Luciano Gonzalez
08/29/2020 - 6:00
- Clarín.com
- sports
Since Christy Salters became Christy Salters again, she gave supportive talks in different corners of the United States, spoke in the Senate of that country to promote the Law for the Protection of Victims of Domestic Violence and founded Christy's Champs , an NGO aimed at accompanying women survivors of sexist violence and their children. Because she is also a survivor who was miraculously saved . But that happened when Christy Salters was still Christy Martin , the woman who brought women's boxing from ostracism to big evenings.
Basketball or teaching. Those seemed like possible destinations for the young woman born and raised in Itmann, a small West Virginia mining town in the Appalachian region. Shooting hoops in high school, despite being 164 centimeters tall, she had won a scholarship to study education at Concord University, an hour from the family home.
But in 1987, during her freshman year as a college student, and at the initiative of her friends, she enrolled in Toughwoman, an amateur boxing championship, even though she had never worn a pair of gloves . She defeated three opponents and took the title, which she repeated in the following two years.
After finishing his studies, Larry Carrier, a promoter from the area, suggested that he focus on boxing. He took her to his gym, where he began training under the orders of the man who would mark his life: James Martin, who was 25 years her senior and who initially refused to work with a woman .
Christy Martin, along with James Martin, her ex-husband and coach.
Almost immediately, Carrier offered him to star in a professional match. Christy accepted the invitation and on September 9, 1989 faced Angela Buchanan in Bristol. "I beat him up, but the judges tied it," he recalled years later. They met again three weeks later and this time he knocked her out in the second round at Johnson City.
Quick, powerful and owner of an aggressive style, she began to string together victories and change the opinion of James, who saw in this woman a source of income , a possibility to build a name as a coach and, secondarily, a partner: two years after Meeting each other, the couple married in Daytona Beach and moved to Orlando.
Pugilism practiced by women was a marginal activity, to which the large organizations and promoters turned their backs. But based on her triumphs and her image of a rude woman (more than once she insulted or spat at her adversaries), Christy, who had already adopted her husband's last name, made her way into that extreme macho universe and managed to attract the attention of visionary Don King .
Martin became the first woman hired by the promoter of electrified hair, who on January 29, 1994 included her in one of his evenings, which had as its double main attraction the victory of Frankie Randall over Julio César Chávez and that of Félix Trinidad on Héctor Macho Camacho at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. That night, it took Christy just 40 seconds to knock out Susie Melton .
Don King raises the arm of Christy Martin, the first woman who had a contract with the promoter AP Photo
What was then a rarity became a recurrence. On December 16, 1995, Martin shared the billboard for the first time with Mike Tyson, the gold mine that King was exploiting again after his time in prison. He knocked out Erica Schmidlin at the Philadelphia Spectrum for a while before Iron Mike dispatched Buster Mathis Jr. at a festival in which Julio César Vázquez from Santa Fe also won the WBA super welterweight title from Carl Daniels .
King featured her on the next four cards Tyson starred in, all at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. In one of them, the Coal Miner's Daughter , as she was nicknamed (her father, Johnny, worked as a welder at the Itmann mine), ended up stealing a good portion of the spotlight. It was on March 16, 1996, in the prelude to the fight that the Brooklyn knocker beat Frank Bruno in the third round and that left little flavor for the public due to the modest performance of English.
In return, Martin staged an all-out battle against the Irish Deirdre Gogarty . With an irrepressible nosebleed from the third round and a bloody face, he ended up winning on points in a duel watched by 1,370,000 spectators in the United States.
A month after that victory, her photo appeared gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine, a space that no female boxer had ever occupied. The note revealed the ambiguous position in which Christy found herself: she recognized herself as a pioneer, but made it clear that she did not intend other colleagues to follow her. She knew she was breaking down barriers, but it reinforced some of the stereotypes about the role of women .
“In his opinion, a woman's place is primarily home, except when fighting, of course. She is proud to cook and clean for Jim (although Jim admits, with some shame, that he irons) and hopes to leave the sport soon and start a family ”, explained the text of the journalist Richard Hoffer, in which that figure began to be glimpsed dark that accompanied Christy.
On that note, Jim recalled how embarrassed he had felt when his later wife had entered his gym. And he told, in a humorous way, the plan he had devised so that Christy would give up her idea of fighting: “I had everything prepared so that they broke a couple of ribs. But the boss showed up, the guy who had invited her to the gym, so I thought I'd put it off for a couple of days. What would it look like if your ribs were broken right away? I'm a macho guy and I didn't think women belonged to boxing . "
Christy Martin, on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine.
But in those days any difference that might exist between them was buried by the peak of exposure of the woman who drove luxury cars or a pink Harley Davidson, signed autographs, gave interviews on the main television networks and even participated in a chapter of Roseanne , one of the most watched sitcoms in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Likewise, the bags he collected were far from what any top boxer perceived.
In 1997, Martin traveled to Buenos Aires, where she was interviewed by Mauro Viale on the program “Mediodía con Mauro”, which was broadcast on the América channel. In a rudimentary ring set up in the studio, he improvised an exhibition with Marcela Acuña , who a few months earlier had jumped from kickboxing to boxing, which was unregulated for women in the country at that time.
That first meeting opened the door for them to meet again on December 5, 1997 at the Pompano Beach amphitheater (Florida), on a suitable ring and putting into play an honorary title that the previous year had granted the American the World Boxing Association. The local won on points in the first professional fight starring an Argentine boxer .
The victory against Acuña was one more in the long chain that Martin forged. After a loss to Andrea DeShong in her fourth rented match, in November 1989, she had 34 wins and a draw in nine years , until she was defeated by Sumya Anani on December 18, 1998 at the Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. That night, excited, she suggested the possibility of retiring. "I am ready to move on with my life," she said.
Christy Martin was the first rival Marcela Acuña faced in her career.
However, she chose to remain in the ring , despite the absence of level rivals and some shorts with Don King were displacing her from the big televised billboards. It was necessary to find a great adversary to rekindle attention. He tried it first with the charismatic Mia St John , a natural super feather that put on six kilos to face her. She won, but without regaining the magnetism with the public.
On August 23, 2003, already separated from King, she bet big: she challenged Laila Ali , super middleweight champion of the International Women's Boxing Association (WIBA). “We were the two biggest names in the sport and I was very confident. But I didn't really realize how big she was until we signed the contract and I met her. When I saw her, I thought, 'Damn it. This woman is great! "Martin acknowledged.
The difference in size, height and reach were decisive. That night in Mississippi, 9,888 viewers, a record for a card featuring a fight between women as the main attraction, saw her capitulate in the fourth round to the daughter of the great Muhammad Ali, who was undefeated in 15 appearances.
The last great attempt to relaunch his career ended in frustration. Her rival would be Lucia Rijker , who had been a world kickboxing champion , was undefeated in 17 fights as a boxer (although she had done only three in the last six years) and had played Billie The Blue Bear , Maggie Fitzgerald's last rival (Hilary Swank) in Million Dollar Baby , the film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood that had been released in January 2005 and a month and a half later had won four Oscars: best picture, best director, best actress and best supporting actor (Morgan Freeman).
The rivalry between the two had been brewing for years and had had an unofficial duel in late February 2000, when they had beaten each other in a gym. Finally, the confrontation would take place on July 30, 2005 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Both had been guaranteed a purse of $ 250,000 and promoter Bob Arum had offered an additional 750,000 to the winner, who would become the first female boxer to receive a million dollars for a fight .
But 11 days before the festival, Rijker suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon in his left leg. The fight was called off and the Dutch never boxed again. “I was devastated. I was in the best shape of my life, I had trained very hard and that was the fight everyone was talking about. When it was canceled, I should have retired because I lost some of my hunger, ”Martin admitted in an interview published in The Ring magazine in 2018.
As women's boxing, which she had brought to the fore, grew, her career was dying out. Anyway, on September 2, 2009, already 41 years old and two decades after his professional debut, he was able to achieve the super welterweight crown of the World Boxing Council, which had only begun to sanction women's titles in 2005: he won on points in majority decision to Dakota Stone in her 57th rented bout.
The bond with her husband had been shattered. In mid-2010, Christy informed James that she wanted a divorce. She contacted a lawyer and planned to start the process. “ For 20 years, Jim told me that he would kill me if I ever left him. At first, I didn't think she was serious, but time passed and I found out that she was, ”the champion revealed in an interview on ESPN this year.
On November 18, 2010, Christy was reunited with Sherry Lusk , a high school classmate with whom she had shared the basketball team and had a romantic relationship during adolescence, and who had contacted her through Facebook a few months earlier. James, who controlled his wife's every move, found out and threatened to kill her.
Christy Martin made her last professional fight against Mia St John, on August 14, 2012.
On November 23 at 5:30 p.m., that latest threat materialized in the house they still shared in Apopka, 30 kilometers from Orlando: James stabbed her four times in the torso and once in one of her legs with a 23-centimeter knife. blade and then shot him in the chest with a pink 9mm Taurus pistol that belonged to Christy.
The boxer agonized lying next to the bed in her room for half an hour until she could leave the house, when her husband, who believed her dead, went to the bathroom to take a shower. She stopped a motorist on the street, who took her to the Apopka health center. After two hours, they managed to stabilize her in the emergency room and transferred her to Orlando Regional Medical Center, a highly complex hospital.
She was hospitalized for a week. One day after being discharged, with the bullet still embedded in her torso and dozens of stitches distributed throughout her body, she returned to the gym. “Boxing was the best therapy I could find. The gym was the place where I felt safe, ”she explained in 2016.
One hundred and ninety-three days after the attack, on June 4, 2011, he returned to the ring to face Dakota Stone again in Los Angeles. He knocked down his rival in the fourth round and was ahead on the three judges' scorecards, but referee David Mendoza stopped the contest 50 seconds from the end due to a broken right hand, which Martin had suffered in the second round .
Again he had to go back to a hospital. And there things got complicated: during surgery, he suffered a stroke that limited his mobility and speech for a few weeks and permanently affected his vision. "The doctor said: 'Don't fight again, don't get hit on the head and blah, blah, blah,' " he said.
Christy Martin, during a preliminary hearing of the trial against her husband, who tried to assassinate her in November 2010.
In April 2012, already recovered, Christy faced the trial against her husband in Orange County court. During the process, it became clear that James had exercised tight control over his wife's every movement, had filmed and photographed her without her consent in intimate situations, had threatened to make this material public, had pierced her relationship with her family and he had administered at will the 4.5 million dollars that the boxer had earned during her career.
When it was her turn to testify, Christy said that she had started using cocaine in 2007 and that it was her husband who provided it. She also revealed that she had attempted suicide more than once and that her husband had challenged her to do so. After his chilling presentation and before returning to his place in the room, he walked to where the accused was, confronted him face to face and, in a calm voice, said: "I hope you rot in hell, you son of a bitch . " Then she returned to her seat.
"Outside the ring , I was afraid of Christy because I did not want to do anything to make her angry," James said during his statement, in which he apologized several times, although he never admitted shooting or stabbing his wife and suggested that the injuries that had suffered had been the result of a hand-to-hand fight. “We were together 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nobody stays with another person 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unless they love each other, ”he tried to argue.
It took the jury five hours to find him guilty of attempted second-degree murder . On June 26, Judge Emerson Thompson sentenced him to 25 years in prison , the mandatory minimum sentence, which he is still serving at Graceville Correctional Center. The complaint had requested life imprisonment. "He deserves to spend every day for the rest of his life behind bars," said the champion after knowing the decision.
Christy Martin hit Lisa Holyewyne in 2001. Sixteen years later, they got married. AFP photo
With the ration of reassurance that she knew that the man who had tried to kill her was in prison, Christy allowed herself to ignore the medical advice and scheduled the goodbye fight just 47 days after sentencing. On August 14, aged 44, he lost on points to Mia St John for the WBC super welterweight title at Table Mountain Casino in Friant, California. She said goodbye with a record of 49 wins (31 by knockout), 7 losses and 3 draws.
Now away from the ring, she chose to be Christy Salters again and regain some of the tranquility that 23 years of professional boxing had taken from her. Dusting off the degree she had earned in 1989, she worked as a teacher at a special education school in Charlotte, where hardly anyone knew her story. "When I see my students working on computers, I often think, 'Please don't Google me,' " he said in an interview published in Sports Illustrated in 2016.
But she also committed to her past: she began giving talks on gender violence and gave life to Christy's Champs , her NGO. “ I want to share my story to give strength to other people. I was able to endure 20 years and survive. I want other people to be able to take strength and get out of their situation. Because they may not be as lucky as me, ”she explained.
Christy Martin, now a promoter, with Alberto Palmetta.
In 2017, he married Lisa Holewyne , a woman whom he had met 16 years earlier and whom he had beaten hard: she had been his rival on November 17, 2001 in a match that Martin won widely on points at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, in the last fight he had with Don King.
Despite all the activities that he added to his hours, boxing never disappeared from his life . Four years ago, he started Christy Martin Promotions , his promoter company, which was one of those in charge of organizing the evening in which Argentine Alberto Palmetta won the WBA international welterweight title against American Tre'Sean Wiggins in Daytona Beach , the last August 15.
“Sometimes I wake up and wonder why I do it. I try to help a boxer get to where I was and have some of those incredible experiences like fighting at Madison Square Garden, in Las Vegas or for a world title. I want someone else to have that opportunity, "he explained in July 2018 in an interview published in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper.
In December 2019, Christy was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York. She and her colleagues Lucia Rijker and Barbara Buttrick were going to become the first fighters to access that privilege, but the ceremony, which was to take place in June, was postponed to the same month next year, due to the coronavirus pandemic. .
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