5'4 1/2" junior welterweight Christy Martin
from Orlando, Florida was probably the best-known female boxer in the
world in the late 1990's. Her contract with promoter Don King introduced
millions of pay-per-view viewers to the sight of her knocking out
(mostly over-matched) opponents on the undercards of promotions
featuring Mike Tyson.
Born on June 12,1968 in Bluefield, West Virginia, the former Christy
Salters was a catcher in Little League baseball. She played basketball
at Mullens High and at Concord College in Athens. While at Concord, she
entered and won a Tough Woman competition on a dare. Despite having
little ring experience, she was amazed by how much she enjoyed herself.
After graduating with an education degree in 1991, she and her mother
Joyce looked into a ring career for her.
Christy's professional boxing career began with a five-round draw
against Angela Buchanan of Australia in Bristol, Tennessee on September
9, 1989. Three weeks later in Durham, North Carolina, Christy knocked
Buchanan out in the second round.
Martin became a media star through the bloody nose she was given by her
most serious opponent in 1996, Irish featherweight Deirdre Gogarty. The
unanimous six-round decision for Christy Martin on March 16 at the MGM
Grand in Las Vegas earned Martin recognition by the World Boxing Council
as its nominal women's lightweight champion of the world (they did not
offer women's title belts for open competition).
The fight's real significance was that it was easily the highlight on
the undercard of a disappointing men's heavyweight title bout (Mike
Tyson vs. British boxer Frank Bruno). The Martin-Gogarty battle was seen
in an estimated 30 million homes and in over 100 countries! Gogarty fell
to 11-5-2 with the loss.
Martin relies on strength, aggression and relentless pressure to
overwhelm her opponents. Gogarty, a skilled boxer, found holes in
Martin’s defense and bloodied Christy's nose but was unable to blunt the
heavier boxer's attack. It was a boxer-slugger confrontation, with the
slugger winning.
The image of the bloodied Martin battling to outpoint Gogarty (who
recovered from a knockdown to make an exciting fight of it) brought more
attention to women's boxing than any other single event before or since.
It took the sight of a female boxer bleeding like a stuck pig while
winning her fight that put our sport on the world's media radar in 1996!
Martin has had 59 professional fights, and earned the WBC light
middleweight title in September of 2009.
