TRAILBLAZER
Jane Couch paved the way for fighters like Katie Taylor to enjoy successful careers in the ring but her pioneering ways came at some cost
‘IT’S HARD TO ENJOY IT NOW AFTER ALL I WENT THROUGH’
WHEN Katie Taylor walks to the ring in front of 21,000 people at the Manchester Arena on Saturday evening, it will be another milestone for the trailblazing Bray native, further confirmation that she has helped to carry women’s boxing into the sporting mainstream.
Taylor’s attempt to be a two-weight world champion, as she faces WBO super-lightweight title-holder Christina Linardatou, has been given top billing by Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom despite popular Mancunian Anthony Crolla bidding an emotional farewell to his home town on the same card.
This sort of ground-breaking, historic main event would have been unthinkable just over two decades ago when Jane Couch took her brave stand against the British Boxing Board of Control’s ban on female fighters who, at the time, made it clear that they believed women were too emotionally unstable to box.
‘It sounds like something from 1898, doesn’t it? But this was 1998, only two years before the Millennium,’ Couch says with a sigh, recalling her painful battle through the British courts that saw her caricatured in the press as ‘a monster and a freak’ (this reached its most absurd point when she appeared on Michael Barrymore’s ITV show to engage the popular television presenter in a ‘toy fight’).
Had it not been for Couch’s courageous decision to become the sport’s Suffragette, there’s every chance that Hearn wouldn’t be using his promotional prattle to wax lyrical about Taylor (below) this week.
The Irish Boxing Union took their lead from their British counterparts and also didn’t grant women professional licences until after that landmark decision.
Couch’s partner Brian is from Ballymote in Sligo, so she’s well aware of the place that Taylor holds in Irish affections. And she has kept a close eye on the Bray woman and the barriers broken down during her glittering career. Even so, she’s not sure if she will be watching when Taylor’s bout with Linardatou takes centre-stage. She has been left battered and bruised by the sport, not so much by what happened inside the ring as outside it.
‘I will probably keep an eye out for Katie’s fight, to see what happens. But it’s hard to enjoy boxing these days, after everything I went through because of politics and the politics of being a woman.
‘When you know everything that goes on behind the scenes, know what the sport is about, really about, like why the big fights don’t happen, why the best boxers avoid each other, it can be hard to just sit there and enjoy a fight, like I used to.’
Couch won five world titles and went 10 rounds with the Dutch legend Lucia Rijker in Los Angeles back in 2003, but she will forever be associated with the legal fight she undertook – while world welterweight champion – to be allowed to box in her own country. That battle forms the centrepiece of her recently published autobiography,
The Final Round.
Now 51, and happily settled in Bristol, Couch has always been uncomfortable with her depiction as boxing’s Emmeline Pankhurst, deferring to the contribution of her two lawyers, solicitor Sarah Leslie (who has since passed away from breast cancer) and Dinah Rose, a top sex-discrimination barrister, who claimed Couch being refused a boxing licence was a restriction of trade.
‘They showed that the board were trying to protect boxing as the last male sports bastion against the participation of women,’ Couch remembers. ‘All the board could use in their defence was PMT and women being too fragile to box, which was great for us because everyone started to see just how sexist they were. That they were stuck in a different time.’
Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read was chairman of the British board at the time. He was famous as the police detective who brought the notorious Kray twins to justice, but his reputation would take a battering during his time in the stand, claiming at one point that women’s boxing would be like mud-wrestling and only attract ‘the brown-mac brigade’.
‘Nipper Read was known as this brilliant copper, that had nicked the Krays. But he came off as a dinosaur in that courtroom. We couldn’t believe some of the stuff coming out of his mouth at times, like when he started talking about women’s mud-wrestling. But it all strengthened our case.’
Following their legal victory, Rose took Couch aside and warned her that this was only the first round of the fight and she had to be prepared for more dirty tricks, that her opponents wouldn’t take it lying down.
‘I now know what she means. I was painted as this monster who wanted all the women in the country to fight each other, instead of just being a professional boxer trying to earn a living,’ Couch recalls.
‘I was on The Big Breakfast (TV show) with Vanessa Feltz and she started the interview by saying how disgusting she found two women punching each other in the face. I went on Richard & Judy, and they had this phone-in, with people asking if I was a freak? When you are on television, and people are asking that question, you start to wonder that maybe you are a freak.’
Couch had a breakdown in 2008, a consequence of being painted as a ‘freak’ in popular culture. She admits now that she was unprepared for all the shell-fire. Worse still, she was going through all that torture for very little.
Although her first official bout in the UK attracted plenty of publicity in November 1998, few promoters were willing to take a chance on her. ‘After the court case, I thought everything would change. But the board and some of the promoters were ardent that they didn’t want it and they did everything they could to block me, make sure there were no fights.
‘Once Eddie Hearn and his ilk came on the scene, I knew it would be different. They were younger, from a different generation and were more amenable to it, but unfortunately, they came along 10 or 15 years too late for me.’
Couch only fell into the fight game. In her mid-20s, she was a bit lost when at home in Fleetwood one evening, she came across a Channel 4 documentary on women’s boxing that featured Irish trailblazer Deirdre Gogarty. She was drawn in and hooked.
Through a family friend, she found someone willing to train her, if reluctantly at first. Her first bout took place in ‘a dingy nightclub in Wigan’ – less than 20 miles from where Manchester Arena now
stands – on Halloween night 1994. She knocked out a London Met policewoman by the name of Kalpna Shah in the second round.
‘The ironic thing about fighting a copper was that everything was underground. It was completely illegal,’ Couch chuckles. ‘That was the big reason to get recognition. While it stayed underground, it was dangerous. There were no brain scans, no blood tests, no test for Hep B. I think there was one first-aider by the ring in Wigan that night, no other medical people. From a dodgy night-club, I went to fighting for a world title in Denmark in my fifth fight. That was a different ballgame, I moved from Sunday League straight into the Premier League. It was a bit of a shock.’
Couch displayed a remarkable will to win to beat Sandra Geiger, the French world champion, in a brutal bout that saw both women hospitalised, Couch with a broken jaw and shattered cheekbone. She had hoped the belt would give her some standing in the public eye. But there was nobody at the airport to welcome back the world champion and not a word written about her success in the British press. What hurt the most was Boxing News, the sport’s trade weekly. It not only said nothing about Couch’s bout, but reported extensively on the under-card in Denmark, including a fight between two journeymen. ‘They told me straight out that they don’t report on women’s boxing,’ Couch says.
Unwanted at home, she travelled around the world in search of fights. Her travails, and travels, are chronicled in the book. Jamaica. New Orleans. Albuquerque. Waco, Texas.
Sometimes, taking a fight at less than a week’s notice. Often, not getting paid.
‘I did go on a journey around the world, but not in the way I would have wanted,’ she observes now ruefully.
‘It’s difficult not to regret a lot of it. Don’t get me wrong, I have some great memories. Met Marvin Hagler, Angelo Dundee, I’m still good friends with Ricky Hatton. But if I had to do it all over again, I’d definitely change some of it.
‘I just kept doing it and never really questioned why I was doing it. I kept thinking if I take this next fight, I might get the break and the big pay-day. So, I kept going all over the place, knowing I probably wouldn’t get paid. I have to take some of the blame, but then I didn’t know any different.’
Before defending her welterweight title against Andrea DeShong in New Orleans in 1997, Couch got a bit of a thrill when she met Gogarty, one of her inspirations.
‘It was about a year after her famous bout with Christy Martin. She was living in Louisiana, training boxers,’ she remembers. At the time, Couch was getting ready to go down the legal route in the UK.
‘Deirdre is a quiet person, but it was so exciting for me to meet her. And she had gone through all the s**t that I would later get. When she met me that day, she knew what was ahead of me and was probably thinking that I didn’t have a clue about what I was going to get into.’
Time has given Couch a sense of perspective about all the muck flung in her direction. It was simply down to her being a pioneer, the original trailblazer.
‘I was the one who got it legalised. Maybe if someone had come along before me, my life might have been different,’ Couch says.
‘That’s what happens when you are the first. You are the target, everything is thrown at you.’
She insists that she doesn’t look at Taylor’s eminent status – she was recently voted Ireland’s most admired sportsperson yet again – with any envy. ‘Katie has worked hard to get where she is. And she has had her struggles too.
‘She had to pretend to be a boy to box when she was younger. She deserves everything she gets. Katie is a superstar and Eddie Hearn has done a great job in harnessing that, building her profile. Look, maybe I’m wrong but I think a promoter like Eddie is still the exception. I think there are some on the boxing board that can’t stand seeing women get into the ring.
‘After the London Olympics, I thought the whole thing would take off. The Olympics was like a validation and the public would now get behind women’s boxing. Some of the fighters, like Nicola Adams and Tasha Jonas, probably thought they would walk straight into big contracts. But it never really happened.
‘It’s still a struggle for most women boxers out there. Of course, I know it is a struggle for many male pros too. But when fighters have to work to get a crowd themselves, I think it’s still easier for a male boxer to sell tickets than a woman boxer. Maybe I am wrong about that, but I have talked to a few female boxers who had their fights cancelled because they couldn’t sell enough tickets.’
But at least, they now have an opportunity to make a living from their sport and for that, a lot of female fighters, even a superstar like Katie Taylor, owe a debt of gratitude to Jane Couch.
‘KATIE IS A SUPERSTAR, SHE DESERVES EVERYTHING SHE GETS’