Like a missionary church, the West Portland Boxing Club welcomes all kinds. Here, seasoned pros work alongside kids who won't drive legally for years. English and Spanish chatter fills the room.

The ringmaster of this salty circus is a soft spoken gentleman named Bill Maertz. In decades as a coach in local, national and international boxing realms, Maertz has seen hundreds of fighters come and, almost always, go. Maertz has devoted much of his life to teaching the rigorous routine required of boxers. He's not surprised when students move on to less unforgiving pursuits.

"In boxing," Maertz notes, "the penalties for laziness are very real and immediate."

A select few, however, not only survive but thrive on boxing's combination of months of discipline and split seconds of combat chaos. In fact, West Porland's current crop inlcudes just such a fighter, a boxer Maertz says is unique in his long experience.

Molly McConnell, a 29 year old welterweight, didn't step into a boxing ring until two months after her 25th birthday. Despite that relatively late start, she's established regional dominance in her class, winning state championships in Oregon and Washington and battering nationally ranked opponents. The Northwest no longer holds many opponents eager to step into the ring with her. Portland boxing insiders say the 140 pound amateur is a hot prospect for a national title and professional glory.

"She has tremendous technical skills, which is something you don't often see, even among professional women fighters," says Sue "Tiger Lily" Fox, a Portland cop who fought at the pro level in the 1970s and now runs the website Womenboxing.com. "She's destined to be a terrific pro fighter is she so chooses."

"There isn't an amateur woman fighter in this country - or in any country - I wouldn't put her up against," says Maertz.

Despite this acclaim from Portland's small circle of boxing cognoscenti, McConnell chooses amateur obscurity, at least for now. She see pro boxing as a money-poisoned imaged game, where many fighters build careers on soft-core glamour shots as much as their skills in the ring.

"Professional boxing, especially for women, is in the toilet," she says. "The skilled female fighters don't get the big fights, or the big money, either. That's reserved for a select few who have the right management and, more importantly, the right looks or the right name. There are tons of great fighters out there, but you'd never know it from the fights on TV. Most of them stink."

"You find women like Mia St. John, who's kind of a pretty lady and who's posed for Playboy and all the rest of it - that's really just a publicity kind of deal," says Maertz. "And it's making a mockery of women's boxing, making it harder for someone like Molly, who wants to be taken seriously."

The spectacle of two women punching each other no longer qaulifies for what-will-they-think-of-next segments at the end of TV sports shows. Still, boxing occupies a different space in the public mind than basketball, soccer or other sports in which women have come to prominence. Full-contact implies Y-chromosomes. Women like McConnell, who shove their way beyond sports' last gender boundaries, still must justify their existence.

It's not a novelty to see women in the ring anymore," McConnell says. "But I get tired of talking about it." vtbox©

Guy Villegas, another West Portland coach, gives the signal, and McConnell pops out of her corner of the ring. She and her opponent, a man with biceps any yuppie health club rat would trade his Lexus for, bounce for a few seconds, then exchange blasts.

The two speed-waltz around the ring, their herky-jerky dance punctuated by flurries of fists. McConnell's opponent tries to advance on her, but McConnell won't be cowed, answering her foe's sallies with a bell-ringing jab.

Their duel makes it clear: This is nobody's pugilistic man-bites-dog show, nobody's trendy low-impact aerobic routine.

"So often, people are like, 'Oh, that's an interesting hobby,'" says McConnell. "I work eight hours a day, then I train for three hours a night. This is not a little hobby of mine. This is not a fun little workout program I've come up with. This is what I do. So if you want to irritate me, saying stuff like 'Oh, that's cute, you're a boxer' is a good way to do it."

One does get the feeling that irritating her wouldn't be the best idea. McConnell's arms are like tattooed two-by-fours. Whether she's sparring some guy most people wouldn't curse in traffic or punishing a heavy bag, each deliberate jab is a micro-essay on converting muscle power into impact.

"She hits extremely well," says Tom Smario, professional boxing cornerman and poet. "She doesn't fight like a lot of the women, who flail and slap and have no control. She punches straight and hard. She's pretty mean in there. The thing is, she fights like a man."

After four years in which, by her own account, McConnell has breathed, slept and eaten boxing, 2002 figures to be the year her hard-won, hard-bitten talent is tested on a national stage. McConnell and Maertz have set their sights on several national tournaments later this year. Whether those tournaments are the culmination or just another phase of McConnell's labors remains to be seen. However, her veteran coach i s confident.

"Win, lose or draw, we're just going to get better," he says. "But we're working on making those tournaments winning experiences, not learning experiences."

This championship potential carries a price tag. McConnell's friends, her love life, her cat Fatty - all have taken a back seat to the ring's alluring, relentless demands.

"Molly is putting a lot of her life on hold to pursue this," says Ron Woodward, her former coach. "Her entire life right now is amateur boxing."

When the alarm wakes her for her 7 am shift as a painter and drywaller at St. Vincent hospital, Molly McConnell is not a happy camper.

"I'm not much of a morning person," she says. "Every night I spend about half an hour with ice bags on various things - my elbows, my knees. So the first 20 minutes of my day I have an ugly grimace on my face, as I try to get the blood flowing."

McConnell works at St. Vincent until 3:30 pm. And then, when other folks are wondering if it's beer o'clock yet, McConnell is running, pumping iron, chucking a medicine ball, skipping rope, smacking the bag, sparring. She spent nearly 1,000 hours in the gym last year.

"I'm an old lady, man." McConnell says with a laugh. "I'm in bed by 8:30 every night."

McConnell runs five or six days a week, jogging between three and five miles on three of the days and focusing on interval training on the others. The intervals, a mix of sprinting and jogging, prepare her for boxing's jagged rhythm.

"That's the way to train, to go from lull to frenzy," she says.

She moves on to weights. Again, she alternates by days: working chest, biceps and triceps one day; back, shoulders and legs the next. Abs get the treatment daily.

Then there's shadow boxing, hitting the heavy bag, jumping rope. Three times a week, McConnell spars between four and seven rounds, almost always against men.

"I don't spar with women because there aren't enough around who are good enough," she says. "If I'm up against a guy who's the same weight I am, he's going to be stronger. They just hit harder. I figure if I can take their punches, I can take punches from a woman who's my weight."

To top it all off, she's on a strict diet, trying to drop below 140 pounds so she can fight in the light welterweight class. No cheese, almost no other dairy, very little meat, copious fruits and vegetables: "Basically, the rule is if it tastes good, don't eat it," she says. Maertz has also instructed her to consume a gallon of water a day.

"It's gross," she says of the water regime. "It gets to the point where I can't look at a glass of water."

When she's in civilian clothes, few would guess at the force latent in McConnell's square shoulders, or the punishment that put it there. She looks little different from many Portlanders her age, two earrings in her left ear, three in her right.

McConnell, though, is privy to constant reminders of the boxing ring. "I hurt every day," she says, with a characteristic rueful laugh. And though she doesn't exactly say so, it seems the pain might be part of the attraction.

"I played softball, basketball, volleyball," she says of her Seattle childhood and college days at Lewis & Clark. "I was a really good softball player, but I never had to work hard. I was never the first one out there or the last one to leave, or any of that. Boxing was the first sport I found where, whether or not you were naturally athletic, you had to be disciplined. For the first time, I felt really challenged."

Despite this affinity, McConnell lost two of her first three bouts before approaching Woodward, a glazier and spare-time boxing coach.

"Before I ever knew her, I thought I saw some things in her essential to being a good fighter," says Woodward. "She has a tremendous desire to win. Now that sounds stupid. Doesn't every athlete have that? But boxing is different. You climb into that ring and weird things start to happen. You choke. You freeze. You have to have that special desire to overcome all that, or you're finished."

Woodward and McConnell worked on the basics: jab, balance, style and strategy.

"It was like pouring gasolline on a fire," Woodward recalls. "When you're an adult and they ring that bell, you are in a fight, not a boxing match. Molly has no problem with that. She's not in there to show off her fancy footwork. She's in there to end it - now."

McConnell's most recent opponent, a 22 year old from Vancouver, B.C., named Lara Cubitt, speaks of McConnell's assaultive style first-hand. McConnell finished Cubitt in less than a round.

"She's tough as hell," says Cubitt. "She throws really good hooks, which makes her exceptional among other women fighters," says Cubitt. "She was strong enough to put me in my place, that's for sure." vtbox©

Though women have fought professionally for decades, women's boxing really took off in the 1990's. On the pro level, all female bouts proved a reliable draw. However, in the eyes of many serious fight fans, the women's pro game is overrun with dilettantes lured by a quick buck and passing notoriety.

"Men don't just turn pro out of nowhere," says McConnell, who's worked in corners during pro fights. "Ninety percent of them have long amateur careers first. For women, all you have to do to get a pro license is take a physical and fill out a form."

McConnell and others say these shabby standards lead to contests staged more for novelty's sake than sporting value. McConnell points out that Laila Ali and Jackie Frazier, whose sold-out renewal of their fathers' rivalry last year was the most hyped women's match ever, boasted about as much experience between them at the time as McConnell has accumulated herself.

Some pro fighters market themselves as muscled-up sex objects. Mia St. John, a "hot pink knockout" in Playboy's panting words and a "raw" boxer even by a sympathetic writer's admission, grins in a white bikini/robe ensemble on her website. Visitors to St. John's little patch of cyberspace will soon be able to buy posters, T-shirts and hats, an elaboration of the commercial success St. John enjoys as a well- promoted - and, say the critics, well-protected - fighter.

McConnell takes offense not at such gimmicky packaging, but at the use of sex appeal to mask slipshod skills.

"If some women want to promote themselves with 'glamour shots' and they can really kick some ass, I say go for it," she says. "What annoys me is when they are portrayed that way and then have no skills to show for it. I don't care how you market yourself, but you better be able to back it up with some solid skills."

Amateur boxing, unlike the pro circuit, offers nowhere to hide. Champions are determined by national tournaments such as the U. S. National Championships and the Golden Gloves, which take place every summer.

"There's no money to taint everything," says McConnell. "To be the champ, you have to work your way up the ladder."

Since 1995, the number of registered female amateurs has increased from less than 500 to nearly 1,800. As a byproduct of that rapid growth, the national tourneys have matured into true obstacle courses for those who reach the finals.

"These are women who have some experience and some ability," says Jim Beasley, executive director of Kansas-based Golden Gloves. "They are well-oiled machines ready for combat."

"When all's said and done," McConnell says, "it would mean more to me to say that I won a national amateur championship than to say I had a few pro fights."

McConnell's record stands at 11-2, with five stoppages, the amateur equivalent of a knockout. She hasn't lost a fight since November 1999, when she dropped a bout to then nationally ranked Adrienne Lugg, a Seattle fighter McConnell whipped in a January 2000 rematch.

This near spotless record did not come easy.

"I would go to work to pay the bills, train and fall asleep," McConnell says. "I saw less and less of my friends. A lot of them own their own businesses and set their own schedules. They wake up late and stay out late, they go to the bars - really, just all the things that adults in their 20s normally do, except I can't. When I go out to a bar, I can feel the cigarette smoke in my lungs for three or four days."

"I tried to date and box at the same time, but there just aren't enough hours in the day. For a long time, it was way too hard to try to put energy into starting a relationship when I barely had enough energy to get up and go to work in the morning. I was single for a long time. then, out of the blue, I met someone who changed my whole outlook on life. I didn't think I could box and have a life, but now I know I can do both."

McConnell's parents, who live in the Seattle area, support their daughter's sanguinary pursuits - though, she says, her mother prefers to do so from a safe distance.

"She watches my fights on video," McConnell says. "She knows that this makes me happy, but she is a mom. A part of her can't help but wish I'd taken up golf or tennis instead."

Analyzing the primal pull boxing exerts on its diehards may be of more interest to outsiders than those neck-deep in the sport. Even McConnell's coach, after all his years in boxing, professes a certain mystification regarding its attraction.

"I don't understand why people box or what they like about it," says Maertz. "I can only say that it's an individual thing - a decision to try to be good at the hardest thing there is. George Foreman once said that boxing is the sport that all other sports aspire to. You lose a game of football or basketball, and your feelings hurt a little bit. In boxing, if you don't work hard, the consequences are black eyes and bloody lips."

"It wasn't because of money that Oscar de la Hoya started boxing when he was 10 years old, because at the time there wasn't a dime. He started because he had a desire to conquer the best and toughest sport there is, and I think all good boxers share that."

Perhaps this is what drives McConnell to compress so much boxing into each day: the sense that the challenge is nearly limitless and must be faced immediately.

"I'm not getting any younger - that sounds strange coming from someone who's 29," she says. "I'm going to put it all out there for five or six years. After that, I can party all I want. Boxing has to be done right now.

"Sometimes it becomes, 'Why am I doing this? Why shouldn't I just quit, or take a break?' But then I think about the fact that the reason I'm at the top of the local ladder is that I'm in there every day. In the summer, when other people are taking a break, I'm in the gym."

Motives aside, this insatiable appetite for the toil of the ring puts McConnell in a lonely class. "Molly is dying to learn more and more about boxing, and that's unique in my experience." says Maertz. "I've had a lot of men who were like that, but Molly is the first women." vtbox©
Willamette Week, Vol. 28, No. 10, January 9, 2002, p. 16-18, 20 & 23