Boxing: Why women are stepping up to fight

New Zealand is sending a team to the first women's world boxing champs. PETER JESSUP looks at why women
are stepping into the ring.

When Odette van der Meer told her father she was stepping into the boxing ring for a real fisticuffs contest, he had visions of her nose splattered over her no-longer-pretty face. Of her lying KO'd on the canvas. Of her stumbling around later in life, punch-drunk.

Wairoa farming couple Carl and Olga van der Meer had raised their daughter with visions of her fulfilling her dreams of becoming an architect and reaching the top level in equestrian competition.

She's done both those. Now she's one half of the first New Zealand women's boxing team. Van der Meer, aged 25 and just out of the University of Auckland, is off to Pennsylvania for the inaugural Women's World Boxing Championship, starting Monday.

She's in the lightweight division (135lb). New Zealand's other representative is 30-year-old welterweight (147lb) Melanie Horne, three-time national champ, primary school teacher turned firefighter.

They're two of the 49 women who have registered with the New Zealand Boxing Council for fights this year. Hundreds of others have taken up the sport, whether just to the stage of hitting bags and shadow-boxing for fitness or up to sparring to improve reflexes and timing for a range of other sports.

Horne and van der Meer are bubbly, attractive, intelligent and articulate - just the sort of women you'd never expect to find in a boxing ring. And they love it.

The attraction? "Fitness to the extreme," says Horne. "It's very technical, like chess, in trying to out-think your opponent, see their punches and react so you don't get hit and then respond in a way that puts them on the back foot. Nerves and fatigue add another factor."

Van der Meer feels the same. "I like the mental pressure, the amazing focus you need, and the sheer hard work you have to put in beforehand."

What about the violence bit? "I'm going out with the attitude that I need to score more points than my opponent," says van der Meer. "It's like any other sport. It's one-on-one, it gets your adrenalin going. It's not about visiting violence on someone - think like that and you lose."

They've each had the odd black eye and split lip in sparring but no serious injury in the ring. The real damage is being done to the sport's typically sexist barriers and attitudes. Even the hardest of hard men in the boxing scene now concede that the women can do it and do it well, that they deserve a shot.

Their sport gets next to no credit or publicity. Until there's an unusual incident like that in April, that is, when visiting Australian Patricia Devellerez lost a week of her life to a drug-induced coma and half her lifetime's memories when she was knocked out in a transtasman competition.

Daniel Stowers of Papatoetoe spoke for many at the time when he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Herald: "I'm all for women making progress in various fields and struggling for equality in male-dominated areas. But I figured they would have had the common sense to leave a mindlessly violent blood-sport like boxing to the idiot gender that created it. Men scratch themselves and belch a lot in public - that's nothing to aspire to either."

Carl van der Meer knows what he meant. "I was blown away when she told me," he says of his daughter's chosen sport. "I wanted her to be an architect, not go and get punch-drunk."

He went to watch her fight and, according to both, turned from opponent to coach.

"I could see where he was coming from," says Odette, "but now he accepts it's not what he thought it was. Anyone who's against it should come and watch, at least, before making up their mind."

The decision to allow women to fight was taken out of the hands of the local amateur association when the International Amateur Boxing Association to which it is affiliated went down that track in 1996. Besides, there was talk of complaints to the Human Rights Commission with women who wanted to fight for money talking about taking action for restraint of trade should anyone try to stop them.

For all that there is little pro-fighting for women anywhere in the world and little money in it. Even the rush of interest and money this year when Laila Ali took on Jacqui Frazier-Hyde was largely a beat-up on the back of their champion fathers.

More typically, bouts are infrequent and disorganised. Women's world heavyweight champ Susie Taylor fights three or four times a year and earns around $US10,000 ($23,677) a fight, compared with the tens of millions the men's heavyweight champ commands. Her competition is somewhat varied.

This, and the ugly nature of the early amateur and pro fights, gave ammunition to the blokes who scoffed at the women's right to fight.

Attitudes at least are changing. With a few years' training behind them, the women have gained respect. Referees report they have fewer problems in female fights, few warnings needed for holding and none for low blows, according to NZBC executive officer Deidre Rodgers.

Many of the women boxers gravitate to the ring from other contact sports such as karate, as Melanie Horne did. "I started karate because I got a scare one night and I wanted to learn self-defence," she says. "Then I started boxing to improve my karate. I came down to the gym and saw all these guys pushing themselves to the absolute limit and I thought that's what I want. There were no women then." And no women's changing room or other facilities.

There are no obvious physiological reasons why women should not box, according to Wellington neurologist Graham Martin, who has taken a personal interest in sporting head injuries. "Are women more susceptible to head injury, the so-called glass jaw? We don't know. Will women be more damaged if they do receive a head injury? We don't know.

"We need to watch it and judge the outcome later."

However, as Martin points out, "Boxing's far less dangerous than flying a microlight. There are other sports that have more problems with head injuries, not least motorsport. The Boxing Council is well aware of the risks and in my view has taken responsible steps to look after its competitors."

Amateur boxing's governing bodies - here and internationally, covering women and men - have tried to duck the worst risks. There is a limit of three rounds. The referee can use a standing eight-count if he feels a competitor is stunned: three of those in one round, or four in a fight, and the fight is over. Any sign of blood and it's over. Any sign of concussion and a contestant must submit to medical exam and, if that confirms any head injury, there's an automatic 28-day ban on fighting.

Amateurs must use gloves that are more heavily padded than those the professionals wear. They must wear headgear. Women must also wear groin protectors and breast plates and their rounds are shorter - two minutes as opposed to men's three-minute rounds.

NZBC chairman Keith Walker, who has headed the organisation through the few years the women have been pushing their cause, admits there are still some who remain belligerently unmoved in their stand that boxing is not for females. "There were some colourful comments in Taupo," he says of calls made at the national champs in August. "There's still quite a mixed feeling but most people now will concede women can fight with skill."

The critics have to get used to the idea. Women will be included in the Oceania championships to be held for the first time in April next year at Taupo.

Cameron Todd, who trains Melanie Horne and Odette van der Meer will, as one of a panel of five national boxing coaches used by the NZBC, take the women to Pennsylvania for the world champs. He is enjoying working with females not least because he makes a living from it. Women make up a substantial number of the clientele at his gym Boxing Central in Mt Eden.

"They ask different things. They ask lots of things. Whereas the guys pretty much take the game-plan, listen and nod their heads, the girls want to know why they're doing every single thing. They think more about it, which makes you think more, and in the long run I think it's making me a better coach."

Other differences? "They get more nervous, generally. When they get tired emotions come into it more." Men deal better with the nutritional routine, especially when it comes to dropping kilos to make weight divisions pre-fight, Todd says. He has no fears the women will get badly hurt. They don't punch as hard. They don't get to the same fatigue levels.

Olga van der Meer has no worries about her daughter in boxing. "She wants to do three-day eventing. Three people died doing that last year."

She and Carl are proud of Odette's achievement in reaching national representative level. Carl suspects part of his daughter's motivation has been to challenge his initial opposition. "She always wants to go out and prove me wrong."

Even after receiving such serious injuries in April, Devellerez and her husband Rocco still support the sport. She has lost peripheral vision in her right eye and as a result doesn't drive. She can't remember winning the national awards that dress their home. Her balance is sometimes off. But boxing remains her passion. She still attends bouts and would one day like to coach.