Boxing on: toe to toe with the NZ champ

ALAN CLARKE

I'm over 50, under-fit, soft as hard-boiled cabbage and haven't thrown a punch in anger since Gordon Gillies tapped my nose and took all the fight out of me in primer four.

So going toe-to-toe with seven-times national boxing champion and, hopefully, future Olympian Dawn Chalmers in her Nelson gym might not have been the smartest idea I've had.

The warning bells rang a bit louder with a message from Chalmers on my work answerphone. "You'd better buy yourself a mouthguard if you haven't already got one" she says. "Just in case."

Misconception one: Women boxers are all 100kg of bristling butch aggression with a single-figure IQ, who spend their time bench-pressing buses, getting ballpoint tattooes and beating up the blokes of south Auckland. Maybe I'd be lucky to get out of the ring alive.

However, Chalmers proved to be whip-smart with a winning smile and a nose straighter than mine. The session started right after work at the Enner Glyn home of Chalmers and her partner, elite and very astute boxing coach Alan Dickey.

Their double garage is the home of the Clifton Boxing Gym. It is fitted out with heavy punch bags, a speed ball, exercycle, grinder and other instruments of torture, including an old tyre (which meant two minutes of interval-training hell at the very end of the session).

Misconception two: I'd assumed my participation would be a couple of minutes of pretend sparring and an hour of observing and asking reporter-type questions. Wrong again. Straight after basic introductions – former Nelson Giants guard Ricky Brooks, training for his first fight in the new year, was also there and looking very promising – it was out with the skipping ropes.

If Dickey had reservations about my age and lack of physique he didn't show it, and for the next hour he treated me like any beginner. He drummed home the basics: point your toes in the direction of the punch, your weight should be 51 per cent on your back foot, roll your thumb down but not too early or your elbow will bend out; keep your guard up and chin down, keep moving, keep your eyes open ...

A punch, he says, starts in the feet, is powered by the legs, waist and hips, directed by the torso and through pulling back the opposite shoulder. The arms and fists are just the end-part of it all.

So often, the simplest things have their intricacies. How easily form and technique must disappear when the pressure goes on, unless it has become second nature through many torturous hours of practice.

We moved through various drills that would have been even more fun if I had a basic level of fitness. Everything was in two-minute increments – timed to coincide with the length of a round in amateur boxing.

Eventually, it was on with the tape and gloves for mitt-work, more drills, and finally out came the headgear, in went the new mouthguard, and it was time to bang gloves with a national champ.

Of course, Chalmers could have been blindfolded in a straitjacket and would still have dropped me had she wanted to. Less than an hour of drills had left me incapable of punching my way through a paper towel. Just trying to maintain a semblance of a guard, let alone trying to follow her footwork or throw anything resembling a jab was a challenge.

But she went easy on me, though I half hoped she would let go with a decent wake-up jab to give me something more to write about. And I'd have to say there was a moment – half way through a two-minute round that felt like 10 – when I got a flash of what boxing might mean to someone as skilled and driven as she is.

In an age of political correctness and risk-aversion, when increasing numbers of young people get their kicks behind a computer screen by sending their avatars off to battle in cyberspace, there is something raw and primal – and incredibly self-affirming – about entering the ring.

So, misconception three: boxing is mere raw brutality. At an amateur level anyway, it's primarily about courage, endurance, mental and physical agility and technique – physical chess, perhaps. A shuffling, shaking Ali, robbed of all his grace and power by Parkinson's, cannot help the image of an often-maligned sport. The highlights packages from professional bouts and attacks from doctors concerned about the damage to brain cells from headshots don't help either.

But as I say, there was a moment, and it was a bit like awakening from a slumber. And I understood why Chalmers – who started sporting life as a promising surf-lifesaver and rep basketballer, played water polo at national age-group level and would succeed in any sport she chose – does what she does.

And I understood too why the pair are now looking at spending around $45,000 on her one and only shot at representing New Zealand at an Olympics, in London in 2012. To get there, she has to finish in the top eight at the World Championships in Barbados next September, meaning a financially punishing schedule of leadup fights overseas and perhaps some training with world lightweight champ Katie Taylor in Ireland.

Despite her unprecedented success in a demanding sport, she has only ever had one sponsor – AMP Powerhouse chipped in with $1000 last year – and the campaign Dickey has mapped out for the next 10 months leaves them facing the possibility of having to sell their house.

Retirement is mandatory for amateur boxers at 34 and, as Chalmers is already 30 this means that London will be her only opportunity to shoot for gold. But as Dickie puts it, the house is only a material thing. "What's that compared with attempting to fulfil a dream? She's an out-and-out Kiwi, and the important thing is to make sure she gets a shot. She's earned it".

Some might wonder about the pair's priorities. But how many of us get to ride the rush and live our dreams? I've never been ringside in my life, but it's hard not to be in this Kiwi champ's corner.

- © Fairfax NZ News