Thirty years ago today, Christy Martin won the fight that changed everything for women’s boxing. Which means today we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the night Martin inadvertently launched the career of the only woman who would hand her a defeat during her prime.
The story of how and why Sumya Anani became a boxer is beyond absurd. It sounds like clumsily written fiction.
But the fact is that Martin’s win over Deirdre Gogarty on March 16, 1996, which landed “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” on the cover of Sports Illustrated, directly led to Anani taking up boxing. And barely two and a half years later, a tiny crowd of about 600 fans in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, watched Anani snap the biggest star in the women’s game’s nine-year, 35-fight unbeaten streak.
It was sometime in the early ’90s that Barry Becker first met Anani at a Bally’s gym in Kansas, where the muscles Anani built up dabbling in weightlifting in college caught the boxing trainer’s eye. Based on musculature alone, Becker told her she should try boxing.
“I was like, what? I told him, no, I’m a massage therapist, I’m a mom,” recalled Anani, a single mother to a son she’d had at age 19. “There was no thought in the orbit of my mind about boxing. I never watched boxing growing up. I didn’t come from a boxing family. I just didn’t know anything about it.”
Anani blew off the friendly approach. And she continued to do so every time Becker saw her at the gym the next couple of years and repeated his request.
In 1995, she and her son moved to Jamaica. And the last thing Anani expected to see in the spring of ’96 was Becker, fresh off a flight to the island, Sports Illustrated with Martin on the cover in his hand, making his same old pitch.
“He hadn’t seen me in like a year and a half,” Anani said. “He throws this magazine in my face and he goes, ‘You can beat her. I know you can beat her.’”
If this were a movie script, it would be too ridiculous to green-light. A trainer hops a plane to tell a woman who’s never boxed that she can beat the lady who’s on the cover of SI?
Becker asked Anani to shadowbox. Then he told her, “When you come home, you’ll turn pro.”
“I came home from Jamaica about two months later, and he found my name in the phone book and came to my mom’s house,” Anani said. “He goes, ‘I got you a fight. It’s in three weeks. It pays $400.’”
For a 24-year-old woman who’d just moved back in with her mom and was trying to raise a child, the timing for taking an outrageous flyer was just right. While $400 may not sound like much, in Anani’s mind, it registered as enough money to buy a used car. She finally relented.
On August 12, 1996, at the Beaumont Club in Kansas City, Missouri, she turned pro with a four-round decision win over a fighter named Jessica Breitfelder who came in with a 1-5 record.
Two weeks later, in Springfield, Missouri, Anani scored a four-round decision over a fighter named Jessica Breitfelder who came in with a 1-6 record.
Just five months after Martin vs. Gogarty, Anani – a natural as a boxer, just as Becker predicted – was 2-0 as a professional.
The road from there to a fight against Martin was short, but it wasn’t exactly smooth and straight.
“The Island Girl’s” fourth pro fight, against Katie Dallam on December 11, 1996, at a firefighter’s union hall in St. Joseph, Missouri, very nearly derailed everything.
Anani TKO’d Dallam in the fourth round, and Dallam, who was making her pro debut, suffered a life-altering brain injury. Dallam’s real-life disaster partially inspired the short story that was adapted into the 2004 film Million Dollar Baby.
For Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, that incident resulted in Oscars. For Anani, it resulted in heartbreak.
She dedicated all of her future fights to Dallam. She learned years later, during an interview for Dateline following the success of Million Dollar Baby, that Dallam had been in a car accident the night before their fight and perhaps it wasn’t Anani’s punches that did all of the damage.
Regardless of what exactly caused the injuries, after that, “I never took it for granted how dangerous this sport is,” Anani, now 54, reflected.
But she forged on, improving to 11-0 (7 KOs) by the fall of ’98, including a win over Andrea DeShong – the only woman to that point to hang an “L” on Martin, having done so in 1989.
Anani was unknown, unproven, fighting only four- and six-rounders, but in the relatively thin ranks of women’s boxing in the ’90s, that was good enough to get her on the radar of Team Martin.
With a record of 36-1-2, Martin was still the biggest star in the women’s game more than two years after becoming a Sports Illustrated cover girl, still getting prime spots on Don King undercards. Martin-Anani was signed for just such a spot on the Showtime broadcast of the Ricardo Lopez-Rosendo Alvarez rematch on November 13, 1998, in Las Vegas.
It was Friday the 13th, and Anani’s opportunity, it turns out, was cursed. The fight got postponed that day, and the best anyone could do to explain it afterward was to describe it as a “misunderstanding.”
King’s people said they were told Martin was sick. So they pulled the fight from the card. Martin insisted she wasn’t sick. Martin and King were reportedly in the midst of a falling-out at the time, and it’s possible one of them was screwing with the other.
When they got the bad news, Anani and Becker went to Martin’s dressing room. Becker suggested Martin was chickening out, which led to a physical altercation and security guards having to separate Martin and Becker.
“The contract said they had to pay me or fight me within 30 days,” Anani recalled, so the fight was promptly rescheduled for December 18 – but not under the bright lights of Showtime nor the neon lights of Vegas. Instead, it landed on some network called US Satellite Broadcasting, in front of an estimated 600 fans at Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale – and not necessarily many more than that watching live on USSB.
The audience wasn’t the only thing that was undersized. Anani was given a dressing closet so small she couldn’t fully extend her arms. This after receiving a phone call to her hotel room that woke her up at 6 a.m. on fight day, which Anani believes to have been some sort of gamesmanship.
When it came time for the ring walks, Anani’s entrance song, Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” didn’t play. So she walked the aisle to no musical accompaniment. Moments later, Martin entered to – you guessed it – “I Won’t Back Down.”
But in a world that kept on pushing her around, Anani stood her ground once the bell rang.
Anani didn’t show exceptional skill, but her pressure-fighting, aggressive style caused problems for Martin from the start. The Coal Miner’s Daughter’s nose was bloodied in the first round (nothing out of the ordinary there). Martin hit the canvas in the second, though it was ruled a slip.
Anani hurt Martin with a left hook late in the third and then pummeled her for the remainder of the round, prompting commentators Col. Bob Sheridan and Carl King – yes, the promoter’s adopted son – to say they’d never seen Martin in that much trouble.
By the seventh, Martin’s left eye was swelling. By the ninth, her right eye was too. Midway through the 10th, with Anani surging, an exhausted-looking Martin began holding. Becker and Anani don’t think it was accidental that the bell sounded to end the round 20 seconds early.
Watching the fight on YouTube decades later, I scored it a 97-93 Anani win. The official judges had it a bit closer – one saw it 95-95, the other two 96-94 – but at least the latter two had the correct winner.
Was Anani concerned that she would get screwed out of a decision she deserved?
“No, because back then, I was so naïve,” she said. “Barry always told me I was too trusting of people. But I knew I’d beaten Christy, and I was too naïve to worry that they wouldn’t give it to me.”
Anani made $10,000 that night (before her team and the IRS took their cut), which remains her career high.
“Don King yelled to me after the fight from the other side of the ring,” Becker recalled. “He was up on the ropes, and he says, ‘Barry, I’m signing Sumya.’ And I said, ‘OK, sign her.’”
Anani was indeed offered a contract, but she looked it over with Becker and her then-promoters, Bud Keys and Jim Fulton of Power Punch Promotions, and what they saw was a long-term commitment to King worth no more money than what she was already making.
So it was back to the relatively small-time circuit for Anani. She won four fights, then lost by split decision over six rounds in September 2000 against unheralded Britt Van Buskirk – a defeat twice avenged. She fought to a majority draw in ’01 against well-regarded Fredia Gibbs, then later beat Gibbs by injury stoppage.
Anani stopped future Hall of Famer Jane Couch in ’02 and twice defeated Martin’s future wife, Lisa Holewyne. And in 2005, a 32-year-old Anani scored a near-shutout over 10 rounds against the capable Belinda Laracuente.
But after she beat Martin and didn’t sign with King, Anani could never land a fight against a name-brand opponent.
“Holly Holm wouldn’t fight me. Lucia Rijker wouldn’t fight me. Mary Jo Sanders wouldn’t fight me,” Anani said. “I literally called these girls out all the time. Laila Ali wouldn’t fight me. She fought Christy, which was a mismatch of epic proportions. It was like if Bernard Hopkins fought Erik Morales or something. If Laila really wanted to prove something, she should have fought me, because I beat Christy and I was number one at the time.”
Added Becker: “The big wheels never really paid that much attention to her. Nobody would fight her even now if she came out of retirement.”
Concerned by hearing Becker speak those words, I said to Anani that I hope she’s not looking to box again.
“No, but he’s trying to get me back in. It’s a constant conversation,” Anani said with a laugh.
She’s actually been retired two full decades now – since a pair of losses in 2006 against Terri Blair. Anani ascribes the second of those to fighting on a soft ring – padded with memory foam, she alleges – which tired out her legs. Those two defeats at age 34 dropped Anani’s record to 25-3-1 (10 KOs) and put a pair of punctuation marks on her exhaustion with the boxing business.
“Even before that,” she said, “I was just kind of getting tired of not getting fights. I’m training my butt off and I’m not making money and I have my son and my house. I loved training, I loved boxing, but the politics were just really getting to me. So, I’d been thinking about retiring already, and then the fact that there was an entire boxing commission that allowed this soft ring to happen, that shocked me. That was it for me.”
Throughout her boxing career, Anani utilized other means of making money. She was in the boxing gym training for six hours a day, but she also taught yoga classes, worked as a personal trainer and gave massages. And she’s always been a meditation practitioner.
After boxing, all of those side gigs transformed into Anani’s main gig. She now owns and operates a largely youth-focused health and exercise business called Learning2Fly (which happens to be the name of another Tom Petty single), with four separate facilities all within a few blocks of each other in Mission, Kansas. There’s Learning2Fly Lagree, Learning2Fly Yoga Center, Sunflower Gyrotonic Fitness and Chakra Circus Event Center.
“It’s my little health mecca,” said Anani, now a grandmother to a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old. “It’s about health and healing, and it’s definitely my passion and my purpose in the world. And I’m grateful for boxing – it helped me get here.”
Anani is a spiritual person and is very much not a slave to modern technology. She doesn’t own a TV, is barely on social media and, as I can attest from personal experience, has a gift for accidentally deleting text messages and losing numbers she thought she’d saved in her phone.
I first connected with Sumya last December. Someone shared with her my column written immediately following the annual International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee announcement, in which I declared her failure to gain entry in the “Women’s Modern” category the most egregious ongoing snub. So she emailed me, overwhelmed to see a boxing writer advocating for her nearly 20 years after her career concluded.
“I was so shocked,” she told me when we spoke for the first time. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, he put it in writing, he’s put it into the ether.’”
Anani has made it into other halls of fame in recent years – the International Women’s Boxing Hall of Fame, the USA Martial Arts Hall of Fame, the National Boxing Hall of Fame. But boxing’s most prestigious HOF remains elusive.
Anani has been on the ballot since the category was introduced in 2019, and that’s where she remains. Martin was inducted in that first class – and rightly so. But the only woman to beat her in between DeShong in ’89 and Ali in ’03 is still on the outside looking in.
Maybe it would be different if Anani-Martin had taken place five weeks earlier than it did. If it had been on a major Vegas card, broadcast live on Showtime – rather than tucked away on an obscure satellite network, seen by few, nothing more than a line of agate type to most fans – maybe Anani’s name would resonate differently and her place in women’s boxing history would be more secure.
For the most part, though, Anani doesn’t let it get to her.
“We say in meditation that when you’re talking to God, it’s called prayer, but when you’re listening to God, it’s called meditation,” Anani explained.
It’s not her style to pray for a call from the Hall. But she’ll be ready to listen to the voice on the other end if and when the call comes in.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
