Unless you wanted to do it topless in some businessman’s apartment, the opportunities for female boxers in the early 1970s were limited at best. Sky’s new documentary, Right to Fight, written and directed by Georgina Cammalleri – and drawing on the research and archive of the former boxer Sue “Tiger Lilly” Fox – is the story of the women who changed the sport.
It is not a tale that has been told before. Fox has spent years painstakingly gathering scraps of evidence to form a coherent whole – since male historians of the sport have concentrated entirely on preserving the male record of what is perhaps the sport most dominated by men. Right to Fight tells it brilliantly, helped by the fact that every one of its subjects bursts with the kind of energy and charisma that is a gift to the camera. They have backstories, anecdotes and attitude that could fill a programme 10 times as long without it flagging for a moment.
Cathy “Cat” Davis broke with her Louisiana family’s expectations (“They wanted me to stay a little doll. But I just couldn’t do the girl thing”) by moving to New York to train as a fencer. When a coach told her, “I don’t teach women or cripples sabre” and slashed her leg with his weapon, she turned to a boxing manager, Sal Alighieri, who was keen to make women’s boxing the next big thing.
Marian “Lady Tyger” Trimiar was born in Harlem and lived a hard life with her alcoholic father. Nevertheless, they began shadowboxing together as they watched Muhammad Ali. When she couldn’t find a trainer willing to work with a woman, she had business cards made that read “First Black Female Boxer” and one gym agreed to take her. The men beat her up as an initiation rite and bored a peephole in the shower she used, but she wasn’t deterred: “I kept coming back … Eventually I earned their respect.”
Pat “Liberation” Pineda was molested as a child, married at 16, pregnant with baby number two at 17 and felt suicidal by 18. “I was caged. There was no freedom.” A friend sneaked her into a boxing gym where she channelled her rage and found her calling.
Cammalleri does a wonderful job of telling the fighters’ stories in a way that, as with all the most sensitively directed documentaries, illuminates much more than the ostensible subject. In Lady Tyger’s business cards alone, we see the extraordinary confluences of aptitudes and abilities required to be a pioneer in any field – canny insight, confidence, cool-eyed detachment and perspective, as well as her indisputable talent and ambition. This is to say nothing of the determination: when the women are refused licences, without which they cannot switch from amateur to professional and earn a living, they battle to get the rules changed in the face of unyielding hostility from officialdom.
Sexism pervaded the women’s lives at every level. The level of resistance and hatred inspired by their desire to box professionally is breathtaking. There is contemporary news footage of men in the street and, more importantly, men on various athletic commissions (and, alas, Muhammad Ali), insisting that women are designed to serve men – and not physically or mentally capable of fighting. Pineda’s manager hid from her client letters full of rape threats and hopes that “your babies die”. It is best not to dwell on the fact that the only thing that seems to have changed in half a century is that women who step out of line can now expect to receive similar missives via their social media accounts or email.
In their private lives, too, most dealt with abusive men, whether at home or at work (“There’s always a lot of trainers that want to have sex with you. And if you don’t go with them they would say you were gay”). Lady Tyger fled her violent husband in the night when she found out she was pregnant. Davis’s manager tried to strong-arm her into marriage, although she was (to her own consternation) gay and in love with a woman she had met on a university course.
What Cammalleri draws out most delicately, however, is how Davis benefited from being white. Blond and good-looking, she became the acceptable face of women’s boxing. She was awarded her licence first, although Lady Tyger’s and other boxers’ applications predated hers, and got all the publicity. And this was despite allegations that Alighieri was fixing her matches. Davis claims a stroke seven years ago has left holes in her memory about that. It makes a reunion between the three fighters in the closing minutes saddening as Lady Tyger presses her on various issues and Davis comes up short. However, the final scene, as Marian “Lady Tyger” Trimiar is inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame and roars to the heavens in triumph, is the perfect note on which to end.
Right to Fight aired on Sky Documentaries and is available on Now TV.
