The Beginnings of WBAN
In Sue Fox Own’s Words…..In July of 1996, after virtually being out of boxing for nearly 17 years, I decided to get back into shape to fulfill a goal to run in the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s “Race for the Cure” event, in Portland, Oregon. This event was to raise funds for Breast Cancer Research. I wanted to run in this race, not only to raise money for this non-profit organization—-but to celebrate my own seven-year survival of breast cancer.
At the time, I knew that the best way to get in top shape to run the 5K in the race, was to get back into boxing, and into the ring. I found a local gym in Portland, Oregon, and began to rigorously train several times a week.
During one of my training sessions, an amateur male boxer, made a comment to me about a female professional boxer, Christy Martin. Martin was under the tutelage of the infamous boxing promoter Don King, who was getting Martin some major worldwide media exposure at the time.
The male boxer proceeded to tell me about what an accomplished boxer Martin was and how she had managed to upstaged Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, when she fought on the undercard in a six-rounder against Deirdre Gogarty. I personally had not never heard of Martin, and at that time had no idea if women boxers were even still boxing on cards as when I was boxing on some of the cards in the late 1970’s. After my conversation with that male boxer, it sparked an interest in checking out what was on the Internet about the women boxers, current and past.
My immediate response to the Internet search that I did, left me with great disappointment and sadness for all of the past women boxers who had made many great sacrifices for the sport—and yet there was virtually nothing about them on the net. In what should have been nothing more than a mere simple Internet search at that time, ended up being a long and tedious 14-year journey into trying to uncover the true history of the sport.
The little information that was on the net was obviously scare, and inaccurate—as I knew this immediately without research with some of the recorded data for the fact that I was actually part of that history being a past pioneer female boxer.
One of the initial blaring inaccuracies that I discovered in the media was that the female boxers who were currently fighting at the time in the 1990’s were staking claims to being the true “pioneers” in many frontiers of the sport. When I discovered what was happening to the history of women’s boxing, it made me more determined to “Set the Record Straight” and to give credit and homage to many of the great past female boxers, who were the women who actually paved many of the roads for the current boxers.
I spent the first two years from 1996 to 1998, solely researching any and everything that I could find about the sport and the female current and past boxers. I contacted gyms, boxers, trainers, managers, promoters, boxing commissions, FightFax, newspaper archives, sending out letters, emails, posting on forums and tried to do anything by any means possible to dig into discovering the true history of the sport.
In retrospect, I look back at this long road of researching and investigating, and never realized at the time how difficult this journey was truly going to be and where it ultimately would take me after many years on my mission to uncover the past and the truth.
In May of 1998, I was ready to deliver to the world the true history of the sport—or what I thought was the truth, when I went live on the net with the newly named site called, WBAN (Women Boxing Archive Network).
Unfortunately at that time in 1998, in what I thought was the accuracy of the history of women’s boxing that I had published on the Internet in the two years of research, I began to realize that I had only scratched the surface of what had happened in the past.
The boxing community worldwide who had taken an interest in my journey on the net began to send in historical documents, old photos, boxing records, hotel records of fighters, boxing magazines from the past, newspaper clippings, old videos of women boxing, and the list goes on to the point that I actually had to build on a special room in my house to store all of this valuable data and memorabilia.