AMERICA AT LARGE: One afternoon two summers ago I found myself in Los Angeles' Staples Center, where Shane Mosley and Oscar De La Hoya would battle for the world welterweight championship in the main event of a star-studded boxing show a night later. On the day of the weigh-in, I was walking through the bowels of the building in search of a discreet spot to light up a cigarette when I ran into Lucia Rijker, the Dutchwoman who then, as now, was widely regarded as the top female boxer in the world.
Although she lives in LA, where she works at the Wild Card gym under the tutelage of Steve Collins' old trainer, Freddie Roach, Rijker had not been invited to box on the card in her adopted hometown. When I asked her why, she laughed and replied "because my tits aren't big enough".
That seemingly flippant reply was only half in jest. Mia Rosales St John, a glamorous Californian whose transformation from bantam-to-featherweight owed much to the enhancement of silicone implants, was boxing on the Mosley-De La Hoya bill, and by the purest of coincidences she happened to be featured, au naturel, in an issue of Playboy then on the newsstands.
Two years later, Rijker is still undefeated, but no closer then than now to an oft-discussed dream match-up against her richer, more famous, albeit probably less talented counterpart, Christy Martin. And while on one hand the feminine side of boxing seems stronger than ever (there are now amateur World Championships, and women's boxing is on track to become an official Olympic sport), its credibility is unlikely to be bolstered by the widespread exposure it is slated to receive next Wednesday night when Fox television airs its "Celebrity Boxing" special.
In one corner, the network has lined up Tonya Harding, the one-time Ice Princess who gained widespread notoriety through her involvement in the attempted kneecapping of eventual Olympic silver medallist Nancy Kerrigan just prior to the 1994 US figure skating trials. Harding was originally scheduled to be opposed by Amy Fisher, the so-called "Long Island Lolita", who did a stretch in the penitentiary for her involvement in the killing-for-hire of the wife of her middle-aged lover, Joey Buttafuco.
When the New York state parole board denied Fisher permission to box, the television people barely missed a beat, and engaged instead the services of Paula Jones as a replacement opponent for Harding. Ms Jones, you may recall, shot to fame some years ago by virtue of her highly public lawsuit against former President Clinton, whom she accused of having made unwanted sexual advances when he was governor of Arkansas. Having dropped the charges after being mollified by a pay-off proffered by supporters of the accused, Ms Jones then somewhat famously spent the proceeds undergoing plastic surgery. She confessed to the hometown Arkansas Democrat this week that her chief concern going into the bout with Tonya Harding isn't for her knees, but the fear that her nose job may come undone.
A few weeks ago, we found ourselves in attendance at a club-fight show at The Roxy in Boston, where Wendy Sprowl, a local flyweight with a 6-1 record, spent four two-minute rounds beating the bejeezus out of one Terry Moss of Athens, Georgia, who was making her professional debut. Somewhat distracting was the fact that, throughout the bout, a small voice across the ring kept squealing "Come on, Mommy!" When I mentioned my unease to one of my colleagues, he replied: "You should have been here last year when Sprowl got stopped by Juana Vega. Every time she got hit, the kid was crying "Oooh! Mommy!"
If Lucia Rijker and Christy Martin can be viewed as pioneers in a sport whose future may (if one were to judge from the likes of Harding-Jones, anyway) already be behind it, Deirdre Gogarty, the Drogheda-born featherweight, surely deserves a special mention as well. It was Gogarty's gamely blood-spattered loss to Martin on the undercard of Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno II in 1996 that put Christy on the cover of Sports Illustrated, directly precipitating a run on female boxers across the country.
If Gogarty was a bit on the small side for Martin back then, she can probably count herself lucky she got her in '96, before middle-aged spread set in. In the six years since, the so-called "Coal Miner's Daughter" has insisted on fighting in the same dainty, pink outfit she wore into battle against the Irish lass in Las Vegas that night, with the result that in today's incarnation Martin often resembles an over-pumped inflatable doll, threatening to burst the seams of her costume every time she throws a jab.
Apart from a brief and rather undignified tussle at a media event in LA a few years back (Christy gave Rijker a shove, Lucia decked Martin with a hook, and the two were soon rolling around the floor like Tyson and Lewis), Martin has been steadfast in her refusal to face the boxer from Amsterdam. Since both are now well into their 30s (so, for that matter, is Deirdre Gogarty), the chances grow with each day that the two claimants for distaff supremacy may never settle the issue in the ring.
Thanks to her long-term contractual arrangement with Don King, Martin may hold the edge in visibility, but Rijker may yet have the last laugh. She revealed to me a few weeks ago that she has been short-listed for the female lead opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator III. In her last bout, a week before Wendy Sprowl's conquest of Moss, Rijker recorded her 15th victory in as many pro fights by stopping Carla Witherspoon of Philadelphia via a fourth-round TKO.
Ms Witherspoon, who claims a distant kinship to former heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon, brought a 9-26-1 record to their fight at the Mohegan Sun, and didn't offer much resistance that night, but as Rijker observed later, "at least she took the fight. My first opponent pulled out, and her replacement turned out to be pregnant".
