Battered Women

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Washington Monthly. Posted March 22, 2005.

When I was just out of college I worked as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia, and we used to go to Friday night boxing fights at a club called the Blue Horizon, on an iffy block of North Broad Street at precisely the point where Center City peters out into a vast ghetto. Like the rest of Philly, the Blue Horizon knows very well what it is selling, a twisted nostalgia for a time when things were tougher. The concession stand – a fold-up table in the entrance hall – sells only $3 cans of Bud and Bud Light. Past the stand, the space opens up into a big, brightly-lit room with a couple of dozen rows of wooden chairs, like those in an elementary school classroom, surrounding a boxing ring four feet above the floor, a theater in the round. These are the cheap seats, 15 bucks, half of them filled with blacks from North Philly, the other half with slumming yuppies like me. Only two in 10 are women, but their catcalls are as rough and fierce as any.

For 50 bucks, you can buy yourself an armchair seat on a balcony ringing the room, from which you can peer down over the room. These, however, are always filled with older Italian men, the Unindicted Co-conspirator set, fat and inert in their little chairs, each one looking like a marshmallow stuffed into a shot glass. They spend the evening pretty much unmoved by the drama of the moment, passing assured little nods back and forth: They knew who would win all along. The lights are bright, and the crowd is less drunk and less loud than you'd expect. But they are experts.

They know, for instance, that it is no fun to watch heavyweights or lightweights fight because a heavyweight is too big for any but a world-class opponent to knock out, and all but the best of lightweights (135 pounds) don't have enough bulk to hit hard enough to make the fight interesting. So, all the fighters are middleweights and welterweights; the first matches of the night are between the youngest and greenest, and they slowly build to the headliners. The first two bouts are brief snoozers, three-rounders between fighters just good enough to play defense but not good enough to really hit. The crowd focuses on the way the boxers shift weight, issuing idle calls of "yes, sir!" when a fighter works himself a brief opening with his feet, exhaling slowly when his fists move too slowly to take advantage of it. By the third fight, a six-rounder, the boxers can really hit; as they tire, their defenses loosen, and their heads start to snap back against the fat compress of the other guy's fists. The mafia goons on the balcony are applauding now, and their cigars are out; the antiquated on the floor are calling out advice – left, move, left, move. When the ring card girls – third-string, fourth-decade strippers from a South Philly gentlemen's club – come out between rounds, they are greeted for the first time now with more than an auditorium full of lazy disinterest. You realize that everyone in the room, from the old Philly goons to the homeboys and the yuppies, is invested, against all probability, in the idea that something historic might happen here tonight, that a new welterweight might emerge, that the epic is still possible in Philly. And then, for the first of two last fights before the headliner, they bring out the girls.

The girls were ugly and thick, but the crowd didn't care, whistling and hooting for them – "Sweet Ass Angie!" junk like that. It seemed almost endearing at first. A scrawny little black girl, a north Philly local named Angie Nelsen, danced around the ring, throwing up her gloves and revving up the crowd. In the red corner, called the ring announcer, was Jessica Flaherty, a corn-rowed white girl from Amish country who couldn't muster the same kind of flamboyance; she just looked scared. Clapping, the crowd leaned forward – here was something new. The girls shrugged off their robes – now looking young and nervous – and charged each other at the bell, wind-milling with both arms.

The worst male fighters know how to play defense, but these girls looked like they'd never been trained. They didn't even try to protect themselves. There was no effort to dodge, no shifting of weight, no clever, calculated movement of feet. Both girls just kept charging, swinging both fists at the same time. It was like watching six-year-olds fight before they're old enough to realize that they might be hurt: All you want to do is make it stop. The action in the middle of the ring was an inchoate tangle of limbs and fists. Thirty seconds into the whirling, Angie fell down, striking the mat violently, as if she was attacking it. Jessica waved her arms above her head chaotically – a caricatured Rocky gesture – a huge grin on her face. I thought to myself that these two must be the worst girl fighters in the world. But it turned out that six months earlier, Jessica had placed second in her weight class at the National Golden Gloves – this was as good as it got.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells in an editor of The Washington Monthly.

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