BELLE OF THE BRAWL

By Steve Wulf

THE CHAMP WORE PINK. A PINK robe, pink shoes, pink trunks and, thanks to the mixture of blood and sweat but certainly not tears, a pink shirt that was once white. Fighting on the undercard of the Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno W.B.C. heavyweight title fight in Las Vegas on March 16, Christy Martin, billed as the Coal Miner's Daughter, won a unanimous six-round decision over Deirdre Gogarty, unbilled as the daughter of two Irish dentists.

Besides knocking each other around, Martin and Gogarty punched the lights out of several presumptions. First to fall was the notion that women can't box and that if they tried, it would be some variant of boxercise or, worse yet, hot-oil wrestling. Well, as Tom Humphries wrote in the Irish Times, "it took five, maybe 10 seconds for the beery, testosterone charged crowd in the MGM [Grand] Garden to realize they weren't watching a novelty act...The mixture of ferocity and serious boxing skills left the most chauvinistic ticket holders gape-mouthed." Equally awed were the millions who saw the fight on pay-per-view. For days afterward, conversations about the Tyson fight invariably segued toward the women. Christy Martin has become an overnight sensation. "We've had calls from Japan, Canada and Regis and Kathie Lee," says Jim Martin, her husband and trainer. "Playboy wants her too, but we ain't taking our clothes off."

Also sent reeling was the archaic belief that women are somehow, uh, softer. During the second round, Gogarty caught the 135-lb. Martin flush on the nose, opening a spigot of blood. After the round, as cornermen tried to stop the flow, Jim asked Christy if she wanted to continue. "I was concerned because she's my wife first, my fighter second," he says. "She told me, 'Don't you dare stop this fight.'" Martin's persistence was rewarded not only with the decision, the cheers of the crowd and the W.B.C. women's championship belt, but also with what for her was the ultimate compliment. "A few hours after the fight," she says, "I passed Mike Tyson at the hotel. You know what he said to me? He said, 'Hey, champ.'"

Martin, 27, really is a coal miner's daughter, the coal miner being John Salters of the tiny town of Mullens, West Virginia. Christy was a catcher in Little League and a good enough player on her high school basketball team to score 50 points in a half. She also played basketball at Concord College in nearby Athens, where she got her education degree in just three years. One night she accepted a dare to enter a local Toughwoman contest--"There's not that much to do in southern West Virginia," she says--and three Toughwoman titles later, she and her mom and their little dog went looking for a boxing trainer.

They found Jim Martin in Bristol, Tennessee. "No way was I going to have a woman, her mother and a Pomeranian in my gym," says the 52-year-old Martin. "I even toyed with the idea of having one of my fighters break one of her ribs just to discourage her. But I liked her moves and the way she listened, and I figured this girl could make me some money. The next thing you know, I fall in love with her." Success did not come as easy for the Martins, who moved to Orlando, Florida, to further their careers. Christy has been fighting for five years now, with 25 knockouts and only two losses in 39 fights. In 1993 the Martins signed with Don King, who promised to make them millions. But while the promoter calls Christy "tenacious and vivacious," he pays her purses that can only be called "bodacious." Tyson received $30 million and Bruno $6 million for their fight, but Martin took home $15,000 for hers.

Says Christy: "I really thought I'd have one pro fight, start teaching phys. ed., maybe raise a family. Now, all of a sudden, little girls are asking me for my autograph and Howard Stern is calling. I may have to put those family plans off for a while. Actually, I'm kind of a softie outside of the ring." She's also something of a disappointment to feminists. She doesn't believe strongly in women's rights or even in female fire fighters: "Hey, if my house is on fire, I want Mike Tyson carrying me out of there, not Christy Martin."

Still, she has floored one very large misconception: the one about women's sports being inferior to men's sports. The Gogarty-Martin bout was superior to most male fights. It was crisp and clean and devoid of the arm holding, head butting and eye thumbing so prevalent in boxing. There's not much to like about the fight game nowadays, no reason for a fan to hold the internal debate between fascination for boxing's white purity and revulsion at the sport's blood-red brutality. But the other night in Vegas, a fighter in pink put those two foes back in the ring.