On November 17, 2001, WBC world junior welterweight champion Christy Martin outboxed Lisa Holewyne over ten rounds at Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas, which was unusual because Martin was a self-admitted slugger, not a boxer. At the weigh-in, when Holewyne had wished her good luck, Martin answered, “Good luck getting knocked the fuck out.”
On November 25, 2017, the two women were married by a justice of the peace in Austin, Texas, where they currently live.
The marriage is one of the happier events chronicled in Fighting for Survival, by Christy Martin and Ron Borges. The book is subtitled “My journey through boxing fame, abuse, murder, and resurrection.”
Fighting for Survival opens on November 23, 2010, when what was actually attempted murder took place at the home in Apopka, Florida, Martin shared with her husband, Jim Martin, one of the most evil creatures in the annals of boxing – or in any annals, actually. This twisted parasite finally made good on the threat he had made throughout their 19-year marriage to kill Christy Martin if she ever left him.
“Before nightfall I would be stabbed a half dozen times, have one of my calves sheared off like it was a pot roast, end up with one ear dangling off the side of my head from being pistol whipped, and finally left on the floor with a 9mm bullet hole in my chest,” she relates. The bullet came, ironically, from Martin’s own pink-handled pistol.
From Itmann, West Virginia, a town so small it had no traffic light, Christy Martin – then Christy Salters – was actually a coal miner’s daughter, and she used that song by Loretta Lynn – the original “coal miner’s daughter” – as her ringwalk music throughout her career, which lasted from 1989 to 2012 and included a record of 44-7-3, with 31 knockouts. She wore pink in the ring and was the Warrior Queen of women’s boxing, the pioneer and prophet of the sport, and the only female boxer ever to appear on the sacred cover of Sports Illustrated. She made millions of dollars. She was known around the world to boxing fans.
Yet Christy Martin’s life was mostly constrained by the secret of her sexuality and her naive and tragic willingness to play along with the media myth of her life as the charmed wife of a devoted husband-trainer-manager. Never mind that Jim Martin was two years older than Christy’s father and that the day he tried to kill her he was wearing a $120,000 bracelet he’d bought in Las Vegas from the proceeds of one of her fights there.
Ultra-competitive as a high school and college basketball player who at five-four never saw a shot she wouldn’t take, Martin entered tough woman contests while in college and discovered the knockout power that was to be her ring signature.
It was in the ring that she could escape the haunting threat of being outed as a lesbian; outside the ring, her life was controlled and manipulated by men, from the sociopathic husband who made her totally dependent on his dark demands to promoter Don King, whose command of “Write her up a contract!” started her climb to fame to Mike Tyson, who respected and supported her and installed her as a six-figure fixture on many of his undercards.
But what made Christy Martin the face of women’s boxing took place against Dierdre Gogarty at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on March 16, 1996, thanks to what a sportswriter called “the most valuable nosebleed in history.”
In the second round Gogarty broke Martin’s nose with a straight right counter that unleashed a torrent of blood that flowed for the rest of the six rounds despite the best work of her cut man. The blood-spattered Martin won an easy unanimous decision. The fight was on Showtime as part of the Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno pay per view and Martin’s gory victory boosted her onto the SI cover and made her an international star with all the financial and professional glory that followed.
Christy Martin’s biggest payday – $400,000 – was also the day of her ultimate humiliation. On August 23, 2003, in Biloxi, Mississippi, Laila Ali, the daughter of Muhammad Ali, stopped her 48 seconds into round four. Ali was 25, Christy Martin 35; it was a matter of a good big woman beating a good little woman. Martin stayed down while she was counted out. “The worst thing I ever did in boxing was to quit that night. I’ll never get over it,” she says to this day.
A chance for redemption was offered in a proposed fight with the charismatic Dutch fighter, Alicia Rijker, billed as “the most dangerous woman in the world.” It could have been an epic battle, given the bad blood between the two, but Rijker pulled out at the last minute with a supposed Achilles problem, and the fight never happened.
In trying to kill her, Jim Martin finally and irrevocably set Christy Martin free. At his sentencing to 25 years without parole on April 23, 2012, she walked up to him and hissed, “I hope you burn in hell, motherfucker!”
She still had to defeat cocaine addiction and come to terms with her parents’ attitude toward her sexuality, but today she is CEO of Christy Martin Productions, which promotes boxing, and also speaks throughout the country, encouraging the struggle against abuse.
While Fighting for Survival sometimes borders on preachy, Martin and Borges are reaching out to readers who are victims of abuse with the all-important message that standing up to an abuser moves the abused from a victim to a survivor. Martin’s honesty and clarity make her memoir a very readable document, any such quibble aside. It is highly recommended to even a general audience outside boxing.
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Originally published in Ringside Seat.