June 15 - 22, 2000
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The nurse that hurts
by Eliza Wilmerding
Every time Monique Ward punches the air with a wrapped fist, she lets out a sharp tsss, then snaps her hand back to guard her face. Her black hair flies around her shoulders. Shadowboxing before a fight at Somerville's Good Times Emporium, Monique leads with a jab, throws a straight right, a straight left, pivots, and ends with two furious tight hooks. The five-punch combination takes two seconds. Suddenly, she turns my way and, eyes glaring from her angular face, snaps off a series of straight throws: tssstsss. I hold my breath and tighten. It's startling to see such vicious energy erupt from such a small woman.
"That's it, Monique," says her trainer, Steve Baccari, chomping on gum. She pivots, ducks, then -- tssstssstsss -- another combination. Her arm and stomach muscles ripple.
Steve watches and runs his thick fingers over his buzz cut.
Monique Ward is the best female flyweight in New England, a five-foot-three powerhouse who thinks she looks like the girl next door, but whose arms are half as thick as her muscular torso. For the past three months she's been training for this fight: jumping rope, sparring, shadowboxing; doing neck lifts and bag work and sprints.
"She's gonna steamroll her," Steve says, pointing with his chin at Monique's opponent, a gangly woman dancing and jabbing across the room. Tssstsss. Monique rotates her hips mid-uppercut for maximum power. Steve nods. His jaw muscles bulge. "Yes, nice," he says.
Hours earlier, in a hospital room at HealthSouth, in Braintree, Monique had carefully cleaned torn skin and wrapped fresh gauze around the sagging arm of an old man. She'd rolled a medical cart in and out of hospital rooms, handed out paper cups of daily pills, and served food. She had monitored an irregular pulse, checked the oxygen streaming through thin plastic tubes into a man's nose. She'd gently pressed her ear to a woman's abdomen and listened for bubbly bowel sounds, and talked sweetly with the patient whose cloudy blue eyes looked sad that day, but didn't let him skip therapy.
"I never thought I'd go to college," says Monique, "let alone go be a nurse."
There is no typical career path for a female boxer. After high school Monique worked as a secretary, then joined the National Guard. After 10 weeks of basic training she learned to be a medical specialist, and eventually went on to nursing school. She stayed with the National Guard for nine years, serving one weekend a month and two weeks every summer until she started boxing. ("I miss it," Monique says, remembering. "The people you meet in the Army are like nobody else. Just like in the boxing gym.")
She began boxing not only to stay in shape, but to compete. She can remember wanting to box when she was five years old, but her father told her girls didn't fight. "Women can be aggressive and want to fight, just like men," she says today, shrugging. For reasons she can't quite explain, Monique says, boxing fits into her life like a puzzle piece. "It's a fit, just like nursing," she says. "It feels right."
USA Boxing officially lifted its ban on female boxing in October 1993, sanctioning amateur competition. Today, about 25 women amateurs box in Massachusetts, and nearly 1900 have registered to compete in the United States.
Monique says she likes feeling strong, sweating, enduring through a struggle. Steve, who is a fighter as well as her trainer, agrees. "There's nothing that makes you feel so aware and alive," he says. "You're above it all." Nonfighters never really understand, they say -- "and frankly," says Steve, "they don't have a right to know why we fight."
"I don't really talk about boxing with my family or my friends, and I don't need them to be there," Monique says. "I do it for myself."
Her friends call her "the nurse that hurts," but nobody tells that to the patients.
Before her fights, Monique waits until the last minute to tie up her hair. "I think I look like a boy with it up," she says. Image is important. Normally she accentuates her blue eyes with eyeliner, coats her eyelashes with mascara, and refuses to trim down her bright red nails, which dig into her palms and draw blood if she punches hard enough. She applies makeup before work, and it doesn't come off until her post-training shower. "I feel naked without my lipstick," she says. "I'm a female; I like to look good."
Only on bout nights does the makeup come off. "It takes away from the fight," she says. "I've seen pro fights where the women are attractive and wear skimpy clothing. They get paid, but they can't fight. I just think that puts a bad name on women's boxing."
"Plus," she adds, smiling, "mascara can get in your eyes."
Steve holds out one competition glove, then another. She pushes into them. As they stand head to head, he ties and tapes the laces, then slides her headgear down around her ears. He tips her purple bottle of Extreme Ripped Force sports drink to her lips for one last gulp. "You're ready," he tells her, tucking stray hair under her headgear and away from her face. "You've covered everything."
She glances across the room at her shadowboxing opponent.
Steve follows her gaze. "She's got nothin'," he says. "You're going to fold her up like a lawn chair. I mean" -- he points to her biceps -- "look at this hardware!"
Monique smiles and rolls her eyes.
"Just remember," he says, massaging her shoulders, "point your shoulder and get down on that punch and you'll be all set."
Good Times is a sports mall with bare cement floors -- a video arcade with pool tables, a basketball hoop, big-screen TVs, a pizza counter, and a bar, and a prizefighting room with a brightly lit boxing ring in the center. Monique and Steve walk past the boys selling raffle tickets for lithographs of Sugar Ray, past the paramedics, through the crowd of potbellied men with their beers and kids, and past the two women in Budweiser bathing suits who wait in the front to strut with round signs at the bell.
The crowd quiets. "Mooooonniiiique Waaaaaarrd," yells the announcer. The men clap, but not enthusiastically. She ducks through the red ropes into bright light and faces Jackie Walsh, who eyes her, expressionless, from the opposite corner.
A guy says, "Aw, don't they look cute."
The bell shrieks. Neither looks cute mid-lunge.
Female fights are infrequent and seldom an even match, because there simply aren't many female fighters. The fight against Jackie is Monique's ninth career bout. If she were a man, says Steve, training for as long as she has, she'd have had 50 fights by now, easy. Men have to fight seven or eight times just to make it into a local tournament.
Despite the sanctioning of women's competition seven years ago, boxing is still very much a man's world, and women fighters are very much a curiosity. This has never fazed Monique. Two and a half years ago, she walked determinedly into O'Mally's Boxing Gym in Quincy and told the old fighter behind the desk that she wanted to learn. There were no women training that day, just sweaty, focused men sparring with each other, working the bags or shadowboxing wherever they could find the space. Cups of spit lay on the ground. Squished blackened gum freckled the shredded rug, and the place smelled of wet, rotting leather and body odor. She didn't care. If anything, she was a little embarrassed. "I had these big gloves on and pencil-thin arms," she says, laughing at the memory. Her punches sounded like thuds compared to the loud, leathery slaps she makes now.
She's been training with Steve Baccari for a year and a half. After seeing each other around the gym for months, they formally met when she asked for his help: Steve was a reserved fighter with an attitude and a reputation as a conditioning expert; Monique was trying to build up her strength for an upcoming fight. He grudgingly suggested some exercises.
Sometimes, he told me later, it's hard not to resent women boxers. "Guys who box well are a dime a dozen, and it's always hard to find a trainer. But a woman boxer is a novelty; they're catered to. Amateurs don't get paid, but women's traveling expenses are paid, everything will be set up for them. It isn't right," he says, shrugging, "but it's true."
He stopped resenting her when he watched her fight the following week. She took a serious beating from a fighter who was better skilled -- and she won. "Out of sheer will," he says proudly, tightening his fist. When the ref held up her arm in victory that night, the audience gave her a standing ovation. She went home with two black eyes.
He's planned her every workout since. "She works harder and improves faster than anyone I've ever seen," he says, shaking his head. "I wouldn't waste my time if she didn't."
Monique can lift more pounds for her weight than most of the men in the gym, says Steve, and he's never seen anyone learn new styles so fast. He asked her once, "Why don't you act more cocky?"
"Why do I have to act like that?" she asked.
In the ring, Monique delivers an onslaught of frenzied punches, drilling Jackie into the corner with shocking ferocity.
"Don't fight, Monique -- box," yells Steve. She starts picking her punches, setting up to throw Jackie off balance for a knockout. A jab, straight right, a left, she connects. She weaves, circles, then lunges with four powerful straight hits. Slap! Jackie's head snaps back. "She punches like a demon," mutters a man in the front row. Cute, indeed.
Monique tells me later, "I don't go in the ring and think `Win,' or `I'm gonna kill this person,' but that instinct just comes out and takes over. You do what you have to in order to survive." She says being hit "is just part of the sport" and often doesn't even hurt until after the fight. "I'll feel bruises forming that I don't remember getting," she says. "I always remember ice packs." She lays them on tender spots after fights so that she'll bruise less. "I don't want to get looks from my patients."
"People are surprised to hear that I box, because I'm petite and feminine looking," she says. "They think I should look manly. But, physically and mentally, I feel very strong. I take boxing very seriously, and in the ring I'm very aggressive."
From the corner, Jackie throws flailing punches. Her long arms wing in from the outside. Her gloves nick Monique's headgear. It's her first fight; clearly she's outmatched. "Take her out, Monique," Steve yells. Monique crouches low and delivers a tremendous right hook into Jackie's lanky body, folding her down. Monique throws three hard punches.
"Some think it's cute," Monique said once, shaking her head. "They don't know that you can get a broken nose, a broken jaw, black eyes, or a fat lip. Or some just ask, `Why would you want to get hit in the face?' I don't really go into it, it's not worth it." So she tells them sweetly, like an infomercial actress, "It's the best workout. I look and feel better than I did at 18."
Tssstsss -- full contact. Head snap. Jackie stumbles back, disoriented. She reaches down to stop her fall. The ref crouches. The moment her glove touches the canvas, he blows his whistle and Steve smacks the palm of his hand with his fist. The crowd breaks into loud applause. The fight, for which Monique has spent three months training, is over in less than two minutes.
Another three months pass before the New England Golden Gloves Tournament in Lowell.
During that time, Monique has only one other fight set up: a bout with a Connecticut fighter named Jen Anair, one of the two women in New England who've come at all close to beating her. Monique put on five pounds to fight in Jen's weight class; she and Steve drive to Holyoke for the bout only to discover Jen weighing in at 127 pounds, seven pounds more than her trainer promised. The exchange in the dark parking lot is testy. "You know we came all the way down here," Monique calls to Jen, annoyed. "Call me when you make the weight." They get in the car and drive back to Boston. "If they were going to lie to my fighter, they ain't gonna think nothin' of robbing her of a decision," Steve says later.
The New England Golden Gloves Tournament isn't quite so ad hoc. The best fighter from each state qualifies; the winner will qualify for the annual National Boxing Tournament, and national champions have an increasing amount of international competition. (USA Boxing anticipates that women will box in the 2004 Olympics.) Monique won the New England women's flyweight division last year, beating a boxer named Alison King for the second time. At the nationals, she lost her first fight, against top New York fighter Jamie McGrath, but went on to place fourth in the country.
This year, however, on the morning of her Golden Gloves bout, which is again against Alison and which is for the division championship, it becomes clear that this too will end in frustration.
"We just got a call," Steve tells me over the phone. "Alison said she sprained her wrist last night and backed out. It's hard enough finding fights. If she won't fight Monique anymore, no one will."
The next night Monique and Steve spar, and Monique's combinations are better than ever. "All dialed in and nowhere to go," he says later, pulling off his gloves. "It's so typical. We've trained for six fights this year and we've gotten two. I'm disgusted. I wanted it so bad I could taste it."
Monique is too frustrated to say anything; she just wipes her brow and purses her painted lips. She'll take a week off, shadowbox in front of her wall-length mirror at home, and think about what's next.
Monique is good enough to compete at the professional level. "Recruiters have seen her and want her," says Steve. " `Give me the word,' they say to me, `we'll sign her in a heartbeat. You want her on ESPN? I'll get her on the next show.' " He shrugs. "It's up to her."
"She'd be easy to promote," he says proudly, "because not only is she a skilled fighter, but she's pretty, you know what I mean?"
Professional female fighters earn from $2000 to $25,000 per fight. The amount depends on their record, skill, and popularity. Some don't have any amateur experience at all. For now, Monique says, she won't give up nursing. But in order to stay in the game -- in order to find fights at all -- she'll have to travel to the hot spots where more women fight. O'Mally's trainers will network for her. "We'll talk to the guys we know in New York, and try and set up some fights," says trainer Bobby Bower. "We'll do whatever she wants."
But for now, there's disappointment. She doesn't want to be a champion without a fight. "I'm not going to take the jacket if I win by default," Monique mutters, pulling on her sweatshirt. "They're black with gold lettering -- really ugly. I wouldn't be caught dead in it," she says to me, smiling. Last year's championship jacket is stuffed in the back of her closet.
"A millennium one would have been nice, though," Steve says.
Monique leans down and unties her laces. "Yeah," she says. "It would."
Eliza Wilmerding is a freelance writer based in Boston. She can be reached at wilmer7@aol.com.
