10.09.07 – By Fernando Arboleda: Some days ago, here on ESB, there was an article on female boxers featuring a fight between two beautiful girls named Eileen Olszewski and Stefania Bianchini. The men on this sight could do nothing but comment on their attraction to them as women, not as boxers. In fact, the vast majority of men know very little about women’s boxing. This got me to thinking about the wonderful female boxers we have come to know in the recent past. Women with skill, grace, beauty, power and substance. Ladies like Laila Ali, Christy Martin and Lucia Rijker.
When I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, my older friends talked about one of the most beautiful girls at Belmont High School, and in our neighborhood. I always seemed to hear about Veronica Porche, a girl from Lousisana who was elegant and gorgeous. Well, as it turns out, a few years later, one of my biggest boyhood heroes, Muhammad Ali, was rumored to have visited our neighborhood. It seems the world famous Ali began dating the young beauty. After some time, we learned that Veronica had gone to see Muhammad in Africa, while he was in training for the epic boxing battle known as “The Rumble in the Jungle” against the formidable Big George Foreman. Shortly thereafter, Miss Porche would become Muhammad’s third wife.
From this union, came forth the wonderful and beautiful Laila Ali. Inheriting her father’s grace, physical beauty and charm, she was a natural, eventually becoming arguably the best female boxer on the planet. Incredibly fit and statuesque, she inspires an aura of sheer magnetism, undoubtedly inherited from famous daddy.
If you see her fighting (a slightly “over the hill”) Christy Martin, whom she outweighed by some twenty pounds, you witness a fantastic fight, with shades of Castillo/Corrales, or Hagler/Hearns. This was an all out war, with Ali eventually overwhelming the smaller but game Martin. Much in the fashion of a Joe Calzaghe, Ali showed utter determination with her relentless double- handed attack. The smaller, Frazieresque Martin gave it all she could, landing some huge body shots and big left hooks even after being stunned by the sharp right crosses of the nonstop Ali barrage. This is the type of fight when one can truly appreciate female toughness, the gritty determination to go all out, withstanding punishing blows to either win or lose by giving it “all you’ve got.”
If you see Laila Ali now, in her semi-retirement from boxing (recently married to former NFL player Curtis Conway), “dancing with the stars,” you will witness Laila’s inherited magnetism. It’s very difficult to notice her dancing partner, since her beauty and grace in dancing is truly magnetic, the type where your eyes follow her every move. The Ali legacy continues.