Women’s boxing ‘Million Dollar Bummer’ By BRIAN ACKLEY— WBAN Senior Editor

(MAY 2) Blame Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood for denying women’s boxing fans the most intriguing matchup in the history of the sport.   That, actually, and a balky Achilles tendon.

Clint Eastwood – courtesy photo – Million Dollar Baby Producer

It’s not like Christy Martin and Lucia Rijker didn’t know – or talk, a lot – about each other. The flame was hotly burning for a possible women’s mega-fight between the two less than a year after Martin’s headline-grabbing win over Deirdre Gogarty in 1996.

“When I walk away, I don’t want people to say ‘Christy was good, but she didn’t fight so-and so.’ If Rijker is a fight the public’s interested in seeing, I’m sure it will happen,” said Martin, barely a year after appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “I spoke to Don (King) about it. He promised me it would be made. Bob Arum and Don King are both interested in making money.”

Which, perhaps, is why it’s at least mildly surprising the fight never took place, then or ever. At least one person, Rijker’s manager Stan Hoffman, reported in early 1998 that there was in fact a $1.5 million offer on the table. Exactly from whom, and where, was left unreported.

“Christy Martin was the Jackie Robinson of women’s boxing, but Lucia Rijker is the Babe Ruth,” Hoffman once observed.

And, while the fact remains it would have been the biggest single payday in women’s sports history, the money to be made by promoters for such a showdown would still have been peanuts to Arum and King, who were paying their male headliners like Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield tens of millions for just one per pay-per-view bout back then.

While Martin had been fighting, and often, since 1989, Rijker was just emerging on the pro boxing scene in 1996, after a spectacular career as a kickboxer. She started her boxing travels with five straight wins – all by knockout or TKO – in a span of exactly 12 months. In 1997 alone, she fought six times with only one going the distance (against Dora Webber).

In a burgeoning sport where many women’s fights still looked far too much like a glorified Toughwoman sideshow, Rijker and Martin brought the skill and explosive power that fans yearned for.

There was never any doubting Rijker’s power. (Or, Martin’s for that matter.)

“She can hit,” said Gariel Ruelas, a WBC super featherweight champion, in a 2005 interview, and a frequent sparring partner for Rijker“When she hit me, it felt no different from if it was a man hitting me. The last time I sparred with her was maybe two, three years ago. She hit me with an overhand right – I still remember it.”

Added another male sparring partner, James Toney, “She’s a hell of a puncher.”

“A knockout is always a power trip,” Rijker once observed. “You’re standing … she lays on the floor.”

The two would-be rivals had just a handful of common opponents including Melinda Robinson and Andrea DeShong, who handed Martin her only early-career loss. Both stopped the veteran warrior (Martin in a rematch); Rijker did it inside three rounds while Martin needed to push into a seventh round before the TKO.

DeShong said picking a winner between the two wasn’t hard.

“She”ll knock Christy for a loop,” Deshong said after a loss to Rijker in the fall of 1997. “She doesn’t punch as hard as Christy, but she’s a much better boxer.”

Perhaps the fight might have come off if a pair of same-day meetings had turned out a little differently in 1996. Rijker met with both promoters on the same day – King earlier in the day and Arum later – electing to sign on with King’s rival.

“Arum offered me a better contract,” Rijker explained. “I wouldn’t leave his office until he looked at a tape of me fighting. When he did he said, ‘Oh my God, this girl can fight.’ He was like a little boy. I wanted to work with somebody who believed in me.”

The two were finally signed to meet in the summer of 2005, unabashedly riding the coattails of Eastwood’s Academy Award winning “Million Dollar Baby.” Despite the one-time dream matchup finally coming to fruition, Martin was not the first choice for Arum’s movie-inspired spectacle, Laila Ali was. Ali was asked to drop about 10 pounds in order to make the fight happen.

“We had people contact Laila and her husband,” Arum confirmed. “Once I ran into resistance, I thought Christy was a great option. Lucia agreed to fight her.”

Rijker’s relative inactivity, after her sizzling start in boxing didn’t help the cause of securing a bout with Martin earlier in her career. Nor did Arum’s eventual infatuation with Mia St. John as a boxing attraction either. By the time Rijker surfaced for a fight in 2002 against Carla Witherspoon it had been more than 2 ½ years since her previous bout.

Martin, though, was still very much on her mind.

“What I’d like to do is get back in the ring and show that I’m willing to fight for nothing to get Christy,” she said. “It’s up to her. She keeps hiding in the lap of Don King. She holds on to her status so badly. She doesn’t care about the sport anymore. There’s a time to come and time to go. If I walk away and I haven’t gotten that fight with Christy, I’ll feel incomplete. She should too.”

For a flickering moment, in early 1997, it looked like a deal had been struck to match the two on a card in Nashville, Tenn. Of course, it never happened. Other than 2005, it was the closest they would get to actually stepping between the ropes together.

Not that they didn’t have at least one infamous scuffle, however. Rijker made her presence known at a Martin press conference on Feb. 27, 200 before her matchup against Belinda Laracuente. The two ended up trading blows.

“How do I know the brawl…wasn’t choreographed? No TV cameras were in position to film it,” Los Angeles Times report Randy Harvey wrote.

It was far more than a shoving much. Rijker connected with a punch, according to newspaper reports, as did Martin in return.

Said Martin: “If that the best you can punch, you’re in for a long night (if we ever fight).”

That it took Hollywood to make the fight happen didn’t really matter to fans. Had Eastwood put his boxing drama on film say in 1998 or 1999, the two would have written a different story. Instead, he was in the midst of a string of mediocre box office “hits” like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, “True Crime” and “Space Cowboys”.

And it didn’t really matter, much, to most fans the two prizefighters were both 37, and well past their prime. A long simmering score was about to be settled.

“Numerous women told me they cried during the movie. That gave me the idea that female prizefighting had arrived,” Arum said.

Even boxing’s most popular curmudgeon, the lovable Bert Sugar, was looking forward to seeing Rijker in the ring again.

“Put it this way, she’s better than any of the male heavyweights. To me, most women look like their going down in quicksand while swinging pots and pans,” he said in vintage Sugar-ese. “The whole thesis of this fight is that they have Hollywood-ized Lucia into a very scary person.”

It’s actually not clear just how big an event it would have been. Even Arum was unsure that by the time it was finally going to happen, while it still made some boxing sense, that it made much business sense at all.

“If I lose some money, it’s not the worst thing in the world,” Arum said. “I think it helps with my obituary.”

The timing coincided with the movie’s release on DVD.

“I would not be telling the truth if I didn’t say that, without the movie, we wouldn’t be doing this,” Arum said. “The movie highlights women’s boxing and made it seem very exciting. Clearly, it was the impetus for me to put on this event. I didn’t think there was much future in women’s boxing. After seeing that film, I had second thoughts.”

It didn’t hurt, either, that Rijker was cast as the movie’s villain, Billie Blue Bear.

“People walk up to me and say ‘how could you?’ They really think I’m that person in the film,” she recalled. “Watching the film for the first time, I was sitting in the back and cheering for myself, then I stopped. Because all around me, everyone was pointing at the screen shouting, ‘you bleep.’ At first, during the filming, I tried to hold back. But then, you know, I didn’t.”

Rijker had her own reasons for signing, besides the purse, which provided the perfect big screen tie in. Each fighter was guaranteed $250,000, with the winner collecting an additional $750,000, thus becoming a true million dollar baby.

“Karma wise, it was meant to be. Nobody ever rubbed me the wrong way the way Christy did. Sumya Anani is a very nice lady and wonderful athlete, but she doesn’t do that for me. Christy Martin does. She started this by trashing me. I just couldn’t let it go.”

Added Martin, “I don’t think that Bob Arum would have had the interest in this because he didn’t have a hook for it. Timing is everything.”

Photo credit:  Mary Ann Owen

Less than two weeks out, Rijker’s Achilles ruptured, and she never fought again. The night women’s boxing fans had waited almost a decade to devour was gone. The “Million Dollar Baby” had in a blink become the “Million Dollar Bummer.”

“I’m so disappointed. We worked so hard. It was like somebody hit me with a baseball bat in the stomach,” Martin said. “I know of some people who had made plans to go to Las Vegas Saturday. One of them said to me, “Christy, why don’t you still come out to Las Vegas and shadow box with with a cardboard of Lucia in front of Mandalay Bay? Just to get it out of your system?’ The problem with that is I won’t be getting paid.”

Everyone was disappointed, despite all the reasons the fight was about eight years too late. Even Rijker’s trainer for a time, the legendary Emanuel Steward – who was no fan of women in the ring – yearned for the fight.

“I don’t want to think that someday Lucia will be walking with her kids and someone will point to her and say, ‘There goes the greatest female fighter whoever lived, but she never had a defining fight.’ That would be so sad.”

Indeed.