Going the Distance

The first female captain of the Dartmouth boxing club recalls her biggest bout.

I'LL NEVER FORGET HOW much Debbie Greenberger too bled when I punched her in the mouth.

It was 1998, and I was co-captain of the Dartmouth Boxing Club. The club was a new invention; only six months before I had been lifting weights and taking cardioboxing classes, frustrated that I wasn't boxing for real. When posters for the club went up around Alumni Gym, I was primed to fight. I showed up at the first practice excited and determined.

By the time Debbie appeared a term or two later, I was in charge of training the new arrivals. As the only woman qualified to spar, I was also credited with some special expertise in training new female boxers.

Debbie and I were just doing drills, practicing combinations Jab, right cross. Jab, right cross, left hook Jab, right cross, left hook, uppercut. Over and over. You're not supposed to actually hit the other person, but, of course, it does happen. Which is why you always, always wear your mouthguard.

It wasn't until I accidentally popped her in the mouth with a simple jab and her lip smashed into her braces that I realized she had opted not to wear her mouthguard. I sent her, bleeding profusely, off to the locker room to tend to her busted lip.

I boxed in the Dartmouth Boxing Club from early 1998 to late 1999. Our coach, Craig McGray, Adv'05, was a graduate student in computer science. After a year or so of bag workouts, brutal cardio drills and practicing our combinations and footwork, there were four of us who formed the core of the team and were judged by Craig as qualified for actual sparring: Alex Neuhoff'oo, Ben Moor '00, Mike Glenzer '01 and me.

When Craig took a term off in the fall of 1998, he left Alex and me in charge of the club as co-captains. This made me (by virtue of persistence and circumstance more than skill) the first female captain of the club.

lam a small person—a "light bantamweight," to be exact—but I was determined never to betray a hint of girly-girl. At one point, in the midst of a bad haircut at a Main Street salon that shall remain nameless, I told the stylist, "Oh, just shave it all off." G.I. Jane—the film in which Demi Moore, resplendently bald, plays the first female Navy SEAL—had come out the previous year. When it was my turn to lead drills, I ruthlessly barked orders; I was especially fond of making everyone partner off, and then one guy would get into pushup position, his partner would lift the first guy's feet, and then the guy on the ground would have to hop down the length of the mat using only his arms.

As far as I could tell, the guys respected me well enough. However, small incidents would remind me that I wasn't one of them. At one point, one male boxer commented that he really needed boxing in order to work off his natural aggression. Yeah, the other guys agreed, absolutely. "Oh," I thought, "I don't really have natural aggression."

On another occasion, two newwomen showed up, and I led them through an exercise in which the three of us would stand in a circle and toss the medicine ball at each other's abs. The idea was that you would tighten your muscles, catch the ball as it bounced off your stomach and then belt the next person in the stomach. Several minutes into the exercise, one woman suddenly burst out laughing, stepping back and breaking the rhythm of our drill.

"I can't believe..." she gasped, in between peals of laughter, "that we're a bunch of women just standing around hitting each other in the stomach!"

I didn't think it was funny at the time. I was a serious boxer, and this dilettante was making me look bad.

At the end of each practice, two of the more advanced team members would be paired off for a match. I first ended up in the ring (I say that as a figure of speech; we simply had a taped-off mat rather than a proper ring) with one of the bigger guys. Since I was not only a girl but out of this guy's weight class by a solid 60 pounds, naturally he didn't go all out. Being much lower to the ground, I'd dart in and get some good stomach shots and try to duck out before sustaining a swift hook to the head.

After a few rounds that were more exercise than competition, it came time for me to spar with Alex Neuh off, now a nonprofit management consultant in Boston. This was a notable event because Alex and I were actually more or less in the same weight class. And I can't know what was running through Alex's head at the time, but as I've retold this story over the years, I've always attributed to him the thought that a little guy sure as hell isn't going to get beaten by a girl.

And so Alex proceeded to beat the living daylights out of me. There I was suited up in headgear and an abdominal protector, laced into 10-ounce sparring gloves that felt as big as watermelons and extended nearly to my elbows. The buzzer went off, and all of a sudden my head was knocked back and I was staring at the gym ceiling. I hadn't even seen it coming.

I inched back. I was too disoriented for fancy footwork. Suddenly I was hit by another blow to the chin and found myself looking upwards again. With Alex also laced into sparring gloves, I never sustained as much as a bruise (and a localized injury like a black eye would have been nearly impossible). Instead, the force of every hit was spread out, knocking my entire head backwards. "I'm getting whiplash," I thought.

A minute or two into the first round, Craig stopped shouting out helpful instructions and instead began shouting things like, "Jen, we can stop this!" and "Jen, you don't have to do this!"

I shook my head furiously (which didn't help the dizziness or whiplash). I was staying in. Every melodramatic sports movie I had ever seen floated back into my head: Like Rocky, I would go the distance.

The club kept its bouts short and sweet—just three three-minute rounds. But nine minutes is an eternity when you're taking hit after hit, too addled to strike back, unable to suck in enough air past your mouthguard. Alex blocked my every punch; my trademark stomach shots only earned me a whack in the head when attempted on a guy who was 5-foot-7

When the final buzzer went off, I don't think I'd landed a single decent punch on Alex. Craig only said, "Good job staying in there."

Years after the fact, I contacted Alex to see what he remembered about the fight. "I do remember getting a couple punches (probably left jabs or straight rights) through to your head," he wrote. 'And I remember Ben Moor commenting to me afterwards that a couple of the punches to the head landed pretty well and made your head snap back." Alex assured me, However, that "I don't think you ever fell down or anything."

Despite my clear loss, I left practice exhilarated—and satisfied that my male opponent had treated me seriously as a fighter. I headed back across the Green to my home at Phi Tau, leaving my handwraps on, hoping people would ask me about boxing.

They did.

The most common response: "Boxing is coed?"

"Of course," I would say.

JENNIFER DZIURA is a freelance writer,stand-up comic and occasional fashion model.She is at work on Naked Model with a Stolen Car, a book about her move toNew York City.