How the Unlikely Duo of Gladys Smith and Toni Tucker Achieved a First for Women’s Boxing in New York

The first known women’s boxing match that took place in the United States occurred at Harry Hill’s Theater in New York on March 16, 1876 when Nell Saunders engaged Rose Harland in a sparring competition officiated by Hill himself, who rewarded Saunders with a narrow decision and a silver  butter dish. Twelve years later, Hattie Leslie and Alice Leary participated in an illegal prizefight in a barn on Navy Island, located off Buffalo’s Niagara River, resulting in the arrests of both combatants as well as their seconds and financial backers. ‘Countess’ Jeanne LaMar had boxed exhibitions in New York and petitioned the state athletic commission for a professional license in 1922 but was denied, though she would obtain one from New Jersey the year after. African American trailblazers Emma Maitland and Aurelia Wheeldin brought their ‘Tea For Two’ stage act, during which they boxed one another for three rounds, to cabarets, ballrooms, and vaudeville theaters not only all around Manhattan but across the globe throughout the 1920s and 30s.

After four years of going toe to toe with the New York State Athletic Commission in grueling legal battles, Lady Tyger Trimiar, Jackie Tonawanda and Cathy Davis were simultaneously granted their professional boxing licenses on September 19, 1978. It would take another ten months for the first officially sanctioned women’s boxing match in New York state history to be contested and, curious as it might seem, none of the three female pugilists who fought so hard for so long to make it happen would be involved.

Lady Tyger had fought her friend and Job Corps coworker ‘Killer’ Diane Corum in an amateur bout at the Audubon Ballroom on May 1, 1974 and, five months later, sparred both future middleweight world champion Vito Antuofermo and Junior Olympic lightweight champion Miles Ruane during an exhibition in Little Italy but would never once box in her home state as a professional. Neither would Jackie Tonawanda, the self-proclaimed ‘Female Ali,’ who became the first women’s boxer to compete in Madison Square Garden on June 7, 1975, albeit in a mixed gender exhibition against kickboxer Larry Rodania. Among the triumvirate of original licensees, only Cathy ‘Cat’ Davis would fight in New York and not until April 11, 1981 when she knocked out Lavonne Ludian at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in upstate Poughkeepsie.

In Jackie Tonawanda’s only verifiable pro bout, she was beaten by Valerie Diane Clark, who fought as ‘Dynamite’ Diane, winner by six-round split decision over ‘the Female Ali’ to capture the WWBA light-heavyweight title and a $300 purse in Louisville, Kentucky on February 16, 1979. Two months later, Clark was scheduled to participate in New York’s inaugural women’s professional boxing match opposite Marge Golden at the War Memorial in Syracuse. Promoter Tony Graziano received the begrudging seal of approval from the New York State Boxing Commission to add the women’s bout to the April 14 card sponsored by the Canastota Boxing Club.

“Why would a woman want to get mixed up in this business?” grouched regional athletic commissioner Tom Rees. “The State Supreme Court told us we have to do this. I don’t really want to get into what I feel about it all. But I think you know,” Rees intimated to Bob Snyder of the Syracuse Herald-Journal. “We’ve got to make the best of a bad situation.”  

It was a situation which was obviously also disagreeable to Carmen Basilio. “I’m against it,” stated the Canastota born and bred two-division world champion, most famous for his pair of fifteen-round wars with Sugar Ray Robinson where they traded the middleweight title back and forth. “Everything’s equal rights nowadays. So why fight it? You’d just end up in the courts or in jail. But would you want to marry some woman who’s been punched in the head too many times?”

Twenty-six-year-old Diane Clark was born in Washington DC but relocated with her family to New York in her pre-teens, graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School and going on to study nursing at John Jay College. Her cousin was an amateur boxer and Clark would spar with him at home. It was with his encouragement that, after a year spent working as a nurse’s aide, she began seeking out a gym where she could train. “The first five I called said they wouldn’t, that they don’t train women,” said Diane, who wound up at the more welcoming confines of Gleason’s Gym, located then on 34^th Street, where she was put through her paces three hours a day, five times a week.

When the trainer who had originally agreed to work with Clark suddenly passed away, she was taken under the wing of Lee Black, a middleweight journeyman who boxed in the mid to late 40s and twice fought Jake LaMotta’s manager and little brother Joey. “Women are very vicious,” insisted Black. “Once in the ring, they may be a better show than the men.” Starting off at welterweight and gradually working her way up to light-heavy, Diane had been competing professionally for three years, mostly in Canada where it was easier to get fights. She compiled an 8-0-1 record along the way, up to and including her recent win over Jackie Tonawanda when she had stepped in as a last-minute replacement for Lillian ‘Wonder Woman’ Wells.

“I feel like we’re special. Before my first fight, I was scared, nervous. I didn’t know how people would take me,” confessed ‘Dynamite’ Diane. “But after, they asked for my autograph. Now they tell me to stay with it. I want to make this grow. If I was embarrassed, there’d be no sense going on.” Clark was hopeful but realistic about her future prospects as a prizefighter. “The commissioner said women may fight until the age of forty,” she said. “With me, if boxing doesn’t go international, maybe I’ll fight to thirty. Then go back to school.”        

All of the commotion surrounding the April 14 Diane Clark/Marge Golden matchup became an anticlimactically moot point when Golden’s pre-fight gynecological exam turned up an unspecified irregularity. With no time to scare up a substitute, Clark was left on the outside of the Syracuse War Memorial looking in. Nancy Sciacca, New York’s only female fight promoter at the time, seized the history-making opportunity and signed middleweights Gladys ‘Bam’ Smith and Toni ‘Leatherneck’ Tucker to square off against one another at the 369^th Regiment Armory in Harlem on July 16.

As her nickname suggests, the 24-year-old Tucker was a three-year veteran of the Marine Corps where she learned to box mostly by sparring with men. She enjoyed her overnight shift patrolling the IND Eighth Avenue subway line from 8pm til 2am as one of over 100 members of Curtis Sliwa’s crimefighting outfit the Magnificent 13, the predecessor to his Guardian Angels, often teaching Kungfu to her comrades.

“Boxing has more contact. Kungfu is more self-defense. You very rarely get to use it,” Tucker reasoned. “The only time I used it was on 42^nd Street. The men over there, they bother young ladies. I was attacked by a man. He wanted to take me to a motel. He kept pulling my arm and wouldn’t let go. So I took his hand and I swung his arm around and pulled it tight, so that if I pulled any tighter his elbow would break. Then he left me alone. He knew I meant business.” Curtis Sliwa knew it too after Toni got a little carried away when the director of the ABC YOU program wanted to see the two spar for the cameras while filming a segment on the Magnificent 13. “I knocked him down and there was blood,” Tucker recounted. “The director yelled, ‘Cut! Cut!’” Rather than get upset, Sliwa was impressed and promised Toni he would be attending her fight.   

A 21-year-old mother of two, Gladys Smith had belonged to a gang in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey, meaning that her taste for fist-fighting was first acquired and satisfied on the streets. Trainer Hilliard Edmund took Smith on as a student at his 8^th Street Gym which had previously welcomed through its doors Newark native Marvin Hagler, Saoul Mamby, and Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, who at the time was still going by Eddie Gregory and, eight months away from unseating WBA world light-heavyweight champion Marvin Johnson, would be sharing the July 16 undercard in Harlem with Toni Tucker and Gladys Smith. Now that she was dedicated to carving out a better life for herself and her two young sons, Smith was optimistic that a victory over Tucker might inspire some of her friends still living the gang life to change their ways as well. Gladys’ good intentions notwithstanding, ‘Leatherneck’ Tucker promised, “I’m going to knock her block off.”

Dressed in camouflage pants, a white t-shirt emblazoned with the Magnificent 13 logo, and the organization’s trademark red beret, Tucker exhibited military-type punctuality by appearing for the weigh-in at the State Athletic Commission offices not one minute later than the appointed time of 11:30am, tipping the scales at 157 pounds. Her opponent, however, was missing in action and feared to be a no-show like she was for a fight in Nova Scotia a few months prior, an infraction that resulted, oddly enough, in the suspension not of Gladys Smith but her trainer Hilliard Edmund by the Nova Scotia Athletic Commission. Because of a mutual agreement between the two entities, the NYSAC would uphold Nova Scotia’s actions against Edmund and prevent him from working Smith’s corner, assuming she turned up at some point.

The suspense was brought to an end two hours later when Gladys finally materialized and weighed in at 160 on the nose. The gynecological exams performed on both Smith and Tucker came back clean and it looked like the fight was on. But no so fast. While Gladys Smith did indeed show up at the 369^th Regiment Armory, she left her mandatory breast protector back home in Newark. Without it she would not be allowed to enter the ring, so an anxiety-inducing round-trip from Harlem to Jersey was undertaken and completed with just twenty minutes to spare before bell time.       

2,500 fans filled the Armory to witness history in the making as Gladys ‘Bam’ Smith and Toni ‘Leatherneck’ Tucker stood in opposing corners, came to center ring for referee Billy Graham’s instructions, touched gloves, and commenced to swinging. Smith was the far busier, not to mention stronger, of the two from the outset, peppering Tucker with left/right combinations throughout the six 2-minute rounds. Surprisingly, fatigue seemed to set in rather quickly for Tucker, who could be seen rolling her mouthpiece around with her tongue from the second round on in an effort to clear passage for the intake of more air.

Her mouthpiece spilled out onto the canvas in the fourth and Toni fumbled around trying to clumsily pick it up and shove it back in with a gloved hand. Since referee Billy Graham neglected to call timeout to allow Tucker to get her bearings, Smith nailed her defenseless foe with three consecutive left hands. Tucker grabbed Gladys in a clinch, holding on for dear life in a desperate attempt to smother the attack. Admonished by the referee, who appeared to be on the verge of stopping the fight, Tucker protested to Graham, “All I’m trying to do is get my mouthpiece back.”

Tucker lasted the distance, but it was Gladys Smith who had her hands raised in victory, one of which grasped a small trophy that was presented to her after the decision was announced. “I have to get in shape,” admitted an overjoyed Smith, who also took home a $400 payout. “I want to fight again. I want to be the champion.”

Gladys’ trainer, Hilliard Edmund, opined, “For two girls, it was an even match. You never know until you get in the ring and now she knows she has to train harder.”

Jack Brami, the assistant matchmaker for Madison Square Garden, was on hand to conduct a scouting mission to find talent worthy of fighting in the world’s most famous arena. Asked whether he felt women qualified based on the bout he had just watched between Gladys Smith and Toni Tucker, Brami remained noncommittal. “Up until now, we have no interest,” he said. “What remains in the future, I don’t know.”

Only a clairvoyant could predict with any degree of accuracy that it would be seventeen years in the future before the Garden would host a women’s boxing match when Kathy Collins outpointed Andrea DeShong over six rounds on August 20, 1996.

To illustrate how far women’s boxing has evolved, we fast forward again to the present day in 2025 as Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano prepare to conclude their trilogy on July 11 right back where it started, at Madison Square Garden. Already having shattered MSG’s metaphorical glass ceiling by becoming the first women to headline the ‘Mecca of Boxing’ on April 30, 2022, this time they will be topping a bill of all-female bouts. 

 

Sources:

Female Boxers (New York Daily Herald, March 17, 1876)

Jackie Tonawanda To Defend Women’s Title (Macon Telegraph, February 15, 1979)

War Memorial Boxing Includes Female Debut (Binghamton Press and Bulletin, April 13, 1979)

Bob Snyder. Women’s Pro Boxing Bout KO’d by Physical Exam (Syracuse Herald-Journal, April 13, 1979)

‘Snyde’ Remarks (Syracuse Herald-Journal, April 14, 1979)

Aaron C. Elson. A Couple of Girls Ring in NYS History Tonight (New York Daily News, July 16, 1979)

Aaron C. Elson. Women’s Bout Nearly KO’d (New York Daily News, July 17, 1979)

N.Y. Hosts Its First Women’s Boxing Match (Central New Jersey Home News, July 17, 1979)

Aaron C. Elson. Bam Gets Nod Over Toni in 6 (New York Daily News, July 17, 1979)

Bob Straetz. It’s No Sport For Women (Poughkeepsie Journal, April 12, 1981)