Women’s Amateur Boxing: A New Classic

The Wildcard Amateur Women’s Boxing Team at the Atlanta Classic

There have always been single-sex amateur boxing tournaments and shows. Men would train, show up, get matched, and fight. Women mostly watched from the sidelines at these shows.

But women are humans and animals, just like men are, and so naturally they want to fight, too. In recent years the world has finally started to acknowledge this, and women’s matches have begun to show up at tournaments and even, now, at the Olympics.

By the time I started boxing three short years ago, co-ed tournaments were the norm. But while there were always women’s fights at the major tournaments, there were still many more men’s fights than women’s. Men might fight three times or more to win a big tournament like the Golden Gloves, and women have been lucky to get one match.

Now, we’re back to single-sex tournaments, but in the other direction.

The last weekend of February, Sweet Science Boxing in Atlanta hosted the Atlanta Classic All-Female Boxing Tournament.

The Atlanta Classic, a women’s amateur boxing tournament,  drew women from across the country at all levels, from novice to open fighters, including master’s fighters, at all weight classes. It was two full days of boxing, in two rings, with so many women signed up that the organizers ultimately had to start turning fighters away. The Atlanta Classic was endorsed by the WBC, which provided miniature green WBC belts for some of the awards, and the medals for the winners and runners-up.

A fighter with her new belt. Photo by Brittney Witherby photography

The West Point Women’s boxing team brought several fighters, who trooped into the Friday night check-in in full dress uniforms. My own Wildcard Boxing Club had seven fighters who took the five-and-a-half hour flight from Los Angeles, including me. This made us the team that had traveled the furthest for the opportunity to punch another girl in the face and body and maybe bring home a trophy.

And we did exactly that, returning to Los Angeles with four of them, and the team sportsmanship award.

The Wildcard team back from the Atlanta Classic

I have always felt at home in boxing, and never felt like the sport or the gyms where I trained held my gender against me, or had any issue with women fighting. Nevertheless, the scarcity of women to spar and fight, even in a major metropolitan area with a thriving boxing scene, meant that getting experience required extra work, extra time, that the men didn’t have to put in.

And my experience is not the experience of every woman in fighting. It is exponentially harder for women who aren’t lucky enough to live in a place like L.A. that is chock full of fighting and fighters of every variety. Having an event like the Atlanta Classic was vital, too, because the only way to really learn to fight is by fighting—not training or sparring but fighting. Being up in that ring in front of spectators throwing and absorbing punches meant to hurt, with an actual corner and not in the middle of a distracted and crowded gym, changes everything.

Even worse, some women have been excluded because of their gender, relegated to the sidelines because they were “too pretty” or “shouldn’t mess up their faces.” Even Joyce Carol Oates, in her book On Boxing, said that “[b]oxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world.”

Thankfully, though Oates was right about a lot of boxing, she was wrong about women’s place in the sport. Boxing is not, as she wrote, “a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity,” so much as it is a celebration of the lost religion of humanity.

A Fighter shows her supporter her medal. Photo by Brittney Witherby photography

As they have done in every other area of humanity, women in fighting have spent years making their own way, carving out space for themselves in gyms and at tournaments where men were the main event, the stars, and just exponentially more numerous. Women are used to doing this kind of work. We did it at work, in politics, and in our own neighborhoods. But it was liberating, last weekend, to not have to do that work for two days. Almost every fighter who came to the tournament got at least one fight. Even better, tournament organizers went above and beyond the call of duty to try and get any girl who wanted two fights in the ring a second time.

Fighter Evelyn Servin with Marty Hill, owner of the Sweet Science Fitness Boxing Club and founder of the event. Photo by Brittney Witherby Photography

Those who have never been in the ring are often flummoxed by women like us, who want to fight and ask for those bouts.

They ask not just why people fight, but why women fight?

Of course, the reasons that women climb through the ropes are as varied as the reasons that drive men to make the same choice. The Atlanta Classic meant that we also didn’t have to try and answer this question for a weekend. It acknowledged just by existing that every woman fighter, just like every man, has her own reason for gloving up.

For me, that reason was the confluence of many things. My life at the time I started boxing was so miserable that I didn’t even realize it and certainly didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t think boxing would do that work, but on some level I thought it might knock something loose, and it did.

And though boxing is a lonely sport—you are never so alone as you are when the referee says “seconds out” and everyone else takes those three steps back, leaving you by yourself in your corner—once you bleed with people, you forge bonds with them. Men have always cemented their relationships with other men by roughhousing, fighting, leaving it in the ring or on the court or on the field.

The idea of not lugging around grievances and slights as if they were fancy handbags, of instead loving the very people who physically hurt you, is no less appealing to women than it is to men. For years now, the combat world has slowly been making space for women to do this. But having an actual event like the Atlanta Classic that was focused on women’s fighting, drawing women fighters who may have previously only stumbled across each other on instagram or facebook, was and is a game-changer.

Suddenly women weren’t a part of the show, an undercard or an afterthought: we were the show.

And this meant not only that someone had decided that we’d pay the registration fees. It meant that our coaches and teams and gyms had supported us in getting there, too. Coaches got on planes with us, helped us make weight and wrapped our hands. Gyms supplied uniforms and training. Families came and cheered for sisters and girlfriends and wives and mothers. Not because they happened to have men fighting so it was little extra effort, but because we were the point.

Coach Zachary Wohlman giving Vanessa a pre-fight talk

The Atlanta Classic acknowledged, loud and clear, that women want to fight, will put in the work to do so, and can put on a damn good show. The current field of women professional fighters is getting better and better, putting on crowd-pleasing fights worthy of top billing. After the Atlanta Classic, we have uncontroverted evidence that the next generation of women are working their way up the ranks in the amateurs. These women are ready and able to continue to make not just women’s combat sports, but combat sports as a whole, more interesting, more fun to watch, and appealing to a new audience.

To return to Joyce Carol Oates, “boxers are all boxers.” This includes women, and the Atlanta Classic is perhaps the first tournament to make this explicit. Hopefully there are a lot more weekends like it, and all of us get fewer walkovers and more time in the ring.

Sportsmanship at its best. Photo by Brittney Witherby Photography

Vanessa would like to thank coach Marty Hill for organizing the Atlanta Classic, as well as her gym, Wildcard Boxing Club, and her trainer, Zachary Wohlman, for too many things to list here.

Vanessa Adriance is an environmental lawyer and amateur boxer based in Los Angeles and is currently working on a book about her boxing experience. You can find her on Instagram at @vadriance. Make sure to read Vanessa’s previous article “Durable, a Boxing Journey” here.

To learn more about the history and practice of martial arts check out the other articles in the Puncher “What is” series on Judo, Boxing, Karate, Taekwondo, Muay Thai, Sambo, Krav Maga, MMA and more.

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