MULLENS, W.Va. — Christy Martin put a candy tea and a Sprite on her tab at Second Road Station on a current afternoon. She had solely a $100 invoice and didn’t need to hassle the waitress by asking her to interrupt it. The restaurant knew Martin was good for it. Everybody on this former mining city is aware of her.
Martin, 54, is basically credited with legitimizing feminine boxing within the fashionable period. The primary feminine boxer to make the quilt of Sports activities Illustrated, she went undefeated for a decade, reaching success however secretly residing a tortured life.
It was her second expertise of fame — a terrifying, practically deadly one — that lastly set her free.
Martin fought for the primary time in a West Virginia “toughman” contest in 1987, the primary yr ladies have been allowed to compete. She had by no means attended knowledgeable battle, by no means been to a boxing fitness center or placed on gloves, however she was a star basketball participant in highschool and school and determined to offer it a shot. Martin simply gained the competition.
She continued to coach and compete, and in 1991 teamed up with a coach named Jim Martin. A yr later, he proposed marriage. Quickly Don King, the boxing promoter, got here calling and put Martin on his playing cards.
“I had no street map, I had no path,” she stated. “I simply stored combating. I stored rising.”
In 1996, she defeated Deirdre Gogarty in a well-received bout that was televised on Showtime, giving new credibility to ladies’s boxing. Her Sports activities Illustrated cowl bought out all over the world. Her new standing started to sink in when she was strolling down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
“It’s nothing however actual stars there, whether or not or not it’s athletes or actors — actual stars — and I’m strolling by a Versace retailer and these folks that labored there got here out onto the road and requested for my autograph,” she stated. “It was loopy to me.”
However she by no means obtained snug with fame. Throughout an interview on the restaurant in Mullens, she hunched her shoulders in discomfort on the considered it.
“I nonetheless don’t see that I used to be well-known or that I’m — I’m not,” she stated.
That’s partially as a result of her husband, Jim Martin, by no means gave her the possibility to imagine in her personal success.
“He informed me the boxing world hated me, that my household hated me, that I didn’t have any followers,” she stated. “Athletes have heavy egos, however they’re fragile. And it didn’t take lengthy for him to interrupt me.”
The sample of emotional, monetary and generally bodily abuse continued for 20 years. As her profession grew, so, too, did his threats of violence and isolation. The boxing ring supplied solace.
“You may be aggressive, you may be robust, you may be all these issues, , a winner,” Christy Martin stated. “That’s the place I may very well be me. On the skin is the place I used to be crushed down, though I faked it and tried to make folks suppose that I used to be so assured.”
Jim Martin threatened to share one among her greatest secrets and techniques: She was homosexual. She informed him about her sexuality after they first started working collectively, however he selected to disregard it for a lot of their relationship.
By 2010, her profession was winding down and her marriage was all however over. She had reconnected with a former girlfriend and determined to go away her husband. At some point, she lay down for a nap of their house in Tampa, Fla., when she heard Jim Martin sharpening a knife. She heard him say over the cellphone that she was a lesbian and that she was leaving him for a girl.
Then he walked into the bed room and stabbed her a number of instances, together with in her chest and legs, earlier than capturing her within the chest together with her personal pink-handled 9-millimeter Glock.
“He left me for lifeless,” Christy Martin stated.
When he obtained within the bathe, she one way or the other obtained up and stumbled exterior, managing to flag down a passing automotive. A stranger took her to the hospital. Shortly, she went from being a well-known boxer to a well-known headline.
However when her fame modified, it modified for the higher.
“Jim had satisfied me that if the world came upon I used to be homosexual, I’d lose every part, and actually simply the alternative has occurred,” Christy Martin stated. “I’m snug with my very own pores and skin. I don’t have to cover. I’m who I’m.”
In 2012, Jim Martin was sentenced to 25 years in jail.
Christy Martin completed her profession with 49 wins, seven losses and three attracts, with 31 wins by knockout, and was inducted in 2020 into the Worldwide Boxing Corridor of Fame. In 2017, she married a former sparring companion, Lisa Holewyne. Martin has a boxing promotion firm that she runs out of Austin, Texas. At most occasions, she reaches out to native home violence shelters. And each Nov. 23, the date of the assault, she calls the stranger who saved her.
In 2016, a West Virginia trainer informed Martin that one among her eighth-grade college students had chosen her for her state historical past undertaking.
“Out of 200 years, out of every kind of individuals, she selected me,” Martin stated, nonetheless shocked. “I used to be so touched.”
Martin spoke with the scholar and later visited her classroom.
“That’s the celebrity half which means one thing,” she stated.