The Beginnings of Research in the History of Women’s Boxing – Sept. 16, 1996

In the month of September of 1996, after re-entering the sport to get in shape to run the 5K in a Race for the Cure event, I learned that women’s boxing was making another comeback.  After learning about Christy Martin and Gogarty, and searching the net to only find there was virtually nothing on the net about the history of the female boxers I began my Journey.

It became obvious that it would be very difficult to put together the history of the 70’s and 80’s boxers, without doing extensive research. Going from library to library, writing and contacting people.

I decided to have a website to find a central location where the public could participate in giving me information about the other female boxers.   I started to prepare my web page , and in the meantime, I left requests for information on the Internet on other boxing web sites.   I was surprised at the interesting people I met on the Internet, and the information they had about the 70’s and 80’s fighters.  In fact, some of them had as much information as I had to begin with.

One man in particular, Torben L.g, ended up being a complete pool of information.   I could not believe it.  He downloaded more information to me than anyone.  And then there was a medical scientist, Chris, that had done extensive research in New York about female boxing, when his friend wanted to have more information about the sport.   Chris only lived about 15 miles from me.

I had another source,   Keith,  a kick-box editor in England.   He did not have the kind of information that I was looking for, but I think I gave him some fresh ideas about articles to write about women fighters, and he gave me some intuitive ideas on how to get information.

I also received a mysterious email from a person identifying themselves as “AA”.  They asked me to send my mailing address, and they may be able to help me.  I was a little bit leery about writing to them, but what the heck, I was writing a book about my adventures, so why not?   I haven’t heard from that mysterious person, but when I do, I will keep my book informed.

Of course, I needed to find a server to host my website, so I checked all of the computer books, and found a server that supported FrontPage98.  For a mere $50.00 to set the account up, and $70.00 every two years for a domain name, and $19.95 a month with 10mb of storage, I was ready to go.   I had to come up with a domain name that would allow me to get more hits, when people were surfing the net.  I chose www.womenboxing.com.  I wanted to use my fight name www.tigerlillyfox.com, but I really didn’t think many people were surfing the net for tigers, lillies, or foxes.

Then came the part to developing my page.  At first, I thought what could I do to make it interesting enough for people to visit my site, and to participate.   I decided to develop a health survey, because during my time of boxing, about ten years later, I had developed breast cancer, and a bone tumor, with no real hereditary factors.  I always suspicioned that getting repeatedly punched and kicked in every part of my body from my extensive karate and boxing experience, somehow had something to do with it.

I then realized that even though there were not hardly any female boxers in the pre-70’s, I would also need to include them to show that all females, whether they had one or 30 fights all contributed something, and they were a piece of the puzzle in what has transpired into what female boxing is today, in the 90’s.

Before I knew it, I had ample pages to put on my website, and I was amazed how enjoyable, but time consuming it was becoming just to get it online with the Internet.   The anticipation of publishing it was exhilarating, and I decided that I would try to develop my own pages without hiring someone to assist me .

I also had to contact many newspaper, television, publishing magazines to get copyright permission to use articles.  That was very difficult because of the articles that I was interested in were written in the 70’s and 80’s, and a lot of those companies no longer existed.    I tried to locate the female boxers, but that was also extremely difficult, because most fighters did not use their true names, and I am sure that many of them eventually got married and had different last names.  I knew that I had my work cut out for me, and that I had a lot hanging on my response on my web site.

Most of the news stations did not have archived tapes of the 70’s. So I could not find any young clips of me when I was fighting.   I contacted the boxing commissions in Oregon, Utah and Nevada and their records had been lost with the 70’s fighters.   I could not validate my fights, and later found that even many of my fights were in actuality “exhibitions”, and not sanctioned.

I was also hoping that I could get the real scoop from some of these fighters, now that it was all over.  Get some of their experiences.

I know I personally had experienced my own share of horror stories about fighting in the past, that included putting massive amounts of silver dollars in my clothing to make myself much heavier; the lack of a real medical before fighting someone by the doctor simply looking at my hands, turning my hands and stating “You’re alive.”  I had a 102 temp at the time and was suffering from a bad case of the flu!; Getting a very improper breast exam “attempt” just about 10 minutes before stepping in the ring with an opponent—-I refused to let the “doctor” do such a thing;  being set up by not ONE boxing manager but TWO on a couple of my fights;  being put in a complete mismatch in my pro debut…and the list goes on—some of my experiences even too embarrassing to talk about.

On a personal level, I really wanted to know—did other past female boxers goes through the same things I did as a fighter?

And last but not least, I was going to profile all of the 70’s and 80’s fighters that I had information on.  I hoped that those profiles would grow as people would give me more information about those fighters.