Thousand Dollar Baby 

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.

I left the fight with Greg before my three one-minute rounds were up. I was worried I would get a concussion.

Two English professors were in our boxing club, one of whose Romantic Poetry class I was failing. The other was my personal favorite Creative Writing professor. From these two, I learned two equally important lessons: the worth of victory and the opposite yet equal worth of loss. Mr. P., the Creative Writing Professor, fought me once. It was one of my first fights, soon after the debacle with Greg. Mr. P. and I were more evenly matched. He was about my height, a little slower than me, but more experienced and a harder hitter. We went all three rounds, and during that time, I got the satisfaction of equally matching someone punch-for-punch. There's a certain happiness in knowing you're hurting someone as much as they're hurting you. It's an inner glow, an internal satisfaction in feeling the bones and flesh of another person actually take your force, your violent advances. With Greg, it felt like I was getting pummeled by a brick wall. Nothing fazed him at first. With Mr. P., I took a few ringers, right on my nose, but I gave it to him in the ribs. It was a good fight, and both of us walked away feeling tired, bruised, and thoroughly content.

That week in Creative Writing, he told me in front of the class that his ribs still ached. This public recognition is almost as important as the fights themselves, just as the pre- and post-sports shows are nearly as vital as our modern events. They display the courage, the will and the victory of the fight. As people about me in class murmured about how they could never fight, never get in the ring like that, I told Mr. P. he'd left me hurting too. "Helluva headache, my nose felt like it was in my brain."

Mr. P. soon gave up boxing after an MRI showed Greg had cracked his septum nearly in half. Of course he talked about it. Who wouldn't? But I think we both always wanted another round, another shot at the good fight that comes from well-matched opponents.

Mr. T., the Poetry professor, was entirely different. He was a massive guy, at least six-foot, and coated in muscle. When I hit the heavy-bag, it shook a little bit. When he hit the heavy bag, it went flying. Turns out, Mr. T. was a Scandinavian boxing champion. He'd torn through an entire country of fighters, some with larger builds than him, and won. Now he was teaching Romantic Poetry at an all-girls school and facing off with me, a student he disliked enough to fail.

I almost quit right there.

I almost wet myself.

I almost cried, which I just don't do.

I made it through all three rounds. No doubt he pulled his punches. There was no blood, no concussion, no truly bad bruising. But he still fought me, he still clocked me nice on the jaw so my teeth bit into my mouthpiece, creating a reverse-mold of them in the bright green plastic. The indentations of my teeth compressed by his uppercut are still there, almost three years later. He could have killed me, and there's a certain honor that comes from fighting someone capable of putting you to death.

In the end, I pulled a B+ in his class, and I doubt it was from my unique interpretation of Blake's poetry. I think there's a point where every fighter respects another fighter simply because they fight. There's no need to fight, no malice in these circles as there is in competition. When you pull a group of students and English professors together and face them off against one another, it's simply for love of the fight. It doesn't matter so much who wins, it's how you do it. The feel of your arm swinging out and connecting with someone. The feel of it not connecting, the vibrations of pain and a missed mark sliding up and down your arm. The taste of blood, coppery and thick and full of pride in your mouth.

I'm not sure if Mr. T. gave me that B+ because he'd made me bleed, or because I'd made him fight a little harder, a little differently, because I was a woman and women do fight in a very different way. I switched feet a lot, a forbidden move only Ali used and he used it sparingly. When I switched feet, it never worked. It was a remnant of Tae Kwon Do, but it made me less predictable than the meaty Scandinavians, more of a threat. Something for Mr. T. to contemplate in the gymnasium.

I boxed with those men, mostly Greg, for almost a year. I turned all sorts of colors in my tutelage, found new and different places for pain to hide: the eardrum, the roots of your teeth, the edges of your elbow. I got very acquainted with ice packs and the speed bag in the school workout room. I started giving Greg some competition. Greg was a bleeder, his one failing, and I made his nose bleed once. I made him comment in his quiet, calm way, "I felt that one." Then he'd laugh and lift his gloves for a second round.

When the Toughman drew near, I was all nerves and confidence. Prepared yet unsettled, I knew if I could take a 250-pound man, I could take these women. In my mind, the prize was already mine, I just had to show up to claim it. I threw up for two days before I left for West Virginia. The week before I left to fight, I met the woman I would fall in love with. I also found out that if I did fall in love with her, I was going to be a mom in six months. All this was in my head and I was heading to a dairy farm in West Virginia where I would stay a night before I fought the first fight in my life where someone actually wanted to kill me.The day of the fight, Greg and I were served glasses of fresh milk, right out of the cow. It felt like a fighter thing to do, drink something right from the meaty source. I felt ancient, strong, barbaric. I felt ready.

Arriving at the armory in Beckley where we planned to duke it out, I found I wasn't fighting. There weren't enough girls. I could rest the night. Greg, however, had a nice round with a guy who fell easy, swept up and then down, with the strong uppercut Greg used so well and so many times on me. After that hit, the man wobbled through the final rounds, jelly legs just taking him to the end. We celebrated at the Waffle Hut, Greg wolfing down plates of food since he'd fasted to stay in the light-heavyweight class.

The next night was the big one. They wrap your hands in tape, then cloth wraps. It protects your knuckles, because it hurts to hit someone straight-on, no protection. It also hurts to take someone's bare knuckles on your skin, so hands must be wrapped. Hand-wrapping is like a holy act to me. Swirling the thin lengths of fabric about your wrist for support, your knuckles for safety, it takes on the solemn air that comes with crossing yourself, or lighting candles at Shabbat. It is a holy moment where the boxer is quiet, concerned with getting it tight, not too tight, just right. A second of peace.

Next comes the walk of fame. This is classic cheese: "Eye of the Tiger" blasts through the armory speakers as all of us line up and circle the ring, raising fists as if this is some form of mortal combat and all of us are the greatest fighters on earth. We're skinny, fat, misshapen and short on muscle. We don't fit well in the boxing shorts, looking ridiculous parading to an 80s song screaming about "The thrill of the fight!"

Happily, the fights take over, one after another, in vicious rounds of single elimination. I am paired with a woman of at least 35 who is half a foot shorter than me. I am 20 and spirited, quick with a punch and not so bad on my feet. I know I hit like a man, solid and strong, because I have put my fist through an inch and a half of wood. She is past her fighting prime and, man, am I gonna cream her.

We're looking at each other, ready to kill, when the bell sounds and she starts in. I duck around her first few punches, take a couple of soft ones to the sides, nothing to wince about, and then come in hard, surrounding her with my fists, working up then down the torso like I'm playing xylophone with her ribcage. I step back as she tries to fight back, and I hit the soft, padded ground.

I get up again, confused, not sure why I fell. I never fell in other bouts, maybe because the floor was hard and less forgiving than Greg's gloves. But I swing in, step out, and fall again. You hit the ground three times in a round, you're out. I'm pissed because this time I felt her foot behind mine. The bitch was tripping me.

The ref didn't care, he didn't call either trip, didn't call anything on her, even when she tried to sweep me again. I figured she wants to fight this way, go for it, so I let her lean in to sweep me and as I swung back, I grabbed her shirt. Pulling her into me fast as I tipped, she stabilized me the second my fist hit her right on the nose. My momentum plus her momentum plus the speed of my damned fist going God knows how fast, that's one big ouch.

Three rounds went by with me pulling her in, popping her hard, and letting her go. Three rounds of my corner man telling me I was losing when I knew damned well I was winning. Three rounds of her pushing, pulling, tripping and cheating her way through the fight. They went by so quickly the ref almost had to pull me off her, almost had to cut us apart because she was swimming and about to fall. I wanted a K.O. so bad I would have paid the thousand to down her.

It all came down to the judges' call. They rated us on a particular system. She knew the judges, I didn't. She got her hand raised, I didn't. She was coated in a thin sheen of her own blood, I had only a bruise, the size of a quarter, on my arm. I was cheated. Not just of the thousand, but of the victory, the recognition, the screams of the crowd. I felt like the worth had been sucked out of my three minutes, my three fighting rounds. I was ashamed, not because I'd lost, but because I hadn't and someone I couldn't control was telling me I had.

As we left the ring, the place erupted in booing, yelling, cursing. They weren't applauding, they didn't cheer for the other woman. The judges went for her, but apparently the crowd preferred Sam "The Cannibal" Gellar. They booed the winner offstage.

Soon afterward, Greg was disqualified due to excessive blood loss. It was the only reason he ever lost. His nose turned on like a faucet and the fight had to end. We left together, taking the ride back to Roanoke and Hollins.

For weeks, all across West Virginia, people had thought I won the women's Toughman competition and I was congratulated several times for winning despite the judges' ruling.

I continued to fight with the professors and Greg in the Hollins gym. We fought at least once a week. We tried to bring in new members, some women, some graduate level men, all of them creative writers who ran from our ferocity, shied from the feeling of limb against head. We kept our group together for another year, until I left for the birth of my son, giving up my dangerous habits for the new role of "mom."

I remember those days with happiness. We walked away from those fights proud of ourselves and each other just for making it through a fight. Amped up on adrenalin and padded with ice packs, we walked out of the Hollins University gym as if we owned the whole damned city of Roanoke, because for a moment we did. At least to each other. We became kings, gladiators, we recessed back to tribal prehistory and displayed aggression, pure and simple, to our own private audience. It felt so damned good, too. And if one of us broke his nose, or blackened an eye, we'd brag all week, showing off, letting the campus see the temporary tattoos of honor we gained in the ring.

Boxing to me became a certain way of life, a way of living with the bullshit and excuses and two-faced existence that comes from studying the liberal arts. For all the beauty in the arts, there's a lot of crap too, and boxing cut through it. You can't finesse a stream of snotty blood, you can't hide a shiner, and if you do, it's because you're ashamed. Boxing showed through in my life as a point of honesty when I was living the generally less-than-sincere life of a college student. Throughout assignments I found vapid and vacant, I had my vivid bruises, my vivacious battles, my vigorous losses and victories. I had a clear, unquestionable element in my life that guided me through the haziness of learning who I was, and I clung to it with every last punch. I hate to say it, but in those last couple years of higher education, I may have learned more by being pummeled by professors than I did studying any of their texts.

Samantha Gellar is a Charlotte writer who has more metal in her body at age 23 than most people do at 90. This piece is excerpted from her memoir-in-progress, Scar Stories: Violence and Assorted Injuries.