Like most writers, I am my own harshest critic. Setting my ego aside has never been a problem. Nor is admitting when I’m wrong or that my work isn’t up to snuff. In fact, I can beat myself up pretty good when the occasion calls for it. This happens to be one of those times.
Having said that, it wasn’t that I was factually incorrect
about anything I wrote in my first part of this series—except where the title
is concerned. I originally hedged my bets by calling it A Brief But Pretty
Much Complete History of Women’s Boxing Trading Cards So Far but wound up
dropping the “Pretty Much” from the final version, mostly for the sake of
brevity but also because I was confident in having done my due diligence in terms of
conducting research and relying on basic knowledge.
Mine wasn’t an egregious sin of vanity, assuming I knew it
all, but a modest sin of omission, learning after the fact that there was more
to the story than I thought. Still, a sin is a sin no matter the intent and
must be atoned for. Accuracy and accountability should be two of the hallmarks
any halfway decent writer strives toward.
I hadn’t intended to revisit this topic until enough new
trading card releases provided material sufficient for a sequel. But who knows
when that will be. The sports card industry is going through a massive crisis
of identity, credibility, and sustainability at the moment and, come what may,
will always prioritize baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, mixed
martial arts, hell even golf and auto racing above boxing which, admittedly,
has slowly degraded into an increasingly niche sport with women’s boxing being
a niche within a niche like one of those Russian nesting dolls. With that in
mind, I figured this would be an opportune time to tidy up the unfinished
business carelessly left behind after I got through with the first installment.
Let’s start with Laila Ali, whose rookie card was produced
in Germany for a 2000 edition of Bravo magazine, as I wrote about in part one.
Which is true. I think. Allow me to explain. In my subsequent efforts to track
down the Laila rookie card for my personal collection, I stumbled across three
eBay listings that raised my eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
One was for a complete perforated twelve card sheet—also
featuring the likes of basketball stars Dirk Nowitzki and Dennis Rodman, and tennis
legend Pete Sampras—just as it was originally presented in the magazine. If so
inclined, you are welcome to very carefully rip along the dotted lines to separate
the individual cards from one another. Very cool, but no thanks. Especially not
for approximately 180 USD. Another listing was for the Laila Ali card alone,
which I happily purchased and had sent over from Germany for roughly twelve bucks.
I wasn’t even hit with the extra tariff fee I was warned I would have to pay
before it would be released to me upon delivery.
The third offering was what sent me plunging headfirst down
a rabbit hole I still haven’t managed to find my way out of. It’s one of those
bulk listings I rarely, if ever, bother paying any mind to, the kind which prompts
the potential customer to choose from dozens of items that appear on a drop
down menu for your perusal. The fact that it turned up as a search result for
the very uncommon Laila Ali German Bravo magazine card was reason enough to not
totally disregard this listing (if only out of curiosity, since I had already found
and bought it), but there was one noticeably unique aspect to it that
necessitated further research.
This lot of cards was described as originating from the
Polish version of Bravo magazine, ranging from 1998 to 2004. Not exactly being
well-versed on the subject of European pop culture periodicals, my kneejerk reaction
was to assume that the only difference between the German and Polish publications
was likely the mother tongue into which each was translated. Well, you know
what they say happens when you assume. I’m honestly still not sure if the content
of these sister versions of Bravo are identical other than the language in
which they’re written, but the cards are most definitely unique to each specific
edition. Evidently Bravo magazine has also established a global presence in Brazil,
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Russia,
and Serbia throughout the course of a lengthy history that traces back to the 1950s.
Who knew? Not me. But I digress.
The Polish Laila Ali card is smaller than your regulation trading
card, similar in size to the tobacco cards of old, and was part of a set designed
to look like a deck of playing cards. In other words, completely different from
the German Bravo card. But that wasn’t all. Listed just below the Laila Ali
card was one of Jacqui Frazier-Lyde. This was an even bigger revelation, since
Jacqui has no other card. That I know of. Until just a few weeks ago, I had no
idea that these cards existed. Naturally, I had to have them.
Regarding the confusion as to whether this Polish Bravo card or the German one is Laila’s true rookie, the listing identified the Ali and Frazier cards as having been manufactured in 1998. There’s no way this can be accurate, as Laila didn’t make her pro debut until October 1999 and Jacqui not until four months later, in February of the following year. Oddly enough, another Laila Ali Polish Bravo card popped up for sale on eBay just a few days later, this one claiming it to be from 1999, which further muddies the waters. 1999 would work for Laila Ali, just barely, but not for Jacqui. Because the two cards were created and released in tandem, it makes perfect sense to me that they date to 2001, the year Ali and Frazier fought one another. I’ve tried in vain to validate my hunch. No trading card database or interweb search has turned up any information whatsoever to either confirm or refute my best educated guess and the aforementioned eBay listings are no help as they offer contradictory origin stories. Hopefully one of these days I’ll discover the definitive answer I’m looking for. Until then, who’s to say?
But wait, there’s more. When I received my package from the
seller, there were indeed two cards inside with one being Laila Ali. The other,
however, was not Jacqui Frazier-Lyde. Interestingly enough, the card inserted on
the reverse side of the plastic protector depicted Iwona Guzowska, who fought
from 1999 to 2003 (9-1, 2 KOs) and earned the distinction of being Poland’s
first female world champion boxer, winning three belts at featherweight. By
process of elimination, Guzowska’s 1999 start date also helps dispute 1998 as
the year these cards were supposedly manufactured according to the seller.
Now my interest was piqued to an even higher degree. I
immediately sent the seller a message to notify him of the shipping error. To
his credit, he was genuinely apologetic and promised to make things right by
sending the Frazier card as well as a postage-paid envelope for me to return
the incorrect one. I informed him that I would actually like to keep the
Guzowska card, so we worked out a side deal for that one in addition to another
he had also not gotten around to listing yet of Agnieszka Rylik. Nicknamed
‘Lady Tyson,’ Rylik fought out of Kolobrzeg, Poland and went 17-1 (11 KOs) in a
relatively brief career that spanned just five years, from 2000 to 2005 (shooting
yet another hole in the 1998 and 1999 theories as to these cards’ year of
origin), during which she was a three-time holder of the WIBF super-lightweight
world title. All things considered, the seller’s innocent mistake turned out to
be a happy accident as well as a valuable learning experience for me.
We’re not through with Bravo magazine quite yet. Like I mentioned earlier, and in part one of this story, the Laila Ali rookie card (?) was produced in the German version in the year 2000. Although my research into Bravo failed to shed light on the Polish cards of Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, not to mention their Slavic counterparts, it did reveal the existence of another that had flown under my radar for nearly a quarter-century. Featured in the 2001 Bravo magazine sports card set issued for the German edition was a homegrown superstar in Regina Halmich. Deutschland’s first female world champion, Halmich was boxing’s original million dollar baby, having earned a reported €10 million throughout the course of her thirteen-year hall of fame career (54-1-1, 16 KOs).
Regina Halmich and Mia St. John have a few things in common. Both were world champion boxers, both were Playboy cover girls, and both have trading cards. In addition to the 2007 Upper Deck Spectrum of Stars, 2011 Leaf Muhammad Ali, and 2024 Topps Chrome cards of St. John that I noted in part one, she was also featured in the overlooked 2010 Razor Pop Century and 2011 Leaf Award Winners sets. Mia has also been objectified several times in the Benchwarmers series, a brand of trading cards which superficially fetishizes women and is therefore one I don’t care to collect. But to each their own.
Our globetrotting effort to tie up loose ends in the world of women’s boxing trading cards leads us now to the Land of the Rising Sun where we add another stamp to our imaginary passport and thumb through a stack of back issues of BBM (Base Ball Magazine). This Japanese publication began producing sets of trading cards in 2008 that extended beyond the confines of the baseball diamond and into other sporting venues, including the boxing ring. Female prizefighters Nana Yoshikawa (aka Nana Nogami, a short-term WBO flyweight world champion), Satsuki Ito (spelled Itoh on her cards), Tomomi Takano (a former world title challenger who fought five times in 2025), and Yuko Kuroki (a two-weight world champion at 102 and 105 who dropped a split decision to Sarah Bormann last November) were featured on multiple cards in BBM sets called Real Venus and Shining Venus between 2009 and 2017, alternately depicting the women in boxing gear and stylish casual wear.
Boxing and MMA crossover fighters Holly Holm, Cris Cyborg, and Claressa Shields were discussed in part one for having cards dedicated to their appearances in either the octagon or the squared circle or, pertaining only to Shields and Cyborg, both. One name that failed to cross my mind was ‘Meatball’ Molly McCann, the cage fighting combatant who is signed to Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing and won her fourth prizefight in impressive fashion over Ashleigh Johnson a mere two weeks after part one of my story was published. Dating back to her first card in a 2021 Panini set, ‘Meatball’ Molly has had her likeness adorn a plethora of rectangular cardboard as a UFC competitor, including nostalgic throwbacks to the old Rated Rookie cards and Studio portrait designs from the Donruss junk wax baseball sets I grew up collecting.
Speaking of Cris Cyborg, in part one I wrote about how the one and only boxing card she has is the Hit Like a Girl insert which comes from Leaf’s 2025 Women of Sport. I neglected to mention Hilary Swank, who obviously isn’t a boxer but did play one on the silver screen, which qualified the Million Dollar Baby star for inclusion in the same subset.
Portrayed by skateboarder turned actor Jason Lee in Kevin
Smith’s 1995 movie Mallrats, Brodie Bruce acknowledges his ignorance upon
learning that very morning that none other than Stan Lee is doing a signing at his
beloved comic book shop in the local mall that same day by lamenting, “I must
be slipping in my old age.” My reaction was pretty much the same when I found
out only recently that the pride of El Paso, prizefighting siblings Jennifer
and Stephanie Han, were featured in the second series of Zia Boxing cards,
created by John Suazo of Albuquerque and released last September. Because they
are independently manufactured and distributed, with no Zia Boxing website or
secondary marketplace options available to purchase them, I have reached out to
Suazo via email and social media about obtaining the cards with no reply at all
as of this writing.
With that, we conclude this chapter in the saga of women’s boxing trading cards, one which will unquestionably continue to develop. You learn something new every day if you look in the right places or, just as often, in the wrong places too. Until next time…
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