The Boxer's Heart: A Woman Fighting by Kate Sekules

Author:Kate Sekules [SEKULES, KATE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO016000, BIO022000, Personal Memoirs, SPO008000, Biography & Autobiography, BIO026000, SPO000000
ISBN: 9781468301786
Google: JtIQ9SmfE-4C
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-05-29T21:08:51+00:00

I find Kathy Collins in the locker room in her skivvies, scowling at the scale.

“Man, I got five more pounds. I hate this shit.”

“You got four days. You’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Sauna suit. Sweat. Same old.”

I would like to ask many things. Does she have any doubts? What does she do with them? How are her nerves? But I chicken out because I’m posing as another blasé boxer, even though this is new to both of us and, though I’m off duty today, in the back of my mind sits the knowledge that we are two of a kind. We are welterweights. If I do compete, if I turn out to be any good, I may fight her.

We are welterweights. Colin, Terry, Oscar De La Hoya, Felix Trinidad, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns are also welterweights, though the last two were much admired for their successful metamorphosis into the heavier weight classes. Boxers are the most weight-obsessed men (apart, perhaps, from college wrestlers) you will ever meet, but it is a practical obsession, different from ours. Women’s weight is taboo. Since I am heavy, the subject of weight has always felt heavy. Now that instead of fighting my weight I am fighting at my weight, it is delightful and horrible to be perpetually confronted with my number, to be actively checking my weight instead of avoiding the scale. Sometimes that’s not easy. Men in the gym ask what I weigh in the tone usually reserved for “How are you?” As if it weren’t an impertinent question. They already know what I weigh, anyhow. I can’t lie about it. Men in the gym have caliper eyes, accustomed as they are to calculating their own or their charges’ readiness for the weigh-in, where a half-pound extra means disqualification. The subject of weight is loaded differently in here. So many men at Gleason’s are smaller and slighter than I am; there are many featherweights. How they admire me for my muscles and heft, how those string-beans envy me. I am used to men thinking I’m smaller and lighter than I actually am just because I’m female, but boxing people entertain no such charming delusions. So the insults I receive daily are compliments.

“What’re you weighing, Kate? One-sixty?”

“Big LEGS!”

“You gain weight? You got big.”

“My, you lookin’ diesel.”

Men outside the gym—but never women—also invariably ask me my weight. Sometimes I feel like saying, “One-forty-eight. And what’s your salary?” but I understand how he’s just making conversation and perhaps buying a few seconds while he reshuffles his weltanschauung. A woman boxer in 1996 is not yet a common sight. The other personal question nearly all men—but never women—ask is: “What about your breasts?” I explain how we have chest protectors, just like he wears testicle armor, whereupon he squirms and blanches as if this might lead to a breast shortage some day soon. The breast question usually comes before the weight question (one guy explained how he’d had it drummed into him as a child that if he hit his sister in the breasts, she would die), but both are inevitable.

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