A Violent Season:

Finals, First Night
The evening of Thursday, April 7, was the first balmy one of the year. In Times Square, men beat on plastic drums. The sound rose and magnified among the glass towers into the blue and pink sky. Smells sweet, fresh, and foul awoke in the air. Hundreds came out to walk, loose-limbed, renewed, expectant.

Early spring sees obscene excrescences; curling green-and-puce nodes, crocuses poking psychotically through crusty snow. The wind accompanies with a stinging, unsettling scarf dance in all directions. Still-black branches thrash against windows, rain freezes. Then the first balmy day brings a flowering; buds relax in fulfillment. Joyce Carol Oates aptly described the prizefight as the fruit or flower of the boxer's Spartan striving. The New York Daily News Golden Gloves is the flowering of the metropolitan boxing year, from which champions issue. The Daily News Golden Gloves has taken place each of these 78 years in the period corresponding to the Christian seasons of Lent and Easter, when the faithful prepare by fasting to be redeemed in bloodshed. Early spring was also, back in the '20s, a slow sports-news period, and so editor Paul Gallico created the Golden Gloves tournament. This year in the week before the Gloves finals the Pope passed. As did Becky Zerlentes, the first woman to be felled by an apparent death blow in a sanctioned boxing event (autopsy results pend)—she died in the hospital the day after her fight. The Times' Sports section published an article optimistically predicting that Zerlentes's tragedy would draw needed regulatory attention and funding to amateur boxing.

"It's definitely put a damper on things. I got every newspaper and TV station in the country calling me," said Johnny Woluewich, the president of USA Boxing, Metro. Maybe it's the sunshine today, but for some reason I picture him sitting by a pool as we talk. He takes two other calls. "More people wanting tickets." I ask if there will be a moment of silence for Zerlentes, or what do they do in these cases. "We do a ten count, ten rings of the bell, when someone in the organization dies. I gotta talk to the Daily News guys, though, gotta talk to Campi. It's their show."

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Let us go to the locker room, and watch our warriors prepare for their contests. "The more you sweat in battle, the less you bleed in war," said June Chin on Tuesday morning, quoting a trainer. Chin was to face her third-ever opponent in the finals on Friday night. "That's good! That's a good one," said her teammate Maureen Shea, also fighting Friday. "And here in the gym, it's blood, sweat, and tears…. But you don't want blood, sweat, and tears in the ring. Sweat, yeah. But no blood and no tears—unless it's the other girl's."

Boxing, it has often been related, is only the eighth most deadly sport. Zerlentes's immediate predecessor in amateur ring death was Juan Silva III, in 2000; whereas, in 2004, four high school students were killed playing football. But of course many thousands more people play football each year than box.

Few women fighters, when asked outright to acknowledge brutality in their sport, will. "I don't think it's violent." "It's a science." "It's an art." "It's a sport." Most are athletes first, and most come by way of other martial arts, especially kickboxing. "It was a new challenge." "There weren't enough opportunities in Muay Thai; I couldn't get any fights." "I ruptured my ACL and had to stop playing basketball." Many more than you might expect come for weight loss. "When I started I weighed over 200 pounds. Then I got addicted." But why boxing? Why not aerobics? "I heard it was the best workout there is." A whim: "My office was next to a boxing gym. I thought I might be good at it, and I was." "I'm an actress. My assignment was to develop a superhero, someone as unlike me as possible. I chose a boxer. I found out it's actually not so not like me." A spell of darkness: "I was accosted in the subway. I wondered what it was I was projecting—some vulnerability? I wanted to be strong." "My house was broken into while I was home. The guy ran off. I ran after him. The cops asked me what I would have done if I'd caught him." But the latter stories are few, or seldom told. More commonly: "It's not about aggression, or anger." "I don't want to hurt anybody."

Three women shadowboxing in a ring at 7 a.m. at Gleason's Gym near the Brooklyn waterfront. One has already been here an hour; she'll go to her job till five o'clock tonight and then to her graduate school seminar after that; another woman arose at 4:30 this morning to drive here from Long Island, as she does most every day. She works as a paralegal in Manhattan; she's also a pro with an 11-5-1 record. The third is a financial analyst. She's been at work till 10 every night this week. There's a flyweight, a junior featherweight, and a featherweight (109, 119, 125 pounds); or at least, that's what they'll be by God, by weigh-in.

The blue padded floor of the ring squeaks as the three throw quick, intricate combinations, working out bugs. This is the Carl Czerny portion of the day, scales and arpeggios. One-two-three-four (jab, cross, jab, cross); one-two-three-four-five (jab, cross, hook, left uppercut, right uppercut, finish with a hook). Jab, roll left, hook, right cross. Jab jab. The electric bell buzzaps three times and all three ladies stop.

"I try not to do less than three miles of roadwork a day—usually it's four. You're only fighting four rounds, so you don't want distance. When I go pro and I'm doing 6-, 8 round fights, then I'll do 8 miles." The pro: "I do two hours or so on the treadmill a day." One Tuesday morning, a woman appeared transformed. "She looks like she's lost five pounds since I saw her Saturday!" I query. "Sure she did," said a trainer. Same trainer, of another, a winner of the Gloves and Metros tournaments: "She was three pounds over weight; she's having her woman's cycle. She'll be running in the sauna suit."

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For the finals at the 5,600 seat Theater at Madison Square Garden I have purchased tickets for a middling section along with a pair of vintage collapsible binoculars from eBay; I don't want to pester Pete Carson, my contact at the Daily News, for a spot at the press table; certainly I don't want to ask Johnny. Pete has been helpful and encouraging since February, even when he found out I wasn't writing for ELLE magazine. He added me to comp lists for $15 and $20 quarter- and semifinals shows from the Bronx to Manhattan to Red Hook to Hauppauge, Long Island, to the Jamaica Police Athletic League, and pulled out a metal folding chair for me near him and columnist Bill Farrell and next to the judges so I could look at their bout sheets and listen to their jokes and be in the line of sweat-and-blood-bullet fire. One night a few weeks ago I arrived late from work to the Gleason's-sponsored semifinals bouts at the Electric Industry Center (IBEW Local 3 headquarters) in Queens and found it sold out. A man in a maroon velour jacket and a dyed black mustache stopped my friend and me as we tried to squeeze past the disappointed milling coves. I mentioned Pete's name. The man whispered something to his fellow Cerberus. "Okay, come in. Just write something nice about us, why don't you? And don't leave your friend out there alone again like that. All the other girls was hitting on him." "You said my name and they let you in?" asked Pete, and laughed wearily.

I'd grown accustomed to PAL gyms and church basements and was not sure what challenges I'd encounter from the Garden Gloves, formality-wise. Earlier in the season, when toddling to matches in unfamiliar areas, I'd look for the ambulance parked out front of an institutional building and a group of guys who, if white, were large and crewcut. Once inside a neighborhood preliminary bout venue, one can roam and there are no bad eats. Or they're all bad. The crowd seldom exceeds two or three hundred locals, families of fighters, ex-fighters, baby mammas, grandmothers, pasty, greenish Polish boys with spiky gelled hair; black, Puerto Rican and Dominican boys and men in do rags and Shyne Barrow style caps, everyone baggy'd up and notioned in approximations of platinum and ice. There are hot dogs for 2 dollars sold by doleful ninth graders, rank coffee from fellowship-hour urns for a dollar, soda, sometimes a soy-fortified cheeseburger just like the one your lunch lady used to make.

These last few weeks I've eaten more hot dog dinners standing up ringside, pad and pen in the other hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee wedged between my feet on the waxed basketball court floor…or masticating Altoids gum until I realize my jaw hurts and I can barely move it; suddenly grabbing my bag of gym clothes from the morning's workout, the jump rope handles flopping on the floor, with my red handwraps tangled up in it and my regular bag with Boxing Digest, printouts from the web, the names and phone numbers of every woman in the Gloves this year (courtesy of Pete) my pulped copies of Liebling's Sweet Science, Oates's On Boxing, the novel for my book group, flinging it all over my shoulder or just dragging it along the pop sticky floor, because one of the Starrett City boys is getting in the face of a dude from Webster PAL and there are four middleweights, a cruiserweight, and about 8 Olde Englishes between them and me and I got to get out of the way and preferably not any closer to that five-foot speaker. Or if not that, then hey, there's a lady fighter by the construction paper laced proscenium, probably a pro, laughing with her papi—I can tell by her thin-soled suede sneakers and her taut shoulders, her delicate right eyebrow, her short fingernails and her slouch—and I want to get over there and talk to her before the next bell rings. Kid from the Chin Checkers selling DVDs for three dollars—oh hey, yes, please, can I get one of those? DJ Mario and 50 Cent taking us to the Candy Shop again; aw jeez, she's leaving, she's with the Judah club and their boy is done—hey! Excuse me! I see my favorite ref adjust his latex gloves. The music stops. Bell.