Go back to your basics. You don’t have to be fancy and cocky and try to prove to everybody that you’ve got a great style. That stuff gets you knocked on your butt. Go back to your basics and overcome. Some do and some don’t. They might look good in the gym but you go and actually fight and everything’s out the window. Everybody’s different. You’ve got to know your fighter.”    

Right around the time we spoke, Cora was preparing to take fifteen of her students to compete at the Golden Gloves. She has worked as a professional “cut man” and just took her exam to become a licensed referee. “Now I have to do clinicals, hands-on stuff,” Cora explained. “Learn how to work the glove inspection table, sit ringside to learn how to judge a fight, then get in the ring to ref. It’s a process and I’ve got to go through the motions.”

Cora is clearly enjoying what she’s doing and taking nothing for granted. “I’m retired, so I’m just doing what I like,” she said. “Some people are in it for the money. It’s a business. Not me. I’m in it for the love and the discipline it takes to do the right thing. That’s how I look at it.”

Cora and Dora Webber are both members of the International Women's Boxing Hall of Fame, inducted in 2022 and 2021 respectively.