The Drink Tank 077 (2006).pdf

The Drink Tank Issue 77

A Rare Unthemed Issue!

Our Fighting Women

A Semi-Fictional Bio Piece

from Judith and Kathryn Morel

When a little girl is six-

foot by the day she steps into her

Junior High classroom, she gets

teased a lot. When that girl grows

up in Los Angeles, she’s pretty

much asured that she’s going to

have to ight her way through. As

long as she stays in school, she’ll

have to keep ighting. Maria grad-

uated, 3.2 GPA, 36-2 with a cou-

ple dozen knockouts in PAL and

Golden Gloves, 100-0 with a few

score knockouts in brawls with

those angry girls with the brown

lip-liner.

At six-three with mus-

cles that weren’t sculpted but

ire-hardened, Maria wasn’t in

demand for the promoters who

controlled OnDemand and HBOx-

ing. Graduation meant a choice:

the warehouse video-taped ights

for good money that were noth-

ing more than fetishist pre-light

entertainment that usually ended

in photo spreads and sometimes

going home with wealthy admir-

The girl in the ring becomes

something more than the one in

the audience. I’m not sure how to

say it otherwise. Even if the most

glamorous starlet is sitting ring-

side, she’s not a stitch in history

compared to the woman in the

ring. That’s what Maria’s father

told her as he made her throw ive

hundred punches into the heavy

bag every day after school.

Maria Alejandra Munceo

fought two hundred and sixteen

bouts before she stopped at the

age of twenty-three. Six years

later, she came back. Three years

later, she showed up on a pay-per-

view and dropped hard to the can-

vas for the big payday made bigger

by her co-operation. That was the

boxing career of Maria Munceo,

save for the other ight, the real

ight.

amount which never comes close to the

number promised. The girls who fought

Mia St. John and Christy Martin were

put up in hotels, lown in to take the

beatings. Maria would drive all night

to tiny arenas and then drive straight

home after the ight, not wanting to

waste the money on the only cheap

motels in one horse towns. The repre-

sented girls, they ight at the Taj Mahal

in Atlantic City, the Olympic in LA, the

MGM in Vegas. Maria fought in Worley,

Idaho, the Women’s Boxing Capital of

America, in Primm, Nevada, in Hawai-

ian Gardens, California.

And all the while she kept win-

ning, kept knocking out girls who were

a foot shorter and far prettier. She ran

an impressive record, seventy-plus

wins, maybe four losses, and more

knockouts than she could remember.

The records on the club scene were

rare and often revised to give more

weight to the girl who stepped in the

ring with the local favorite.

Maria was always the local fa-

vorite, no matter where she fought. In

Idaho, the only place where women

box and receive as much admiration as

the men for their talents She knocked

sixteen girls out in a row before she

had one ight go to the cards. She still

won and ten more after. She ruled Los

Angeles’ small clubs, making young

Chicana boxers stare up at the lights.

She lost once in Reno, once in Tahoe,

a close call in Chula Vista and another

in Texas. Every night she fought, no

matter what the ending of record was,

she was the star.

Until she quit.

She had just fought her irst

ight in Juanez, a three hundred dollar

pay-off and a long car ride back home.

In Arizona, on a road she knew from

trips to ight Garcias in El Paso and

Vegas in Nuevo Laredo. She pulled to

the side of the highway and stared into

the rear-view.

What the hell am I doing? She

thought and she looked at the clock on

the glowing 3:43 am. There was still a

ers, or the no-money wonder that exist

in legal and illegal boxing clubs with

names like KO Towers and the Doube-

L. If you made it strong in one, you’d

be rich, famous on the net and in the

magazines that cater to the audience

that doesn’t care whether it's boxing or

wrestling or simply two nearly naked,

and sometimes totally naked, women

beating each other to bloody messes. If

you’re a great club boxer, maybe they’ll

see you, maybe they’ll call and say they

want you in the show, on pay-per-view,

in the big arenas.

Maria chose the clubs.

When you work for the big pro-

moters, the pay does not come in

sealed envelopes containing a mystery

trace of blood on her cheek from Lean-

na Fuente’s nose. She had only taken

maybe four punches of any force, but

she was hurting, ribs felt cracked and

spine felt compacted. Everything hurt

all at once, the weight of years of box-

ing, of self-imposed limitations, of

ights against opponents who were no

match for her. She hadn’t lost but a

handful of ights, but she felt like she

had been destroyed. That night, she

stopped and slept at a motel. The next

morning she called Jaime Jullian and

told him to cancel her three ights for

the next month. Maria Munceo retired,

unnoticed.

The next week she took stock.

Seventeen thousand dollars in the

bank and another six grand in cash

that she kept under the spare tire in

her car. She lived in a ive hundred

dollar a month apartment in West-

wood, surrounded by UCLA students.

Maria took a week that she thought

perfect. Sleep ’til ten, then a long bath.

Lift until 1, then TV and lunch. Dinner

at seven and then long run. Then home

and bed earlier than she’d ever man-

aged while training every afternoon.

After that, it was business again.

She moved North, just outside of Santa

Barbara, a little place surrounded by

students again, paying four-ifty and

living with three girls who went to

UCSB. She started community col-

lege, got her AA with an emphasis on

Physical Training. She worked as a

waitress at the 24-hour pancake house

where every drunken frat boy ended

up drinking coffee after parties, wait-

ing until they might be sober enough

to drive. One of them, a boy of twenty,

bought her lowers.

“I’m Michael Falls.” he told her

as he gave them to her “I’m gonna take

you out when your shift’s over.”

She smiled and nodded. He

came back at seven am. They walked

across town for the better breakfast at

Hobee’s. Maria was touched that he

had come for her, and by the end of

the evening, she was his.

She was pregnant that October,

and gave birth a month after her grad-

uation. She named her Rosa Cassan-

dra Falls. The name was a mistake, for

Mr. Falls never made Maria his bride,

and barely stayed until the day Rosa

learned to walk.

Maria Munceo started UCSB

two years later, when she had saved

enough working as a personal trainer

at an over-priced gym to pay for school.

She got her degree in Recreational Sci-

ence, a near 4.0 GPA and a daughter

whose irst words were ‘lift’ and ‘hold’

and ‘breathe’. Mother and daughter

were both it as a iddle when things

changed again.

Four years and six days after the

birth of her daughter, an old voice over

the phone.

“Is this the Munceo residence?”

“Yeah, this is Maria.” She said.

“Maria, it’s Jaime. Jaime Julian.”

She didn’t need the clariication,

but the two talked for almost an hour

about what Jaime had to do to ind her

number, who he had talked to along

the way.

“I got a ight for you.”

Maria spent a few minutes ex-

plaining that she wouldn’t ight in

those clubs anymmore, that she had

more to worry about than driving

across the country to pick up a few

hundred dollars when she could make

that in an afternoon.

“No, Maria, I don’t want you to

ight at the Club. Hell, I haven’t been

there for more than a year.” Jaime

said. “No, I want you to come and

ight for me at the Olympic next week-

end. Thirty-six hundred for the win-

ner, twelve hundred for the loser. The

girls an old Club Fighter named Missy

Stanek. Fight’s in six weeks.”

Maria smiled. Missy could take a

punch like a man, but couldn’t throw

around any sort of defense.

“Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll drive up the

night before.” Maria answered.

“Nope.” Jaime sounded insistant.

“You and the kid can drive up in two

weeks and stay at the Holiday Inn. I’ll

have a room for you. We want you to

train with Michael Brodeur and Mickie

Chavez.”

Brodeur and Chavez? Maria

got the rest of the details, but those

names, they meant more

than the money. The two

had six amazing ights

against one another in the

late 1970s, each one knock-

ing the other one out three

times late in the ight, each

time setting them back to

the beginning, but building

to a rematch that drew the

Mexicans to the ights at the

Olympic. They started train-

ing guys in the late 1980s,

and when the LA ight scene

started drying up, they took

in the ladies. Maria had seen

some of the girls Chavez

had trained; they were ierce

and knew their business. To

them, ighting wasn’t a sport,

it was a way of making a liv-

ing.

That irst ight, that

irst time

back in six

years, that

night when

the drunk

Mexicans got a

terrible opener

where two

tiny African

ighters with

names the an-

nouncer could

barely manage

to mangle threw maybe ten punches

each and did no damage. Maria knew

the kind of ight it was, just the one to

get them on a card and get a payday

without affecting the real record of

either man. In fact, both fought under

fake names: one really was Tanzanian,

the other from Long Beach. The second

ight was much better and the crowd

rode that through six rounds. They

were on third.

Maria took some hard body

shots, but came back with simple, and

slower, combinations. That irst round,

the irst round back, that hurt her

more than the ten hours a day training

under the rigid taskmasters. She was

burnt, started to sieze.

“Maria, harder. Hit the bitch

harder.” Mickie said.

In the second round, Missy went

toes up, loored cinematically hard

from a right cross that she had no

counter for.

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