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Sporting Goods: Stepping into the ring
Picture this: you’ve spent the last hour skipping relentlessly, burning your way through sets of push-ups and lifts of the medicine ball, slugging 200-pound leather bags as if your life depended on it, and now you’re in the ring for a round of sparring. You feel a combination of electrified and bone-tired; you’re alert but it’s hard to hold up your hands. Your opponent is driven and is stalking you like prey. She backs you into a corner and suddenly you’re hit with a flurry of rapid blows to the head. Before you can react, the voice inside your mind whimpers, “Big red glove.”
This is one of the tougher days at the boxing gym. Today it may be a little harder to go home feeling like a champion, but you’ll try.
For much of the 20th century, women’s boxing was banned in most nations, including Canada and the United States. In Canada, women were allowed to train in gyms, but weren’t allowed to compete. In the 1980s, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms made gender-discrimination in sports illegal, overturning certain provincial laws that banned women’s boxing. In 1991, the Canadian Amateur Boxing Association amended its rules to support women in competitive boxing. (Not-so-fun fact: boxing is the only summer Olympic sport in which women still aren’t allowed to participate.)
Lately, North America has been swept with a pop-culture wave of female boxing heroines in movies such as Punch, Girlfight and, of course, Million Dollar Baby. These films often depict women who box as angry or tortured souls with an axe to grind. While it’s true that boxing can help release aggression, in reality it’s more about sweat, resolve and protecting your nose. Usually, you’re the one who’s taught a lesson, not your opponent.
If you’ve ever considered boxing—because you’ve been awestruck by Laila Ali or Jessica Rakoczy’s rock-solid stance, or maybe because you’ve always yearned to knock the stuffing out of a bag—now is a good time to start. Increasing numbers of boxing gyms are opening their doors to women. Women’s boxing is becoming a serious and exciting sport. There are roughly a dozen gyms in Canada where women officially train, either for fitness or to become amateur fighters.
In Toronto, Sully’s Boxing & Athletic Club is home to the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club. Sully’s is one of the city’s oldest gyms, along with the Cabbagetown Boxing Club at the other end of town. Both gyms are situated in tough-girl environs: one is above an auto-body shop and next to a cement factory; the other is in an alley behind a Beer Store. Both have women and teenagers among their members. A few of the women who practice at Sully’s and Cabbagetown have moved up the ranks at regional and national competitions, becoming familiar competitors and occasionally leading in the sport. Coaches at the two gyms have different styles, but are united in one conviction: omen can be great fighters.
Savoy “Kapow” Howe fought and won the first sanctioned women’s fight organized in Toronto in 1993 and is a popular coach at Sully’s. Her classes are advertised mostly by word-of-mouth, but are always packed with women eager to practice their jabs and uppercuts. Classes normally consist of a vigorous routine of cardio, muscle conditioning and technical work such as shadow boxing, footwork and sparring. It’s not unusual on nice days to see the class in front of the gym, sprinting along the gravelly road with Howe behind them shouting encouraging commands to keep going. Classes are exhausting and exhilarating and can leave novices gasping for mercy.
Women take up boxing for a variety of reasons, relating to both physical fitness and mental well-being. The boxer’s training regimen is one of the most diverse and challenging in sport, and if you join a boxing gym you will soon find that activities you once found demanding are now simple. Sprinting to catch the bus? No problem. Hauling 100 pounds of groceries or textbooks? Easy. Your endurance, stamina and acumen—not to mention your muscular strength—will improve dramatically. It’s also fair to say that most women experience greater self-confidence and that boxing makes for unparalleled assertiveness training. Following a strenuous routine of cardiovascular conditioning and technical boxing exercises can make you feel like a superhero. You may not be able to shoot lasers out of your eyes, but almost.
Savoy says she’s in the business of training women to be champions. The kind of champion you are going to be is your choice. When you’re a female boxer, people (your mom, for instance) will often ask you why you’d want to punch—or be pummelled by—someone else. Sometimes you may wonder this, too. But boxing isn’t as bloodthirsty as it’s portrayed to be, and if you focus on the risk involved, you’re missing the point. The joy of boxing is that once you learn you’re strong, nobody can take that away from you.
