February 23, 2005 News & Views » Cover

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Thousand Dollar Baby 

Or, How I Fought My Way Through College

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About the time I was touching gloves with a woman 15 years older than me, I realized my college life differed from that of most liberal arts students. Two thousand and five-hundred West Virginians were screaming, "Beat the shit outta her!" and "Eat her up, Cannibal!" I was a tough woman in the female segment of a Toughman competition where I'd made it to the second round because so few women had signed up and there was no one to fight me. It was the first time I'd been in an actual boxing ring and it struck me how soft the floor actually was. Not half as hard as the basketball court.Let me explain. Sometime in my freshman year at Hollins University, I went to a Toughman Contest. It's a brawling competition. The main goal is to hurt your opponent as much as you can within three one-minute rounds. Crazed working-class West Virginians come in for the bloodfest to watch amateur boxers go insane in a ring provided by the FX network. Our Creative Writing class drove out to Beckley, West Virginia, a back-home country town, to watch this mayhem as a form of field trip. We were almost as big an attraction as the fight, and many of the local audience members were fascinated by the more oddly dressed English majors. Specifically, the ones wearing lots of metal in their faces.

That night I watched the Killer Bee trounce all of his opponents in bouts of barbaric battle. I watched a bout that looked like Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum chasing each other around the ring. I noticed the women were awful, coming out like windmills, swinging blindly. At some point, I turned to the professor who arranged the trip and said, "I could take these girls."

I could. I was a black belt in Tae Kwon Do with two and a half years of sparring experience. The heavyweight women were a piece of cake, pins ready for me to knock down.

Then came The Educator: a 25-year-old lightweight kindergarten teacher. This woman could have knocked the Killer Bee to his knees. She was fast, harsh, and had Killer Mom bleeding, running away, and crying in less than 30 seconds. Killer Mom did not look like the kind of woman who cried or ran — she looked like she would take a bat to her kids when they pissed her off.

As I watched The Educator win her last bout, I knew I wanted to be like her — a swift shark swooping through and devouring opponents. I wanted to be the expert in the sea of beginners. Hell, I just wanted to be able to walk up to someone and say, "I'm The Educator, and I'm gonna beat the living crap out of you."

As we left, two things happened. One: my professor said he wanted me to fight in the Toughman. Two: a friend of mine supported him in this request. My friend eventually weaseled out a promise that I would fight the Toughman. Time went by, I forgot, she forgot, and then she passed away in my sophomore year. Students at the school stumbled about, trying to find a proper way to memorialize her. I went numb about it until the next year, when the Toughman was mentioned. Remembering my promise, I signed up.

The Toughman also has a one thousand dollar cash prize for the winner. Wanting to be more independent, I figured I'd win the Toughman and pay for my books that semester. Show the parents I could do something good while pounding another human being to bits. Being a couple of hippies, they still weren't sold on the whole boxing/brawling thing.It was obvious I needed to train, so I geared up and joined in with the unofficial boxing group at Hollins, an all-girls school.

When I first thought about fighting, I pictured sparring. I figured you could think your way through the fight, look for the openings, use beautiful combinations that stunned your opponent. I thought I could use the martial arts, the sleek Korean fighting skills I had trained in for two and a half years. I thought it was all in the arms and the head, right?

Dead wrong.

I stepped into the so-called ring — some tape signifying a square on the basketball court — with Greg, a graduate student in philosophy and stablehand at the famed Hollins stables. He was also a giant white guy with a mad dog grin that petrified you in the ring. His first tap to my head turned my thinking upside-down. Getting hit in the head is a lot like having someone quickly stuff you in a sensory-deprivation chamber, with pain. Everything goes black and silent for a second, you have nothing, and then blurred sight and muted sound with high-pitched shrieking. It's all very confusing and when you finally regain composure and prepare to think out your next move, a big red glove is in the middle of your blurry sights and it starts all over.

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