Natasha Jonas has recorded so many historic milestones as a woman in boxing that it seems strangely jolting when she remembers a time that her appearance in the ring was greeted with disdain. Last month she made yet more history when she became the first black woman to be granted a managerial licence in British boxing. It maintains the trend that began when Jonas was selected to represent the first women’s team to box for Great Britain in 2009.
Three years later the Liverpool fighter became the first British woman to box at the Olympics Games. Then, in 2022, she became the first woman to win British boxing’s Fighter of the Year. Now, reflecting on her new managerial role while she continues boxing as the current IBF welterweight title-holder, Jonas recalls an amateur tournament when she was part of a mixed GB team that boxed against the United States in the same year she made her international debut.
“Henry Cooper was there and he was the star of the show,” she says of the London heavyweight who fought Muhammad Ali twice in the 1960s. “Every time one of us girls made our way to the ring, he walked out and wouldn’t watch us fight. I didn’t like it but we had to accept that old mindset. I’m fortunate enough to be in the generation that broke that down but I’ve been luckier to reap the benefits of others like Jane Couch who broke down even more barriers.”
Twenty-five years ago, in August 1998, Couch won a landmark case against the British Boxing Board of Control, which had banned women from fighting – claiming, absurdly, that they are “more emotional and accident-prone. They are too fragile to box and bruise easily”. Jonas is close to Couch and acknowledges the debt that she and all other women in British boxing owe to a pioneer who forced profound change.
“For me coming through as a manager it won’t be such a big thing,” Jonas says, “because I think I’m well-respected now by the board and within the boxing community.”
There has been a sea-change in perceptions of women’s boxing, even among bigots who can no longer ignore the sheer quality of Claressa Shields, Katie Taylor, Amanda Serrano, Chantelle Cameron, Savannah Marshall and Jonas. Does Jonas relish the way in which elite female fighters are now acknowledged? “Do you know what? As athletes we always knew how good women’s boxing was. We just needed the world to see it and a big door opened with the London Olympics. That definitely opened people’s eyes and when Katie Taylor turned pro [in November 2016], we followed [Jonas made her debut in the paid ranks in June 2017]. It’s very rare now to have a card without a female fight.”
Jonas and Mikaela Mayer, the highly accomplished American and former world super-featherweight champion, will headline a big show in Liverpool on 20 January. As she prepares to defend her title against Mayer, Jonas says: “It doesn’t get any bigger than fighting as world champion in your home town. That brings pressure but also motivation against a really good fighter. We’re top boxers so we both believe we can win. I don’t think she can outbox or outfight me. She obviously thinks the same about her chances so the best woman will win.”
Before then, Jonas will continue to plot the embryonic career path of Mikie Tallon, the 18-year-old from Liverpool who made his professional debut under her management when he defeated Sean Jackson over four rounds last month. Jonas was far more nervous watching her protege than when fighting in a world title bout herself. “Oh, 100%,” she exclaims. “I don’t get anxious when I fight but I was so anxious for Mikie because you can’t control what’s going to happen. When I went to pick him up from home before the fight his mum said: ‘Look after my baby.’ Oh! I said: ‘He’s my baby tonight, so I will.’”
Tallon won easily and Jonas says: “He boxed brilliantly. He was so measured and controlled and that’s what we wanted to see. It would have been lovely for him to say ‘I got the KO’ but every fight right now has got to be a learning experience. That fight was at bantamweight but Mikie says flyweight is his best division. We’re going to probably try to turn him into a champion at junior-fly. There are so very few fighters in those weight categories he’s going to have to move up and down. There’s only five or six [professional British] fighters at his actual weight [super-fly] and one of them is from our gym where we train with Joe Gallagher.”
Is Tallon, who asked Jonas to become his manager in March, a potential world champion? “That’s everyone’s dream but, right now, I’m realistic with him. I’m taking it one fight at a time and looking at the shorter-term goals of Area, English, British titles down the line. I’m looking at the old way of doing it.”
Jonas, who has a seven-year-old daughter, now also manages herself and insists she felt no qualms about becoming more deeply embroiled in the dirty business of boxing. “To be fair, Joe Gallagher [her trainer] always said: ‘Come to the rules meeting, come to this, come to that’ because he wanted me to experience the business. You’re also looking at possible opponents for your fighter up and down the country and in Europe so I have a newfound respect for Joe, who was my manager for a long time, about all the work he does that we don’t see. Fans don’t see the bigger picture because there is a strategy to building a fighter’s career.”
Understanding how boxing can tear chunks out of a fighter’s soul, Jonas remembers her lowest moment with painful clarity. She had cried for two days after losing to Taylor in the London Olympics, but it was far worse when she suffered her first shock defeat, against Brazil’s Viviane Obenauf in August 2018. Jonas was knocked down twice in the third round, and again in the fourth, before Gallagher rescued her.
“I cried for way longer than two days after that,” she says with a rueful laugh. “I’ve never been stopped like that and I should have won. She was a step up but she was very beatable and to lose like that was terrible. You normally stay in a hotel after the fight but I was like: ‘Joe, I need to go home.’ He drove me back and we were both crying in the car.
“I went back to the bottom of the pile and everyone was saying: ‘You’re too old, you’re too slow.’ You start thinking: ‘Are they right? Have I lost it? Who am I?’ I started believing what they said and went away for two months to my brother’s wedding in Australia. When I came back Joe asked me what I wanted to do and I said: ‘Joe, I can’t end my boxing story like that.’”
She exhales deeply. “So all this success has been a long time coming.”
Jonas loves the sport because it rescued her at a time when she was “an overweight, unemployed scally from Toxteth”. Until the age of 20 her dream had been to become a world-class footballer. Jonas was an outstanding youth player and she won a scholarship to an American college – only for her hopes to be quashed by a bad knee injury.
One of her sisters, Nikita Parris, who at 29 is 10 years younger than Jonas, plays for Manchester United and has won 71 England caps. So would Jonas have succeeded at the highest level of women’s football? “One hundred per cent. I had dreams of being the next Mia Hamm and winning the World Cup. I had big aspirations but it came crashing down [after her injury in the US]. It was taken away through no fault of my own.
“When I went to America I was only the second person to go to university in the family and everyone had these high hopes and I was telling them who I would become. Then, when I came home, I was back to my nan’s, back to square one with no money, no job, no sport and an injury. It was a hard pill to swallow and definitely a dent in my ego.
“Wayne Rooney had just signed for Everton at 16. Beth Tweddle was 18 and she might have just won her first Commonwealth [gymnastics] gold. I was 20 and thinking: ‘Oh my God, all these kids are becoming someone and I’m nobody.’ It was only because Sylvia Singleton [the boxing trainer] was bugging me to go to the women’s night in the Rotunda that I ever went. In 2024 it will be 20 years since I started boxing.”
In 2009, alongside Nicola Adams and Marshall, Jonas was part of the first small GB women’s boxing team that travelled to China. She began ticking off the firsts one after another and, in 2012, women’s boxing appeared for the first time at the Olympic Games. Jonas became the first female British boxing Olympian when defeating America’s Queen Underwood at London 2012. She lost to Taylor in the quarter-finals but they set a record for the loudest decibel count from a crowd at those Olympics.
Jonas lost narrowly again to Taylor in an outstanding fight in 2021 but, a year later, after winning three world title bouts, she made the history that means the most to her – and became British Fighter of the Year.
Her illustrious predecessors included Cooper and Jonas says: “In Fight of the Year and Fighter of the Year in both America and Britain there was a female candidate, which proves how far women’s boxing has come. But, honestly, I didn’t think I would win Fighter of The Year. I was looking at the list of previous winners and thinking: ‘Wow, imagine having this.’ Then they said the winner: ‘Natasha Jonas.’ I’m there with the likes of Lennox Lewis, Ricky Hatton, Nigel Benn and it was just mad.”
It had been a long struggle for Jonas in a life full of adversity. “My mother was a young mum and she had me when she was 15. Before I was born people were saying the best thing to do is to abort me. But then I got born and it was just [three years] after the Toxteth riots [in 1981]. There were all these stereotypes of who you become, and what you can’t do, when you’re from this place. But my mum always instilled in me that don’t let anybody tell you who you can be and what you can do. If you want to do it, go and do it. Throughout my whole life I’ve stuck to that. I’ve believed in myself, worked hard and done it. People think you just turn up and win that award but it’s a combination of all those years of work and ups and downs and blood, sweat and tears. But where you come from, your family and your DNA shapes you.”
Jonas, the perennial pioneer, laughs when I suggest that her mum must be proud of her latest achievements. “Yeah, I’d like to think so,” she says. “She was telling everyone in the bingo and that’s enough for me.”
