World Champion Boxer

Date : 06/12/2006

Alicia Ashley: World Champion Boxer

By Alicia Ashley as told to Orato Editor Heather Wallace, U.S.A.

 
Jamaican-born Alicia Ashley is a three-title World Champion in the highly competitive yet underrated sport of women’s boxing. While she started out as a classical dancer, a knee injury set her on the path of competitive sports where she could apply the mobility and strength she’d developed through performance. Originally, training to be a boxer was intended to improve her kickboxing skills, but it didn’t take long before she was hooked. She trains alongside men, and in the ring, she has proven that girls can fight too – and maybe even better than the boys. Female boxing is still not included in the Olympic Summer Games, but if women like Alicia Ashley have anything to do about it, that could be changing by 2012. Ashley says the sport remains chauvinistic in many ways, but training with men and earning their respect has only pushed her toward excellence.

I was born in Jamaica and moved to the States in 1978 when I was eleven years old. Growing up, we’d always wanted to come to New York, but we didn’t realize it would be so cold, and I still haven’t gotten used to it. I started out originally as a dancer – ballet, modern and jazz. My father is a choreographer and both his daughters started dancing. My goal was to become a professional dancer until I injured my knee and couldn’t dance anymore.

I didn’t imagine myself getting into boxing until my late 20s, and it wasn’t even the boxing that brought me into it. After dancing, I started doing karate. I wasn’t interested in it growing up, but when I got injured, I started doing karate for the exercise. It came relatively easy for me because as a dancer, I had the mobility and the strength. From dancing, I was always on stage and liked being the center of attention, so I started competing in karate. After a while I decided karate wasn’t competitive enough so I started doing kickboxing.

For my first kickboxing match as an amateur, my opponent was a boxer. In kickboxing, you have to kick eight times per round, and then you can box. So when she used her hands, she got me in the corner and I really didn’t know what to do. Because of that, I decided I needed to use my hands, so I started boxing just to get better as a kickboxer. And then I found out I really enjoyed boxing and was getting a lot more competition through it.

All the sports I’ve ended up in have all been individual sports. I was never interested in team sports.

I was really shy growing up, so it was a way of expressing myself, and you gain some kind of popularity for it. You know, if you win, it’s all on you, if you lose, it’s all on you. Performance has always been my own.

I used to be a computer information specialist for five or six years. I got my degree in that and started doing tech support for Prudential. In 2000, they started laying off a lot of people, and in those few years, I was one of the people that got laid off. That actually gave me the opportunity to concentrate on my boxing, and I was able to get my first title within a few months because of that.

Becoming a World Champion was a major accomplishment for me. It was a goal. It’s like winning an Olympic medal. It’s something you’ve been training exclusively for, and you’ve reached the pinnacle. There are so many different sanctioning bodies that have their own world champion titles, so my goal was: “Okay, then I’m going to get all of them.” One is not enough. There were these other women world champions out there, and I wanted to fight them all.

I’ve won three titles in three different weight classes. As a professional, my first one was as a featherweight, which means the top weight you can be is 126 lbs. I relinquished that one to fight at 122 lbs, a junior featherweight. My third was at 118 lbs, so, I’m actually going down in weight. And the third one that I won was actually an “interim title,” because there was a woman at that weight who already held that title, but she wasn’t able to fight for some reason.

She has now retired, so the title shot is now open, and I’m going to fight for it in February.

There is monetary gain involved in winning a title, but we don’t get paid like the guys do. If I walked in and said I was a three-time World Champion as a guy, I’d be making six or seven figures. For the women, you’re lucky if you’re making five figures. It’s horrible, but it’s a male sport.

It will probably change, but so far it’s taking a really long time, and the only female at this point making any type of money is Laila Ali, and that’s because of her name. When she was married, her husband was a promoter and I fought on his card, so I met her. But we’re in two different weight classes, so I would never meet her in the ring. She fights at 168 lbs and I fight at 118 lbs, so there’s just no way.

It used to be that both men and women would be totally shocked when I told them I boxed. They’d say things like, “Oh my god, how could you do that? You’re so pretty; you’re going to mess up your face.” You used to have that chauvinistic sense. But now, a lot of people are impressed, both men and women - especially women.

A lot of people when they start out their career, they have a control over it and they're put up against people that they can beat, so they can build their record. As a fighter, I don’t really have a fabulous record, but I’ve fought all the top people from the get-go and have always fought hard fights.

Now if there’s anyone around that’s even close in the amount of experience I’ve had…actually, there isn’t, because I’ve been in it eight or nine years already, six years as a pro. The newer ones, if their record is 10-0, they haven’t really fought anyone. They’re not really getting experience because the fights are too easy. They’re not going to stick them against me.

Last year, I think I only boxed once. Getting fights is the most challenging part of this career. I’ve been all over the world fighting while everyone else is back here, because I have to go where the fights are. I had the best time in Germany, even though my luggage got lost. At least I got to go shopping everyday. We were there for a week and went in to see the town. But that’s one thing that’s been hard. When you’re going away to fight, you don’t have time to socialize or see the sights, but this time, we actually had time to go out and see different places.

All of my fights have been hard because of the level of competition, so it’s hard to pinpoint a “proudest moment.” It’s kind of like having the decks stacked against you, because I’ve always gone away. I’ve yet to fight a pro fight in New York City. So already I’m giving away home field advantage. You’re going into someone else’s home town, the promoters are their promoters, the entire audience will be for the opponent and if the judges are from that town, you’ll be lucky if you get a fair fight.

The only way you know you’re going to really win is if you knock someone out, to take it out of the judge’s hands.

I’m not known to be that knockout artist because my style is with movement, so I’m more of a boxer’s boxer than a puncher boxer. A puncher really stands and fights and I move so much, so the majority of my fights are going to be decisions. I’ve never been knocked out.

The training is a lot of hours. I do a lot of conditioning work. I’ll do a lot of track running, three to five miles. Sometimes I do sprinting, because that’s how the fight would be. You have to build your stamina. Because the ring is stop and go all the time and your breathing gets disrupted, you have to train that way also. I do strength training, not with weights, but a lot of legwork. I hate everything else that doesn’t have to do with sparring. If I could spar everyday for those two hours, then I would spar everyday for two hours. For me, that’s the best part of training.

Watching female boxers is more exciting than the guys, because we have less time. Each round is two minutes, whereas for the guys, it’s three minutes. Guys have that feeling out time and they can conserve energy. But the women have to get it done. It’s just that men, or whoever was in charge, thought women couldn’t fight for three minutes. It’s wrong; We can. We do the same kind of training that the guys do, but it works out better for us because it makes for a more exciting fight.

Clint Eastwood’s movie about a female boxer, Million Dollar Baby, was accurate in its portrayal in that when she went to the gym, they didn’t want to train her. I’ve seen that.

What wasn’t accurate was that she was walking around knocking everybody out with just one punch. And in the ring where it was the dirty fighting and she got hurt that badly in the end by that shot that never would have happened, because that doesn’t happen in any ring. But that’s how you know it's Hollywood. But it was great that they portrayed how dedicated she was. You see that in a lot of women training. We’re not making any money, so the majority of us have to work full time while training.

We work alongside the guys. I don’t think a segregated facility is good. When I started ten years ago, I started training at Gleason’s gym, the most famous gym in the world. Ten years ago, the attitude was different in that the men would be like, “What are you doing here?” But I didn’t receive that because I came with my brother and he was training me.

For me, it was no socializing. I came specifically to learn how to use my hands for kickboxing. And kickboxing has been more accepting of women than boxing has been. So, I didn’t realize these guys didn’t really want me in the sport. But when I looked for it, it was true. It was just a totally chauvinistic sport. It was all male.

But when I went into the ring to train with the guys, they didn’t treat me like a woman. They have this testosterone level. If you hit some guy and they feel you’re slighting them, they’re going to really hit back, and that’s what they did to me. At first it was like, tap, tap, but then I hit them and it was like, “Wait a minute. She can fight!” and then they’d fight.

For me, that was the utmost respect. They respected my abilities, so they fought me, and I think I learned a lot more because of that. When I train with women, a lot of times, they don’t want to throw (hit). I train people at the gym too, and a lot of times they don’t want to hit me because I’m a World Champion.

If I’ve lost a fight, I’m accepting about it. I ask, “Did I really do my best in this fight?” If I’ve done my best, then I’ve accepted that this girl is so much better than I am and it’s back to the drawing board. You’ll see me back in the ring at the gym two days later. Then it’s talking to my trainer saying, “Alright, this is what she did to me. We now have to work on this aspect of my training.” It motivates me and I’ve become more well-rounded with each loss. How do I reward myself when I win? Sleep one more day before stepping back in the gym. (laughs)

What’s next? Actually, I just started kickboxing again. Chuck Norris has the World Combat League that I’m a part of. I started off this past March and am now in the finals. It’s a team sport and I’m fighting in January. I’ve lost so much kicking because I’ve been boxing and lost that snap I used to have in my legs. So, I’m actually going back to that.

I’m paid to train people - that’s my work now. I’m happy not to go back into corporate America. I’m doing what I love. I come from a teaching background and I love it, so that’s the next step when I can’t compete anymore.

On a lot of these male cards, they are not putting on that one female fight. ESPN, if they have a card that has a female on it, they’ll show it, but HBO won’t. Until there’s a women’s fight in the Olympics, HBO is going to be very chauvinistic in what they show. Like, Laila Ali is not fighting anyone up to her potential, so who’s going to show that? I know a lot of wonderful women fighters, and they don’t show those. You’re not going to get a lot of money if it’s not being shown on television. There won’t be women’s fights in the Olympics in 2008, and I don’t even think by 2012. It's terrible. I think it's changing, but slowly.