Despite boxing one of the oldest pastimes known to human kind, the woman’s sport is still very much in its infancy.
According to women’s boxing archieve WBAN, the first female boxing bout was staged in London in 1720 but, for a number of reasons, the sport has not grown in the same manner that it has for their male counterparts since.
The reason for this is simple; acceptance. We live in a society that is still less a century on from the time when women were given the right to vote in elections and, while nowhere near as seriously as before, the indoctrinated notion that a woman’s role is solely to be mothers and housewives and should never work in dangerous or gruelling environments still exists.
Five-time woman’s world welterweight champion Jane Couch MBE encountered more hurdles than Colin Jackson when starting out as a young fighter in Fleetwood.
“I saw a documentary about women boxing in American and it was just being accepted over there, this was about 16 years ago, so I kind of assumed that I could just go to the local gym and train and be accepted myself,” she recalled.
“I started boxing at the Fleetwood gym, but the owner wasn’t too keen on it and made it quite clear that he wasn’t willing to help me and teach me. I went to one well known gym in Manchester but I was turned away there and made to feel really unwelcome.”
Jane travelled around several gyms looking for somewhere to develop her skills but it wasn’t until she met Bristol-based trainer Tex Woodward that she found someone who would take her in based on her ability rather than her gender.
“I was boxing on an unlicensed show in Wigan and Tex was there as one of the officials and said to me ‘if you come to my gym I don’t care if you are a woman, if you want to learn to box then I’ll teach you’ and he was the only one that really gave me the time.
“I had to leave Fleetwood, where I’m born and bred, and move to Bristol. I had to give up a lot really, I gave up my family and friends where I lived and made a new life for myself.”
In 1998 Jane had a much bigger fight on her hands than the ones she’d tasted in the ring. She’d boxed regularly on bills in America but was refused a licence by the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBofC). The “Fleetwood Assassin” decided that she had no option to take the board to court and won a landmark case on the grounds of sexual discrimination.
She said: “I had to take it to the High court first and then onto the European [court] and it was written into European law in the end that what they were doing was wrong. If I hadn’t have been good at the sport, I wouldn’t have bothered but I’d just won my first world title and I was boxing on some of the biggest bills in the world, same bills as Lennox Lewis, Naseem Hamed and Roy Jones Jnr so if I was not very good at the job they probably would have had a case but because I was doing so well and the Americans and the Europeans had all accepted me, I just thought that I should be able to do it in my own country if I wanted to.”
London-based former lawyer Laura Saperstein entered the realms of professional boxing some years after Couch’s court room success but she says that problems women face when starting out have far from dissipated.
“It was really difficult when I started,” said Laura, who now boasts a pro record of seven wins and no defeats. “A hell of a lot of girls would train for a fight and be told they were getting a fight then just nothing would happen and a lot of it was because men just didn’t want us there.
“A lot of girls just got fed up and left. I set up this website, boxergirl.net, which was designed so that we didn’t have to rely on matchmakers because I got really frustrated waiting and decided I was going to find my own fights. I didn’t know what problems I was going to cause because I wasn’t really aware how amateur boxing worked and that it was an absolute no no, so I got a lot of people’s backs up. I had a lot conflict and a lot people who didn’t want me around.”
Despite Jane Crouch’s success and the depiction of her as boxing’s own Emmeline Pankhurst figure, some are still sceptical about the impact her landmark case has had on women’s boxing.
Mickey Vann is a former star class referee who officiated 157 world title fights. He is also one of the sport’s most outspoken objectors of women’s boxing.
“Jane Couch took the board to court,” Vann said. “She hardly got any fights here [in the UK], nobody wanted to know her and the women that have taken up boxing since, you’ll be lucky if it’s gone into double figures as professionals and where are the big shows with them on? Where has it taken off? 11 years later it’s just back to where it started. There has been no big rush to see them all, so who needs it?”
He continues: “It’s not a feminine thing to do, it’s not a feminine sport. A woman is second class when it comes to sport. She can’t run as fast, she can’t jump as high, she can’t swim as fast, she can’t lift as much, she can’t throw a javelin as far, she can’t do anything as well as a man.”
Respected British trainer and promoter Jim Evans has been involved with the sport for over 60 years and, like Vann, he has no desire to see female pugilists.
Evans said: “When I was a boy, women were to be cherished and protected not stuck in boxing rings. I’ve no hang ups about women doing boxing training, in fact I even train a little girl in my gym. But I don’t think women should be in the ring taking punishment to the head and face.
“Basically it might not make a lot of sense but I’m just anti-women’s boxing. Girls shouldn’t be walking around with a cauliflowered ears and flat noses. The girl who was the world champion from Germany [Regina Halmich], when you see her full face she’s a pretty girl, but when you see her profile she’s got a flatter nose than Charlie Magri. Who would want to see their sister or their daughter walking around like that?”
Jane Couch counters, “Old men like Mickey Vann think women should be at home washing up. It’s just the way they were brought up and it’s really sad. I used to get annoyed with it but I got to the point where I thought ‘they are just like me, they are entitled to their opinions but if I don’t tell ‘em how to live their lives they shouldn’t tell me how to live mine.
“They are just ignorant these people. Saying women shouldn’t box is like saying women shouldn’t be allowed to play football or tennis. Okay maybe they [women] aren’t as quick as men, but you can’t say a woman can’t play tennis ‘cause a man’s game is faster. The woman’s game of tennis is still good. It’s like saying that a man shouldn’t ballet dance ‘cause it’s a woman’s thing. If a man wants to ballet dance, let him bloody ballet dance.”
However, Mickey Vann and Jim Evan’s dislike of the female version of the sport isn’t solely rooted an old fashioned belief of what role a woman should play in society, they believe that allowing women to fight is to risk the existence of the sport as a whole.
There was 1465 recorded ring fatalities between the years 1732 and 2007 and, in 1991, the same year in which former Commonwealth middleweight champion Michael Watson was seriously injured in his clash with Chris Eubank, Lord Taylor of Gryfe presented a bill to the House of Commons proposing that professional boxing should be banned. The sport survived by just two votes.
“Now just say that a girl died in the ring, and it’ll happen one of these days, then quite rightly people will say ‘ban girls boxing’,” Evans opined. “If we went to the House of Commons again about banning boxing after a girl had died, it wouldn’t get through next time.
“A few years ago Christie Martin was due to defend her world title against someone [Maria de las Nieves Garcia] and the girl [Nieves Garcia] failed the medical. She was 31 years of age and five months pregnant. It’s absolutely shameful. If that woman had have got in the ring and let’s say she haemorrhaged from a body shot and miscarried in the ring, they would have tried to shut us all down. All boxers need protecting, men and boys, but girls need protecting more than anybody.”
“But the test worked,” insists Jane Couch. “They made a big deal of it, but she didn’t get in the ring pregnant because the test caught her out and that’s what the test is there for. You have a urine test or a blood test the week before and a urine test the day before.
“We all know the risks. When I signed a professional contract I knew 100 percent what could happen to me. If you are prepared to take the risks it shouldn’t make any difference if you’re a man or a woman.
“It was proved in my case that a woman doesn’t punch as hard as a man, so it evens it out. A woman’s skull isn’t as thick but the power of a ten stone woman like me isn’t the same as a ten stone man. If Ricky Hatton punches someone in the head he could kill ‘em whereas if I punched someone in the head I’d just hurt ‘em and that’s what people don’t get.
She added: “You don’t get many injuries in women’s boxing, particularly in the amateurs with the headguards and the big gloves.”
The Olympic Dream ********************* On the official website of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) it states “The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.”
So with those values in mind, coupled with the fact that men have been boxing in the Olympic games since 1904, it seems odd then that the IOC still to this day fails to accept that women should be allowed to box as an Olympic event.
In 2005 the IOC decided against including women’s boxing in the 2008 Beijing games and have since put off a decision as to whether it will be included in the 2012 games in London until August this year.
“I think it’s really appalling that the IOC have left it this late to make a decision,” said Laura Saperstein. “We’ve got all these girls out there whose dream it is to box in the Olympics and they just don’t have any idea if it’s going to happen in 2012 or not and 2016 is a long way away.
“Not only is it wrong to make people wait this long, but it’s just ridiculous. They should have been in development camps for the Olympics years ago like the boys were, not five minutes before and that’s not going to do us any favours. How are the girls going to look compared to the boys when the boys have had years of development and the girls just get it in the final year or two?”
Jane Couch believes that if women really want to box in the Olympics they should do what she did and take the IOC on in the courts.
“If somebody had the bottle to stand up and take them to court then they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on because it’s been into European law and it’s been proven that it’s no more dangerous for a woman to box than it is for a man,” she said.
“I don’t understand why they are dragging their feet and I don’t understand why someone from the ABA or someone from the Amateur Association hasn’t took them on, because they’d win.”
Despite the views of naysayers, the obvious dangers boxing is fraught with and fact that Olympic acceptance has not yet arrived, it cannot be denied that the women’s version of the sport is on the up.
Earlier this year the ABAE reported a whopping 148 young women had applied to take part in this years female championships. Participation is swelling in a similar manner in other parts of the world also, particularly in the US and German where women’s fights can be viewed regularly on television.
If the IOC does decide in favour of allowing women to box at the 2012 games then that should be the start of the women’s game growing to the next level of its potential.
As Laura Saperstein said, “The sport definitely has a future. The amateur side has grown a hell of a lot and will continue to grow rapidly.”
