The night “big sweating tomatoes” changed women’s boxing forever – by WBAN Senior Editor Brian Ackley

(APR 21, 2020) It wasn’t immediately clear after Christy Martin defeated Deirdre Gogarty in their historic March 16, 1996 bout what a game changer their fight really was.  But it didn’t take that long, either, before the boxing world came to realize something special happened that night at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. 

The Don King promoted pay-per-view event drew more than one million viewers, and those who put down their money saw a lot of unmemorable boxing, topped off by Mike Tyson’s three-round embarrassing hug fest with Frank Bruno.

Photo credit: J & P Photography

But the fight boxing fans and more importantly the media clearly remembered – the fight that was the birth of the modern era of women’s boxing, the fight that put Christy Martin on the cover of Sports Illustrated, on the couch next to David Letterman and prompted phone calls from everybody from 60 Minutes to Playboy – was a six-round blood bath which did more to legitimize women’s boxing than all the fights ever staged before it combined.

“I’m a careless fighter,” Martin said a week after the fight sharing concerns that she thought referee Carlos Padilla might stop the match. He wouldn’t have been the first referee to call an early halt to a bout because it was a woman who got a little busted up. Her nose was bloodied in the second round, the same round she scored a knockdown against Gogarty. “I’m reckless. I get very impatient. I don’t care if I get hit. It doesn’t matter to me. If I had patience, I’d play golf.”

“It was probably the most lucrative bloody nose in the history of boxing,” said Associated Press writer Ed Schulyer.

Despite the fact Martin had dozen’s of fights before that night, and plenty of spectacular knockouts, and that she was already in the third year of a four-year deal with King, there wasn’t much media buzz about the matchup. The two had at least some familiarity with each other, having done some sparring in 1994. The fight’s result, while appearing in newspapers from Honolulu to Hartford ,was nothing more than a one-paragraph mention at the end of wire reports on the entire undercard.

Even her hometown paper, the Orlando Sentinel, didn’t think a great deal of the fight, relegating its “preview” to the fourth page of its sports section, and at that, giving it just six paragraphs. In Edmonton, Alberta, Canada of all places, at least one scribe had taken notice. Sports writer Warren Tasker noted the Martin-Gogarty tilt at the end of his first-ever boxing column, calling Martin “a real banger” in a bout “guaranteed to entertain.”

Boy did it.

“Women in the ring rescued Don King’s hustle,” screamed a headline six-days later in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Writer Jack McKinney called it “a helluva fight”, and admitted, like many, his skepticism about women in the ring.

“That much said, I’m compelled to testify that Christy Martin and Deirdre Gogarty earned a lot more respect than any man on the card, including Tyson.” A local promoter that McKinney did commentary for during regional cable broadcasts was also a skeptic. “I told him Deirdre Gogarty would justify a change in policy.”

Not all the publicity was positive. Some was just downright hilarious. Elle magazine, there to cover the red-carpet aspect of the evening (Jack Nicholson and Denzel Washington were among the many mega stars at the MGM that night) put its own spin on the mayhem.

Penned columnist E. Jean Carroll, obviously not exactly a pugilist scribe of note: “Oh, this is terrible. Oh, this is hideous. Women! Good lookers! Oh, my Lord! The girl in pink just belted the girl in green a quarter of the way across the ring. Knocked her down. Oh, I don’t like this. This is horrible. This is horrible. This is horrible. Their faces look like big sweating tomatoes!”

Martin – who was paid $15,000 for the fight (Tyson, by the way, was paid $30 million for his three-round dance) and outweighed Gogarty by 15 pounds once they actually stepped through the ropes – didn’t really seem to know what all the fuss was about, or fully appreciate at first what the fight meant to the sport.

“It’s kind of strange,” she said. “I don’t know what everybody is so excited about. I’ve had about 40 fights … but I’ve just never reached that many people. Maybe it was the blood that added the drama. People told me I had courage and a lot of heart.”

Be it the blood, the knockdown, or the sheer indomitable guts of both Martin and Gogarty (who pocketed a measly three grand), their 12-minute war was a true Pier 6 brawl, a singularly satisfying stew of skill and savagery supremely served to a hungry boxing public.

Sadly, there was never a rematch. Martin enjoyed the spoils of her performance – a new $35,000 BMW convertible from King and a $50,000 payday in her next King PPV fight against Melinda Robinson – but shortly thereafter their relationship seriously soured for a time, reportedly because the demand from the Martin camp was for a $100,000 payday. The feud went public in early 1997, culminating in Martin being pulled off a King card days before a fight in Nashville, Tennessee. Ironically, Gogarty stepped in to replace her, a terrible mismatch against woefully inept Deborah Stroman which ended in a 43-second knockout, a fight that did nothing more than fuel critics claims about what was wrong with women in the sport.

“I wanted people to recognize there is more than one good female fighter in the world,” Gogarty said afterwards. “Christy Martin is good. Everyone knows that. But she’s not the only one.”

Their memorable Las Vegas clash did open some immediate doors. CBS Sports Spectacular scheduled a live women’s bout later that summer (Gogarty against up and comer Laura Serrano that fell through that July), as did ABC’s Wide World of Sports, which eventually made good the following year when severely under appreciated Yvonne Trevino routed Brenda Rouse in one round.

Just how big was the impact? Consider that on Aug. 20, 1996, the USA Cable network aired its first ever live women’s bout, Andrea DeShong ( who had beaten Martin early in Christy’s career) against Kathy Collins. Some 65,000 callers responded to a poll presented during the broadcast, asking if they would like to see more women’s boxing on their televised cards.

Eighty percent said yes.

Joked USA commentator Al Albert after the poll results were revealed, “As a matter of fact, the next time we’re on the air, we’re going to poll our viewers again, asking them if they want to see more men’s boxing.”

But, of course, in the final analysis, the Martin-Gogarty bout was no joke.

“It displayed the one quality boxing tests in a way nothing else does, and that’s courage. That fight turned in a matter of seconds from an even that was being laughed at and ridiculed in the arena to one that absolutely thrilled the people that were watching,” said boxing commentator Alex Wallau. “You need great opponents. Had Deidre just stayed down the first time she went down, women’s boxing would not be where it is today. The fact she got up and fought back bravely, that’s what made that fight compelling.”