Body and Soul

As her opponent’s swollen, blood-spattered face darts briefly out of view, a wave of disgust steals over Alicia Doyle. But not for the obvious reasons. Moments earlier, Doyle was happily scrutinizing a tape of herself throwing vicious left jabs at the split upper lip of Lisa Valencia, her gritty adversary in Doyle’s professional boxing debut last month.

But the spectacle has shifted. Instead of two determined women making each other’s heads snap east-west, north-south, while bathing spectators in perspiration mists, Doyle’s tiny TV screen now shows a blond babe jiggling her way across a boxing ring, bearing a sign announcing the onset of round 4. Doyle winces as if she’d caught a left hook to the chin.

“See,” she blurts out, “that’s exactly the image I’m trying to get away from. I hate that [stuff]. That’s sending the message women are just about T-and-A.” Then Doyle adds softly, almost apologetically, “That’s just my opinion.”

If the 30-year-old Sherman Oaks resident sees herself as a crusader for female equality, which she adamantly does, Doyle has picked an unusual, some might say crazy, way to prove her point. Four months ago, Doyle quit her job as a newspaper reporter for the Ventura County Star to join America’s small but growing cadre of professional female boxers, who now number about 400. Armed with nothing more than an ironclad will and a hard, trim physique, Doyle has embarked on a vocational path so mined with danger that her mother can’t bear even to watch her daughter train, while her boyfriend wavers between supportive admiration and gut-churning apprehension.

“That’s my baby girl!” exclaims Patsy Kong, a Woodland Hills resident studying to be a minister in a metaphysical Christian sect. “It’s real hard to see somebody punching on your child, even though it’s a professional trained sport.”

Nothing tested the stomachs of Doyle’s loved ones more than her Sept. 16 four-round bout with Valencia in an open-air ring at Castaic Brickyards near Magic Mountain. By all accounts it was an exemplary brawl, one of the region’s best women’s fights this year. In the end, Doyle’s more experienced rival won a unanimous decision, impressing the judges with her aggressiveness and shudder-inducing left hook.

But it was Doyle’s self-sacrificing stubbornness in the face of Valencia’s assault, her willingness to absorb four or five punches for the sake of landing one good shot, that raised the fight to the level of primal theater. “They just whaled on each other,” marvels Dean Lohuis, chief inspector of the California Athletic Commission, which oversees the state’s boxing, wrestling, kick boxing and mixed martial arts.

“Doyle, she gave her heart, she really put up a good fight,” says Jerry Valencia, Lisa’s father-manager.

For Doyle, who was paid $650--a pittance compared with the purses male boxers command--the fight was more than just a brutal debutante ball. It was “the most intense, exciting, dramatic” thing that’s ever happened to her. Better than seeing her first newspaper story in print. Better than sex. A life-changing revelation that makes Doyle shrug off the lingering deafness in her right ear.

“Competing like that shows you what you are made of, inside and out,” says Doyle, who has written occasionally for The Times. “What it takes to get in there comes from inside your mind and your heart. That’s what enables you to get in that ring, overcoming your fear, overcoming your doubts.” And, in Alicia Doyle’s case, overcoming the dark phantasms of rage and regret that have shadow-punched her down through the years.

Until her bruising baptism in boxing, nothing could silence Doyle’s inner demons. Throughout her early adulthood she was haunted by visions of her parents’ screaming matches, memories of clutching her father’s leg when he was leaving the family, her parents’ divorce and her mother’s subsequent nervous breakdown, the halfhearted suicide attempt at age 13, when Doyle gulped down a box of sleeping pills. Though lately they’ve begun to reconcile, for a long time, Doyle was so angry and conflicted about her father that she would tell people he was dead. “It’s all a kind of blur now,” says the woman nicknamed “Disaster Diva.”

In recent years, Doyle’s life had come into focus. She had found a creative outlet through her writing, specializing in stories about people who’d overcome long odds. She had taken up Tae-Bo, a fusion of aerobics, boxing and tae kwon do, and reconnected with a long-lost half-brother. But it wasn’t until she started bashing a heavy bag at a Simi Valley gym two years ago that the Chatsworth High graduate feels she began to truly confront her old ghosts. And while she relishes her 10 previous amateur fights (five wins, five losses), she swears nothing compares to pro boxing, where there’s no protective headgear and the women sport 8-ounce gloves, “which is almost like hitting somebody bare-fisted.”

“It’s the most powerful feeling I’ve ever had, just to step into that square,” Doyle says at a Sherman Oaks coffeehouse, reliving the ecstasy. “I remember thinking afterward, ‘I can’t believe this is legal! It’s legal to do this!’ Because when you’re in there it’s you and her, man. There’s a winner and a loser.”

So convinced is Doyle of boxing’s character-molding, mind-expanding properties that she now devotes three hours each day, six days a week, to running, rope-skipping, push-ups, sit-ups and sparring, while supporting herself with freelance writing. She considers the financial ups and downs and the grueling regimen a small price to pay for the transcendent bliss of combat.

“Getting in that ring, I experienced something that most people on the planet have not experienced. I was totally enlightened. That ability to program pain out of your being for a few rounds is an amazing thing. It shows what you can be as a human being.”

Doyle’s boyfriend, Dana Bartholomew, a Daily News reporter, frames the challenge somewhat differently, seeing boxing as a kind of Emersonian test of will toward self-improvement. “If you want to win,” he asks rhetorically, “what do you have to do to become a killer machine?”

*

John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” is bouncing off the walls at Kid Gloves gym in Simi Valley as Danny “Big Shorty” Ortiz barks out instructions to his female pupil. “You’re flatfooted right there, you just stand there flatfooted instead of coming to me,” Ortiz shouts. “Keep your feet moving!”

Doyle, dressed androgynously in sweats and a muscle-bearing black singlet, filters these instructions through a scrim of speed and sweat. She scowls, a little thundercloud sweeping across her striking features, but nods, comprehending. To win her next fight, Doyle knows, she must hone her defensive skills, learn to become a more fluid target.

No funky sweat smell, peeling paint or other cheesy attributes of the typical boxing mise en scene greet visitors here. Shoehorned into a strip mall behind a McDonald’s, the converted storefront space is a clean, modern shrine to past gladiatorial greats and would-be contenders. Along with the heavy bags, posters and autographed photos are taped-up inspirational sayings (“Great spirits always encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds.”). Founding owner Robert Ortiz, Danny’s brother, prides himself on running a tight ship. “Nobody spits here in my gym,” he says, “and no gum-chewing when they’re training.”

Doyle’s next professional test may come later this year, if promoters can match her with someone. Only five or 10 years ago that would’ve been difficult, given the paucity of qualified opponents. But since the Golden Gloves amateur association began admitting female boxers a few years ago, the sport that exemplifies manly individualism has grown marginally more feminized. According to California Athletic Commission records, 47 of its 420 licensed boxers, amateur and professional, are women. Women’s bouts are now held regularly at the Irvine Marriott, the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, the Spa Hotel Casino in Palm Springs and other venues. Nationally, an estimated 1,500 women have taken up amateur boxing, while the 400 female pros are gaining followers to the typically slug-happy female style.

Technically, some women still lack precision and/or power compared with their male counterparts. But the overall standard is rising, and women’s boxing has acquired a certain cachet with the recent opening of the highly praised feature film “Girlfight” and the publication of British journalist-pugilist Kate Sekules’ memoir “The Boxer’s Heart: How I Learned to Love the Ring” (Villard). Established talents like Lucia Rijker and Christy Martin have brought credibility to women’s boxing. The daughters of ex-champions Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman have brought glamour. And Mia St. John of Calabasas’ nude Playboy spread last November brought eroticism. Still, women’s boxing struggles to be taken seriously. “People think it’s a freak show,” Doyle says.

Doyle’s interest in boxing began practically the moment she stepped into Kid Gloves gym three years ago to report a story for the Star. That year, El Nin~o storms had battered the small gym that Robert Ortiz originally operated out of his backyard. At the time, she thought that boxing was “violent and brutal” and that all boxers were “stupid.”

Impressed with Ortiz’s priestlike dedication and his use of boxing as a tool to teach young people self-discipline, Doyle underwent a rapid conversion. First she enrolled in a box-aerobics class. Then she asked Ortiz if he would train her to fight. After first telling Doyle, “You’re too pretty to box,” Ortiz agreed. Today, he calls his protegee, a two-time Golden Gloves champion in the lightweight (130-pound) class, “a great role model for the young girls” and “the Rocky Marciano of girl fighters. She just keeps coming in.”

Bartholomew, her boyfriend, recalls that in those early days, when he and Doyle both labored at the Star’s Simi Valley bureau, Doyle would disappear after work and emerge a few minutes later in her gym attire. “There was this kind of Clark Kent, into-the-bathroom transformation, except instead of Superman you’d have Boxer Woman.”

If the ancient art of fisticuffs has brought cathartic self-knowledge to Doyle, it has brought a queasy mixture of pride and anxiety to those who fear she might be enlightening herself straight into the emergency room. “You’re going to get killed,” one of Doyle’s half-brothers initially told her. Unmoved, she persisted and eventually won her sibling’s support.

Her mother was horrified at the effects of her offspring’s rumble with Valencia, though she admits boxing has given Doyle “a lot of self-confidence. To see my beautiful daughter with two black eyes and an orange-colored neck and chest and an orange arm! I said to her, ‘Oh, my God,’ and she goes, ‘Mother, you should’ve seen me the day after the fight!’ ”

While Doyle is well aware of boxing’s risks--”I still want to speak clearly when I’m done”--she’s not worried about a little thing like a smashed nose or a matched set of black eyes. “You can’t be vain in this sport,” she says. “One thing that I’m trying to do as a woman in this sport is show that we are not just pretty faces. We’re fighters.”

In addition to her family’s numerous travails, Doyle has struggled much of her life with a litany of archetypal women’s body-image- and self-esteem-related issues: childhood chubbiness followed by anorexia into her early 20s, and a relationship with an abusive man. Her mom was always praising Doyle’s beauty and smarts, but as a working single parent she wasn’t around much to interact with Doyle and her two half-brothers from Kong’s first marriage. “They really had to fend for themselves,” says Kong. “I was not able to be with them and hug them and do that sort of thing.”

Today Doyle occasionally counsels other young women about diet, fitness and self-acceptance. But she admits food is still an issue for her, especially during the starvation period preceding fights. No pizza. No Starbucks mocha binges. “Nobody knows what it’s like to cut out every pleasurable aspect of my life. Like, two weeks before a fight I’m not supposed to make love with my boyfriend. So I cut that out too.”

More than anything, Doyle says, it was her mother’s stoic example during her yearlong battle with ovarian cancer several years ago that inspired her emotionally to become a boxer. Not once during that awful time, even when Patsy Kong lost all her hair to chemotherapy, did she ever cry in front of her daughter. “She will not come see me fight,” Doyle says. “But she’s the reason I think I can do it.”

Bartholomew, 41, sometimes finds it hard to reconcile the sweet, kindhearted, “hedonistic” woman who wears pink party dresses and keeps stuffed animals in her bedroom with the rigidly disciplined warrior he witnessed in action for the first time three weeks ago. Having weathered a “teenage self-destructive phase” involving drug use, Bartholomew says he can empathize with boxing’s darker side. “I’ve thought about My Lai,” he says, referring to the infamous massacre of Vietnamese peasants by U.S. troops, “and I thought, ‘I could’ve been there.’ I guess I have looked at the incident and thought, ‘I could be swept up in that hysteria, as evil as that was.’ If I have that destructive energy, I think other people have it too. “

*

On the videotape of her bout with Valencia, it’s easy to spot exactly where Doyle gets swept up in the heat of battle. It’s the fourth round, and a resurgent Valencia is applying her punishing left hook, scoring hit after hit. Doyle’s face has turned into a mask of frustration and defiant anger. If “boxing is primarily about being, and not giving, hurt,” as Joyce Carol Oates asserted in her 1987 essay “On Boxing,” the fourth round was Doyle’s painful epiphany.

“She hit me with a left hook that made me go deaf in my right ear. I couldn’t hear my corner, I couldn’t hear the crowd, I couldn’t hear anything,” she recalls. “I was just standing right in front of her and she kept hitting me, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Do it again, do it again! You can’t hurt me!’ ”

But she was hurt--badly. After the fight, she and Valencia embraced before going their separate ways to celebrate with friends. “Alicia came out in a very feminine pink dress with a lace cover,” Bartholomew says. “Her hair was glistening, long, straight, just like she wears it, perfume, the whole shot. And aside from the bruises on her face, she looked great.”

Doyle and her little party of friends planned to dine at a Chinatown restaurant, but the Disaster Diva felt too drained and beat up to chow down. “My jaw was really swollen so it was hard for me to eat.” So she and Bartholomew got some takeout and retired to her one-bedroom apartment, where he babied her, arranging her congratulatory flower bouquets in vases and, he says, stroking her “where I could.” Before she met Bartholomew, Doyle once was involved with a man who hit her. “He wouldn’t do it now,” she says, laughing. “And now I’m with Dana, who treats me like a princess.”

In the days following her defeat, Bartholomew took his girlfriend to a recital at First Congregational Church, where the mighty hall’s massing of beautiful noise can hit you like a shot to the solar plexus. “There was a sequence where they had the organist, and then they had the women’s choir, and then they had a violinist,” says Doyle, her voice tumbling like a waterfall, “and the sounds that were coming from the women, and these stained glass windows . . . they were all so beautiful. So beautiful.” Doyle wept at the strange intensity of it all.