She Gave New Meaning to the Fighting Irish

Amy Catrow is 5 feet 2 and weighs 104 pounds. She went to University High in Irvine, where she played soccer and ran cross-country. Catrow was, she will tell you, a suburban California girl who did not spend hours in a sweaty, smelly gym or have a hankering to have the snot knocked out of her.

Until she went to Notre Dame.

As Catrow ends her collegiate days, she is proud to be receiving her degree in architecture and of the job offers she has in Houston and New York. She also is proud of something else. Catrow is leaving a part of herself at Notre Dame. Her name is attached to an award in the women’s boxing program. The program Catrow started.

She laughs when she talks about her boxing program. There was no grand plan. Not even when, having been wait-listed instead of accepted at Notre Dame, she and her father traveled to South Bend and Catrow promised the dean of students something.

“I told him that I guaranteed that if I were accepted to Notre Dame, I would do something special, leave something at Notre Dame worthwhile,” Catrow says. “I just didn’t know what.”

She knew she wasn’t talented enough to play on Notre Dame’s nationally ranked women’s soccer team or to run Division I cross-country, but she was still an athlete, still eager for competition.

In the spring of her freshman year, Catrow met some of the guys on Notre Dame’s men’s boxing club. It isn’t an NCAA sport, but the men’s boxing program has a 75-year history and a respected tradition. The Bengal Bouts tournament, for instance, raises money for the Holy Cross missions in Bangladesh.

“I’d always liked boxing and I always watched on TV,” Catrow says. “I guess it sounds strange, but I’ve always been curious about the sport. I asked the guys on the men’s team if they’d teach me to box. There was a void in my life in terms of a highly competitive team sport.”

Catrow trained in the basement of a men’s dorm, doing the same exercises and drills as the men’s novice team. When she was home on break, Catrow trained in a boxing gym on Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa. After training hard all summer after her freshman year, she wrote to the Notre Dame administration, asking if she could compete on the men’s team.

“This being Notre Dame, I could tell there was hesitation about a woman boxing on the men’s team,” Catrow says. “They said the integrity of the university was at stake. So I said, ‘If there’s going to be a problem with me against men, then we need to have a women’s program.’ ”

And so Catrow started a women’s program.

She gives credit to men’s coaches Terry Johnson and Tom Suddes, as well as Rich O’Leary, who is the head of the club sports administration, for helping her. Catrow expected maybe five or 10 girls at the first practice and more than 50 showed up. She was more than an organizer. She was also a coach, cheerleader and, of course, a boxer.

“I love getting hit,” Catrow says. “I’m not afraid of punches. The punches you receive, they clarify exactly what you need to do. It’s almost nice to receive a good, solid punch early in the bout. It fuels the fire. And that was my goal with this. I wanted other women to experience what I experienced with the sport, to find the satisfaction and gratification that I did. When I first started, some of the guys were afraid to hit me.

“So I told them that nobody was holding my hand, forcing me to go to their practices, and that if I wasn’t a good enough partner, I shouldn’t be there. That did encourage them to hit me and I told the same thing to the women.”

Even though the women aren’t yet boxing in the Bengal Bouts, they’ve taken part in fund-raising.

“We decided we can do this because we need to use our bodies to nourish those who are starving,” Catrow says.

So in the fall, the women’s team takes donations, relying on their ability to do push-ups and jumping jacks in an hour.

“We raised $7,000 [last] fall,” she says.

There are more than 200 women in the program now. Catrow says she is leaving the program in capable hands with new captain Brittany Crawford. Having promised the dean of admissions that she would do great things at Notre Dame, Catrow leaves “feeling confident that this program is an asset to the university.”

Last summer Catrow did an internship in New York and boxed at a gym there. It was suggested that she had enough talent to compete in the women’s Golden Gloves tournament.

“And it was tempting,” Catrow says. “But now that I’m graduating and going to work as an architect, I realized that my hands are going to make my living and I’d better be careful for a while. I don’t want to break them.”

But Catrow will still find a gym and take on a heavy bag no matter what city she ends up in. Boxing is in her heart. Her boxing gloves will always hang on her wall.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.