In case you haven’t seen the headlines, Claressa
Shields and Marlen
Esparza will have the distinct honor of fighting for the gold in the 2012
London Olympics. While these young
American ladyboxers will certainly be proud to sport the red, white, and blue
of the U.S. flag, they will be representing more than just America this summer;
they’ll be throwing punches for women everywhere. As the 2012 Games close in, excitement over
the debut of women’s boxing as an official Olympic sport is at an all-time
high.
To celebrate this globally historic moment, Overlook Press has
published THE
BOXER’S HEART: A Woman Fighting
by Kate Sekules (see book trailer here). This brilliantly candid memoir tells the story of how a young
writer moves to New York City and rises through the ranks at the famed Gleason’s Gym to box
professionally. Competing in the debut
women’s bout at the Legendary Blue
Horizon in Philadelphia, Sekules is very much a part of the female
fighter’s legacy.
Join Kate Sekules this evening, June 1, at BookCourt in Brooklyn for a
reading and discussion at 7 PM. For those of you unable to attend, please enjoy this excerpt from THE BOXER’S HEART, which describes Kate's first day of training at Gleason's.
I’m sure Terry chose this
picturesque time of day deliberately—prime pro training time, before the
amateurs and “white-collar boxers” get
here. In the shadowboxing mirror, I see me jumping rope surrounded by
trainers with their fighters, fighters
with their trainers, and I feel at home, forgetting that I am different and that maybe I can’t have that. Presently,
I’ll find out where
the boxertrainer frame
warps and where it remains solid when the boxer is me; but just now, I’m
enjoying the new sights, new possibilities. I never imagined there’d be
palpable love here.
Everyone is wobbly, because the
mirror, far from being fog-free
top-to-toe, is the Mylar funhouse kind,
has dried sweat on it, and is duct-taped to the wall in sections, so in this
one I’m giraffe, in that one, elephant.
Having a fat fit in this
thing is impossible. Anyhow, I’m already
away on an I’m-a-real-boxer-now trip, since I’m good at jumping rope, turning
it with flicks of the wrist, alternating feet, cross- ing arms, in a loose
rope-in-front style I copied from a skinny Rasta who trains at Allstars, the amateur
gym I attend in London. Boxers glance my
way. Someone says, “You done that before.” I’m glad when
Terry reappears and we go into the
old Crosby Street routine, which seems inferior now to the boxers’ training
sessions, though the gist of it differs not at all. Like Stephan said, all of
boxing is four punches, jab, right, hook, and uppercut. And chess is six pieces, and computing is two
digits, one and zero. It’s what you do with them. I shadowbox. Shadowbox- ing
relies on imagination. Your reflection is your opponent, or when you do it in
the ring, you raise a phantom opponent to dance in front of you. The boxers
whip their torsos side to side, have their heads on springs, catch a punch with
a glove, make a rib shield of their elbows, fold themselves down, wrap
themselves up, eat the whole ring in one shuffle and step. It looks beautiful.
I, by contrast, have glue on my soles
and lead in my arms. I feel exposed, the only person here with no clue what an opponent is like. Padwork is better.
Terry brings the mitt down for each strike so I sound major, as loud as
the guys. I’ve got my guard up, ready to defend against ridicule, but instead a
man with an early Beatles moptop comes
over and watches intently.
“She notta sa bad,” he tells Terry.
“Kate’s cool,” he agrees, holding
the pads for another one-two.
“She gonna fight?”
“We’ll see.”
“I want to,” I add between
combinations.
“She oughdda fight. She hit hard.”
I love this guy. He is maybe
five-foot-three. His hands, encased in silver tape, look like they’re wearing
badly forged medieval armor and he has deep crow’s-feet from his sole facial
expression—a smile to melt winter.
“Yeah, woman! You godda fight.” We
continue padwork to the bell, but Terry doesn’t introduce us.
The bell is king. At the Manhattan
gyms, it was a door-buzzer sound from a
red box with little flashing bulbs like a lie detector. Here it’s
a bigger box mounted on an iron pillar with a piercing elec- tronic bweep bweep
bweep, and three traffic signal lights: green for work, amber for thirty
seconds to go, and red heralding the one-minute rest. Everything, but everything, in professional
boxing occurs in three-minute increments.
Everything, that is, except women’s bouts, where the bell goes after two
minutes. (Amateur boxing also differs— from one-minute rounds for juniors to three
minutes for the open category.) After three rounds of padwork, I move on to the
heavybag, or I try to. They are all in use, pummeled till they swing like
corpses on their chains, half a dozen slim leather cylinders, a fat canvas one,
and an obese black one called SuperBag. When my turn comes, Terry stands beside
me and tells me what punches to throw in what order, and again I feel uncomfortably
green. Hey, I scold myself, these are pro boxers, not competition; learn from
them. I use them as patterns on the double-end bag and the speed bag, getting
more from them than from Terry. He’s training me a little differently now, the
empha- sis more on form than aerobic conditioning, and I am grateful for the
close attention and proud to be first and only female he’s brought to
Gleason’s, but I can’t help noticing he is distracted. What he is here, after
all, is a boxer.
“Terry, will I be able to spar
soon?” I ask.
“I think we can do that,” he says.
“Who will I spar with?” “We’ll find
you someone.”
I can’t admit this to Terry, but I
still don’t fully understand what sparring is. At least I know it’s practice
fighting, but I don’t get how you gauge how far to go, how hard to hit, or how
the trainers regulate the action, and the action here isn’t making it any
clearer. Three rings— the fourth belongs to Johnny Rodz’s Unpredictable School
of Pro Wrestling—are alive with the sounds of sparring: guttural exhalations,
slapped leather, stentorian admonitions from the ropes. It’s the first time
I’ve seen fighting up close, and the noises are squishy and snuffly, nothing
like the clear metallic cracks on movie soundtracks. When someone connects with
an uppercut, there’s a muted splash. A blow to the head clicks on the headgear,
or is a wet rag on the face. Patterns form in the breath whenever a punch
derails it from the engine regularity—whiffle begets snort, pchew-pchew begets
hmph—and their
satin trunks swish and their boots
bang through the canvas and make a blunt
drum of the hollow ring. “Get him
back, Jemique!” “Body! Body! BODEEE!” Trainers are furious spouses, taking it
personally when their fighter does a dumb move. Then one session will suddenly
pull the whole gym around it like a birthday
cake, and the yelling keeps
climbing to higher registers, the pace
escalates, every punch spraying a sweat fountain; someone bleeds; everyone
screams advice; until a Latino guy with a walking stick—his name is Sinbad—
just lets rip, topping out the racket: “Ayeeeee! Ayeeeee! Ayeeeee!”
When a session is done, the
combatants embrace. Even if it looked
like war, they do this, and the pack dissolves and the next pair steps in. I am
thrilled by the whole thing. It doesn’t strike me as vio- lent. I see it as an
abstruse language that I know slightly, as if I were in Tokyo after a year of
Japanese lessons—my accent is convincing, I smile and nod, but, frankly, I
haven’t a clue what they’re going on about. It is clear that the only way to
get the subtleties of sparring is to spar, but even then, the rules may bend
for me. I want no special treatment. In London, I learned to play pool to burst
the ennui of pub blokes when a girl stepped up to the table—the way they
wouldn’t even bother watching a girl’s shots. I thought beating them at their
own game struck a blow for all women, and I thought so all over again with Sam
and my softball swing, and with Sam not wanting to be “pussy-whipped.” Now I’m thinking
it again. Let me spar, let me learn, let
me show what
women can do. This
is funny, because nobody’s telling me I can’t.
