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The Sweet Science of Boxing |
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Johnson  |
FROM LONDON |
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 Johnson was surprised to discover his Raphaella didn't look like this, but instead looked like a real champ. |
What's a Dad to do if his girl
wants to be a prizefighter?
of TheColumnists.com
A few years ago I received in the mail a drawing of my daughter’s face. She had done it as a self-portrait. The right eye socket seemed to be somewhat discolored in yellow-brown tones with streaks of maroon. Quite a beautiful treatment. Then it hit me: this was my little Raphaella the day after she became New England’s first woman Golden Gloves champ.
I was worried that this ring thing she had gotten herself involved with might be more complicated and possibly more dangerous than I thought.
Raphaella is the second of my three girls--and the most delicate. She's a graphic artist for a big Boston razor maker, and she draws well. She had taken the day off after winning the Gloves and inspected her shiner in the mirror until she just had to reach for her colored pencils. She was obviously inspired.
Being the very responsible father of the champ, I had to ask myself, is this some kind of weird cry for help?
I’m happy to say it was not. Raphaella had never been so happy and proud, even wearing the bruise like a medal. “What’s the point of getting hurt if you can’t show it off?” she jokes today, sporting a new set of bruises from her frequent sparring with some of Somerville Gym’s toughest guys. She also leaves black and blue marks on the guys, she is quick to point out.
I posted her drawing on the wall of my office in London and my colleagues talked of little else for a few days. Comments ranged from sheer awe to dismissiveness and low humor. When a few days later I sent her two new chest protectors from Lonsdale, my mailroom manager had to ask, “How many tits does this girl have??”
But she shrugged off the
jokes, and took boxing seriously as a fitness regime and confidence
builder. I called her frequently to make sure she knew what she
was doing. Her sharp intelligence and analytical approach reassured
me.
“Once you have been in the ring facing someone who’s
trying to kill you, office politics starts to look pretty tame,”
she says. “It’s not easy to intimidate me after what
I’ve experienced.”
Raphaella turned to boxing almost by accident. She had always been a good runner, and for fitness reasons decided to try out to something called cardio-boxing. She had no real idea what it was all about. “As soon as I started hitting the bag, I got a rush and I knew I wanted to be a boxer,” she says. “I wanted to prove that in a competitive situation men and women are the same. It felt terrific to hit, and I couldn’t wait to spar.”
She also writes well. After her first sparring encounter she got this passage down on paper:
“I’m breathing heavily and sweating, jumping up and down lightly on my feet to keep my muscles warm. Ralph Palmacci is scooping Vaseline out of a plastic cup and smearing it on my nose and cheekbones, and I can smell the lingering aroma of cigarette smoke on his fingers. ‘Pucker up,’ he says, and when I do he slides a scoop across my pouting lips. ‘I wanna see a double jab and a straight right hand, a left hook, and then get the hell out of the way,’ he orders, as he squirts water into my mouth and shoves my mouthpiece halfway down my throat. ‘You gotta go POW, and then POW-POW-POW-POW-POW!’ At 80, Ralph was still incredibly handsome. He threw a series of combinations at an imaginary opponent. Then out of the ring he sat on his little stool, crossed his arms and watched with a satisfied grin. His gameplan worked. I gave my sparing partner--a good friend of mine--a bad bloody nose. I knew I had found something big here and it’s called boxing.’
Before she knew it she was forcing herself into a battle with the Golden Gloves organizers for the right to fight in public. They finally relented, and women’s boxing was legalized in New England. She says this remains her proudest achievement because it opened the way for hundreds of other girls to follow.
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The Gloves tournament is a production-line affair with short bouts coming and going in quick succession. The audience is packed with relatives of the youngsters competing, and they tend to get bored with other kids’ fights. That was the case the night Raphaella and her first real opponent climbed into the ring. But a hush fell over the Lowell Memorial Auditorium as the announcer called it “a historic night” sanctioning women’s boxing for the first time in New England.
Three brutal rounds followed and the crowd was on its feet shouting encouragement. The few initial wolf whistles from neanderthals in the crowd went silent. It was by far the best fight of the night. These girls were boxing.
The other girl walked into Raphaella’s jab once too often and she found she could not cope with the results of Palmacci's fine training. As Raphaella recalls the fight, “In the second round I could hear her breathing with difficulty through her mouthpiece and realized I had got her nose real bad, probably broke it. I knew I had her.”
The decision was unanimous on points, and the referee raised Raphaella’s arm in triumph. I thought the roof was going to come off the auditorium. She looked like a real champ, all 106 pounds of her, as she took the cheers from the audience and made her way back to the dressing room in her new blue satin GG windbreaker.
As she discovered at the Somerville Gym just outside of Boston, all kinds of people take up boxing, except perhaps doctors. She was happily surprised at the kindness and camaraderie among the men, and after some mild resistance they had let her in--the first woman to invade this male redoubt. The hesitation seemed to be more a confusion over how to manage the unisex toilets than fears of a feminist invasion.
Working out after her Gloves victory, she was hitting the mitts at Somerville when former World Champion Tony De Marco strolled in and said in a Marlon Brando Godfather voice, “You have a very nice jab.” Raphaella recalls, “It meant so much to me. I carry the memory with me like a treasure.”
Among her acquaintances is John “The Quiet Man” Ruiz, who in three bouts with Evander Holyfield has scored a loss, a win and a draw. Ruiz is the first Puerto Rican to hold a world heavyweight championship. She always gets a nod of recognition from Ruiz when he’s around--considered to be the Ruiz equivalent of a big hug.
Raphaella brought the sensibilities of a writer and artist to the ring. She has done striking portraits of some of these fighters, including Ruiz. One of her memorable descriptions of the canvas after she had worked somebody over: “It looked like a Jackson Pollock in his red period.”
Some day she wants to capture it all in a book that she will call “Breaking Nose: The Pain and Pleasure of Breaking into Women’s Boxing”.
After a few more fights she “retired” from competitive boxing and has since devoted herself to coaching and training others. She was not happy with her record, which included two defeats and two wins (plus five exhibitions fights with a woman who later turned pro), a record I attribute to her lack of a “dark side” that boxers need if they are to move in by instinct and bludgeon the opponent into submission. I can live with that. Who wants a daughter with too much of a dark side?
She now has a noticeable bump on the bridge of her nose. When I recently asked her if one of her sparring partners broke it, she shot back, “It’s not broken, it’s fractured.” A fine point, apparently, in boxing lingo.
Her circle of friends today includes some of the men and women who turn to boxing to deal with their problems. She treats them all with respect and affection.
Many of the youngsters she trains come from families with a father in prison and a mother on the bottle. “It saddens me,” she says, “to see so many of my kids with serious problems, and it’s even worse when I have to say good bye to someone who was going off to jail, as I did a few weeks ago.”
But boxing can provide excellent therapy, she believes, as well as discipline on nutrition and fitness. Her mission outside her work life has become the training of youngsters to get the best out of boxing.
She recently returned to Lowell to witness the latest edition of the Golden Gloves tournament. It was the usual catalogue of small bouts, then two new women fighters climbed in. “Catcalls and wolf whistles broke out everywhere,” she says, “until they squared off. The place went silent, then erupted in shouts and screams. It turned out to be the best fight of all, and people talked about it all night.”
She told this story with a real sense of personal satisfaction.
© 2002 by Michael Johnson. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. The photos of Raphaella are ©2001 by Dawn Alexander.
TO READ TWO RADICAL VIEWS
OF WOMEN IN BOXING, CLICK HERE: BOXINGGIRLS
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