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“There’s a lot
of jealousy in boxing,” remarked Ana María Torres in a recent interview.
There is the Dominican Republic, that’s for sure. Barely six weeks before
Johanna ‘La Bailarina’ Peña was due to fight Regina Halmich for the world
title in Germany last year, a certain Liliana Martínez Vargas went to the
offices of one of their national newspapers and called her out.
Martínez was vexed because she felt she’d beaten Peña when the two of them
had fought two years previously. “She was lying on the canvas like an old
shoe,” she sneered. “The referee should have stoppd the contest, but he
decided to let it continue. Then the bell rang, and that was the only thing
that saved her from a crushing defeat. There’s a thorn in my heart that I
call ‘La Bailarina’, and the only way I’ll get rid of it is to fight her
again.”
Then came the challenge: “There’s a slot free on the Domini bill on the 20th
December. I dare the pampered daughter of the ‘maestro’, Ruddy Peña, to come
out and fight me. I’ll pulverize her!”
With a world title fight coming up on the 17th January, Peña declined the
invitation, and Martínez never got her rematch, but why had she waited over
two years to come forward with the challenge? Why all the invective now? Why
suddenly now was the thorn in her heart so painful that she could no longer
contain her resentment?
Because Peña had struck pay-dirt, that’s why.
“My hotel room in Magdeburg is bigger than our entire house back in the
Dominican Republic,” an amazed Marylín Hernández remarked to journalists
last week. They live in a tin shack. Thirteen months ago, when heavy rains
and electric storms resulted in the bursting of the banks of the Yaque del
Norte and Yuna rivers, floods in the region of El Cibao in the north of the
Dominican Republic just washed away these shacks, and some 47,270 of their
inhabitants were evacuated, whilst the tropical storm Odette that hit the
South of the country at almost the same time ripped them out of the ground,
leaving another 5,000 homeless. “With the 9,000 dollars I’m making — win or
lose,“ said Hernández. “I’m going to buy us something better.”Not surprisingly with the German
promoters sniffing around, the fights in that country take on a
ferocious intensity. They showed a clip of one on ZDF before the
Halmich fight. Hernández is fighting a tall but beautifully athletic
girl that looks about the same age. She ducks under the girl’s jab
and throws a right at her ribcage but she’s only setting herself for
a huge overarm left.
Even though it rocks her, catching her
on the cheek, her opponent answers instantly, drawing back her long muscular
arm for a looping, beautifully timed hook that catches Hernández in the
face.
Hernández will fall backwards, but before she does, her own left, which
she’s somehow retracted and thown a second time, finds its target, jolting
the other girl’s head and causing her to miss with her right, and they both
go backwards off balance in opposite directions.
Just as you’re admiring the tall girl’s grace, as she checks and sets
herself for the next exchange, Hernández is on her again, and drops her with
a third left hand.
It’s her sheer energy that’s overwhelming. She comes in as though on elastic
and catches the tall girl unawares. Running the replay, you see it’s fast
footwork – two or three quick steps to stop herself falling and a lunge to
come back into range. Seeing too late the danger as Hernández begins her
rotation, the tall girl tries to fend her off with the jab, but the left
hook at full extension catches her right on the chin and she falls like a
beanstalk in an untidy heap, as Hernández closes with redundant exuberance
for the kill.z
“We’ll cut her down in the eighth,” says Hernández’s trainer, Antonio Cruz,
referring to Halmich, and you can imagine the guys in Germany watching the
tape and thinking: “What the hell! It’ll make great television. Sign her
up.”
One punch.
One punch, and one gets her shot at the world title and her fifteen days of
fame. Millions watch the fight in Germany — how many others on satellite I
can’t say. One punch, and one gets her 9,000 dollars and her name in papers
across Europe and Latin America.
And the other?
They don’t even name her. She might be one of several people. Which, I can’t
say.
I was just thinking how great she looked, how tough and how graceful, when
her long limbs splayed in all directions like one of those wooden stick-men
when you release the elastic.
One punch, and you’re not even history — history’s what people remember. One
punch, and you’re nothing.
A discarded shoe.
On the stroke of midnight after the fight, Marylín Hernández will turn 21.
You wouldn’t perhaps call her pretty, but she has a figure to kill for. In
Magdeburg, she slips on a red t-shirt and hot pants, and does a samba for
the public that has come to watch her train. Her waist is tiny. Her
shoulders broad. Her arms and legs smooth and shapely. The rest too.
Perfect.
“Halmich may be a good boxer, but I’m superior in every department,”
Hernández tells reporters. “I’m tougher than Regina and I’m also at a
physical advantage because I’m not as small as her.” Hernández has come down
from bantamweight and is expected to have more muscle mass, though the
difference in height is negligible.
After seeing off Liliana Martinez (her again!) over the full distance for
the national title, she knows she can go ten rounds, but she won’t need to.
“It's virtually impossible to win on points in Germany," she tells ZDF
(Translation: “Reid kicked her ass”). "But it's all the same to me. I'm
going to make it quick. This fight isn’t going the distance.”
Halmich describes her as ‘naïve’, ‘hot-headed’ and ‘arrogant’: “She presents
herself in a very confident manner... It’s obvious she has no idea what’s in
store for her on Saturday.”
She dominates the ring in the first round, weaving as she comes forward,
athletic, compact and beautifully balanced, yet she can’t stop Halmich
sticking her with the jab. Four or five times she gets caught with it, and
Halmich follows on one occasion with a straight right to the ear. The
champion scores a few times, too, to the body and already you can see she’s
sitting down harder on her punches than in the fight with Reid.
Marylín’s best moment comes at the end of the
round, as the German misses with a right hand and she’s able to get off her
left, but Regina’s already moving backwards and ‘la Cachorrita’ chases her
across the ring, with both guns blazing, throwing at least three punches
after the bell.
Halmich was right: she’s hot-headed and gets angry when things don’t go her
way. “Each time I hit her, there was this furious reaction, and I had to
back-pedal in some haste,” comments Halmich after the fight. “But this was
something we’d prepared for.”
A strange mannerism surfaces at the start of the second, as she holds out
her left arm and shuffles backwards — or rather, to the side, since she’s
sideways-on to Halmich — but she abandons that, wisely, and chases Halmich
towards the corner and out again with another two-fisted attack that reveals
her impatience to knock the German down. When her left hook misses and
Halmich clinches, she throws hard uppercuts to the belly and is warned to
keep her punches up. Now Halmich begins pressing, and scores again with a
jab, then a hard one-two to the face, but again the response is furious and
Halmich back-pedals for the rest of the round.
Most of the round’s quite even though the slo-mo shows the youngster’s face
distorted as a hard jab hits her between the eyes. Even though her own left
finds the face of her opponent, this doesn’t stop the German spearing a hard
right into her cheekbone and jolting her head to the side.
It isn’t at all the mismatch people had predicted. Billed as a slugger with
no technique, Hernández’s movement turns out to be excellent and her work
rate high. What may be suspect are her reflexes and she hasn’t yet landed
the big punch, but Halmich’s far better here than against Reid. Her
posture’s more varied, switching unpredictably from defence to attack, and
she’s hitting far harder, sitting down more now on her punches, with less
jerking around like a marionette.
Marylín’s outfit’s far better – not that it matters — (but it does!). A bold
statement in yellow and red, the short skirt asymmetrical with a long fringe
like an Apache jacket, and a velvet ribbon at the base of her pigtail. Miles
better than Halmich’s washed out lemon and green. Halmich has a swelling
above her left eye, not the fault, this, of her dress-designer, though I’d
hang it on him if I could. “Regina, when she comes back at you, move away
quickly,” Schmitz is telling her. “Just let her run into empty space.”
And again the slo-mos showing her flattening the challenger’s face. A
spearing left that has her blinking and a left-right that would reduce any
normal person to tears. One begins to wonder whether they’re aren’t playing
a game on us. Isn’t it the same action they keep showing us after every
round? How come she doesn’t see that left coming? Why can’t she get out of
the way of the right?
Of course, Regina isn’t hitting her in slow motion. If she was, it would be
alright.
As the fourth begins and they’re showing the online scoring (Halmich miles
ahead). The German scores but then takes two then in reply. She’s trying for
a digging left to the ribs, but Hernández first hits her forehead and then
the side of her jaw, not at full power yet, but she’s quick now to unload:
as Halmich moves backwards, two range-finding jabs and a huge overarm right,
as though bowling, but Halmich leans forward at just the right moment and
the wrist catches her on the top of the head. As the youngster gives chase,
Halmich skips backwards, just as she’s been told, checking, though, before
she reaches the corner to surprise the youngster with a left hook.
Far from discouraged, Hernández lands more scoring punches in the next
minute than she has in the preceding three rounds. Half-way into the fifth,
she begins to move more lightly, twice ducking beautifully beneath left
hooks to throw hard counters of her own, and this is another good round,
though still, she gets stuck inexcusably once or twice by the first punch of
an exchange, and still, her best punches are missing or finding Halmich’s
guard.
Both fighters are wanting to attack now; Hernández the more muscularly
assertive; Halmich the harder to figure out.
After almost fifty contests, Halmich has learnt now what she can and cannot
do. She can’t run and jab – that’s a tall girl’s game – and she can’t blow
people away either. What she can do is outthink and outreact, and keep the
pressure on until her opponents crack.
And sure enough, just when it looks as though the youngster is getting the
upper hand, Halmich hits a purple patch in which she can’t seem to miss. She
lands seven or eight good punches, never more than two at a time, but
punishing, hard punches, and the commentator remarks that a look of
desperation has appeared on Hernández’s face. She’s certainly lost
concentration, and perhaps even heart. Halmich comes in when she expects her
to go backwards, and with her lightning reactions, keeps beating Hernández
to the punch.
On the bell, they continue trading punches — both of them, not just
Hernández — but it’s Hernández that’s coming unravelled and a stoppage is
suddenly on the cards.
In the round breaks, her demeanour is changing: she looks shockingly
childlike, somehow quelled. Barely an hour from her 21st birthday, you have
the impression she’s getting younger, as though she’d looked over the
threshold at adulthood and decided to turn back.
‘Onward to victory!’ says her coach, lamely, as she steps back into the
arena. At first, nothing much happens, then she’s rocked by a right that
sends her backwards, and she goes into free fall, taking first a right, a
few moments later, a hard left, then a left and a right, and a hard right to
the body… but instead of crumbling, she drives forward and for a moment
Halmich’s attack is derailed. After one minute thirty, though, she takes
another hard one-two and you think Halmich’s got her, but again she starts
swinging and Halmich moves away. The same pattern is repeated for a third
time in the closing seconds. Hernández looks out on her feet after a hard
one-two, but comes forward, and Halmich moves away. Again van de Wiele is
quick to separate them at the end of the round. The harder you hit Hernández,
the feistier she gets.
In the eighth, she starts running, not backwards but in chase, knowing she
needs the knockout or perhaps just maddened and enraged. When she slows
down, Halmich hooks her in the belly and drives her into the corner, but she
scrums down and shoves the German back into the centre.
Halmich sticks her four times with the jab, and tries a left hook for the
finish but connects with the forehead rather than the jaw. “Hernández’s will
seems broken,” says the commentator But it isn’t at all! She’s dazed and not
thinking, but she still wants to fight. And a left hook keeps Halmich
honest, even though it whizzes harmlessly under her nose. If she wins this
fight, she’ll go ten years ‘unbeaten’, and she’s taking no risks.
Then she does and gets punished. As they start trading hooks, Hernández
scores once, and then again, and then a third time, and a weal appears
beneath Halmich’s eye. The courage of the youngster is astonishing. If she’d
landed these punches earlier, when she was fresh, it might have been a very
different story; but that’s another way of saying that Halmich has fought a
smart fight.
In the ninth she reverts to Plan A: never more than two punches at a time.
The punishment Hernández takes is considerable but there’s never a hint that
she’ll quit. Right at the end, when she’s caught with a right hook, van de
Wiele steps between them on the bell.
As they come out for the tenth, there are cheers for both fighters. They
begin slugging it out, and even though it’s Hernández that gets the worst of
it, it’s Halmich that backs away. Then the reverse, and Halmich hooks to the
belly and then to the face, but the youngster’s response is her Ali
impersonation, which is actually very good, and makes you wonder whether she
shouldn’t have tried it earlier.
But Hernández is more Joe Frazier than Ali, with a superb left hook that she
never quite landed earlier, when she was fresh, and hasn’t the strength left
to apply. With 20 seconds to the bell, she does land a big hook, but it’s a
right, and fatigue now causes her to miss with the left. Halmich lands three
more big punches, but on the bell, it’s Hernández coming forward, and for
the last time van de Wiele rushes to check her, as though afraid, even at
this stage, she might turn it into a brawl.
*
As they read out the scorecards, she places her free hand on her hip and
moves restlessly from foot to foot. Her physical grace has deserted her and
she cries when the result is announced. Halmich’s attempt to console her
meets with a firm but polite rebuff. Midnight is fast approaching and she
flees in haste from the scene.
ROUND BY ROUND
BY PETER GEUDENS
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