Historic Article: Full Copyrights of Chicago Tribune: Laurie Holt Vs. Del Pettis – 10 rounds for WBB Championship belt

August 17, 1987 – by Paul  Sullivan (posted for historic purposes only. Full copyrights of Chicago Tribune:

A half hour after the battering, the losing fighter stood outside the office in the trendy Near North Side health club, a check for $1,200 in one hand and a small towel filled with ice in the other.  Placing the ice against a bloodied, black and blue left eye, the fighter was asking one of the local promoters about the possibility of cashing the check on the spot. The manager of the winning fighter, who would also receive a $1,200 check for the night`s work, joined in asking the promoters for nothing but cold, hard cash.

”This is a bunch of baloney,” the manager muttered to no one in particular. ”We always get paid in cash.”

Johnny Dubliss, the California promoter who heads the boxing association that sanctioned the super-featherweight title fight, stood in the hallway with his arms folded, occasionally walking over to the winner`s manager and telling him to hold on tighter to his fighter`s check, lest he lose it.

Welcome to the world of women`s professional boxing, which, in many ways, is just like the sweet science practiced by members of the opposite sex. Blood is spilled and eyes are swelled–and yet the most important part of the evening comes after the final bell, when the money is firmly in hand.

The Lakeshore Athletic Club, normally the stomping grounds of health conscious yuppies from Lincoln Park, served as the site of Saturday night`s title fight between 129-pound Laurie Ann Holt and 123-pound Del ”La Rose” Pettis.   A few hundred curiosity seekers paid from $7 to $30 to watch the two women slug it out, and most fans agreed afterward that the action provided by the fighters at the very least exceeded that of the five male bouts on the undercard.

Holt (8-2) won the Women`s Boxing Board super-featherweight title when referee Stanley Berg stopped the fight after the fifth round. It should have been stopped a round or two earlier, but despite the fact that her face was a bloody mess and her left eye nearly swollen shut, the 27-year-old Pettis (4-1-1) refused to fall.

”I don`t think I ever hit anyone that solid before,” said Holt.

”I`ve never seen a woman who could take a punch like that.

”It`s hard when you hit someone with everything you`ve got and then she just smiles and comes right back at you.”

The 24-year-old Holt does not look the role of female boxer, and in real life she teaches individual living skills to the mentally retarded in her hometown of Waterville, Me.

She grew up the ninth of 15 children and learned to throw a punch from hanging around her five brothers.

”I`ve been fighting for four years, as near as I can tell,” said Holt, who has had the letters H-I-G-H tattooed on her right arm since the age of 16. ”It`s more than a hobby. It`s really a passion. Actually, I just wanted to beat one person back home. She just rubbed me the wrong way. I don`t like Muhammad Ali, and she was acting like him. So I got into it to beat her, and then I kept at it.”

”She just called me up one day to help train her,” said Bob Silva, 50, the owner of a boxing club in Waterville and currently Holt`s trainer and manager. ”I told her that the only way to train is for her to work like a guy, maybe even harder. When you say `girls boxing` you think that they just slap each other around. But like you just saw, it ain`t like that at all.”

Silva`s remark was quite the understatement, as right from the opening bell Holt and Pettis stood toe-to-toe trading punches to the face for 15 minutes with a notable absence of dancing around and backpedaling.

With the fighters required to wear protective breast pouches, there were very few punches thrown to the body by either fighter.

At the start of the second round, Holt knocked the braid out of Pettis`hair with a hard right hook and then followed with another right to the head, cutting Pettis` left eye and sending blood streaming down her face and onto her white T-shirt.

By the end of the fight, the T-shirt, which had an iron-on of a rose on the back, was splattered with speckles of blood, and the crowd, seemingly taking into account the gender of the bloodied fighter, groaned audibly whenever Pettis` eye took another blow.

Pettis, who took up the sport eight years ago while trying to lose weight after the birth of her son, Daniel, was in good spirits after the loss. The black eye was being iced, the money situation was being handled and though her face would surely take a few weeks to heal, she knew that it eventually would. ”I worry about scarring sometimes,” she admitted. ”But really, it`s not a top priority.”