How I Fell in Love with the Ring.
Boxing is something women are not supposed to do: a violent and often bloody pastime whose status as a sport is frequently debated. But in this remarkable book, a woman explains for the first time, with eloquence, wit and honesty, how and why she took up boxing.
An English writer who had sung in a punk-rock band and eventually settled in New York State, Kate Sekules didn't enter the boxing ring for the money, or in pursuit of fame. She did it for complicated reasons that, even after two professional fights, still perplex, her. It challenged the stereotype of the fragile, defenceless female.
Joining the legendary Gleason's Gym admitted her into a hitherto exclusively male world of tough camaraderie and suppressing tenderness - where cornermen cherished their fighters with a maternal compassion. She learnt that what can appear to the uninitiated as two people indiscriminately hitting one another is actually the exercise of precise, geometric skills. She also found out how much it hurts to get bopped full on the nose. But above all she discovered in herself, quite simply, a need to fight: the strange, exhilarating challenge of controlled combat - of climbing through those ropes to become utterly responsible for your own fate.
Opening, compulsively, in Kate's corner as, "not exactly ready to rumble", she awaits the bell for round one of her first fight, 'The Boxer's Heart' is as much of a book about womanhood as it is about sport. Boxing offers her new insights into women's body image and weight worries, into domestic violence, and the dynamics of the sexual relationship - and, most of all, a way of finding out if she can go the distance in life.
