Promoter Fights All-Boys Club

The tomboy childhood, the muscle cars and the pool tables, the karate lessons and the Friday nights spent watching boxing on TV--all could be explained in one simple phrase.

“My Dad wanted a son,” Diane Fischer said, adding, “He also told me I could do anything I wanted in the world.”

Fischer, 55, took him at his word. If only the sport of boxing would.

Five years after she decided to become a boxing promoter, the brassy redhead with the salty vocabulary and the sequined suits is still trying to make a name for herself.

Since embarking on her unlikely second career in 1997, she has staged 48 fight cards in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Louisiana and Panama, but is only now beginning to make money. Not a lot, mind you. She still works a day job--hairstylist at a casino salon--to make ends meet.

“Being a woman hasn’t helped me. I know it’s an all-boys club. But I’m not going away,” she said. Fischer had taken her lumps before she ever got into the fight game. By then, she’d been married and divorced--three times--and suffered the loss of a 16-year-old daughter in a traffic accident.

But she never lost the interest in boxing that she acquired as a child, watching the “Friday Night Fights” on TV or listening to the radio by her father’s side.

Fischer, an only child, went fishing with her father. He taught her how to fight, and introduced her to baseball, basketball and boating. On her 16th birthday, she got a pool table. Then there was the souped-up 1950 Ford coupe and the Austin Healy Sprite she raced as a teen-ager.

Married at 18, she worked various jobs while daughter Dawn was growing up. She earned a brown belt in karate but never boxed.

Going to see fights in Atlantic City casinos in the 1980s, she noticed two things: the boxers were mismatched and no local fighters were on the cards.

So she decided to try her hand at promoting. How tough could it be?

Very tough--especially for a neophyte, or someone living in Vineland, N.J., a rural southern New Jersey farming community, or a woman. And she was all three.

“There’s no school for this,” Fischer said. “I couldn’t call up Don King and say ‘How do you become a promoter?’ So I learned as I went.”

At first, it was women’s boxing, a novelty act for the undercards of men’s matches. The next year, she staged an all-women’s fight card at Tropicana Casino Resort with fighters Dora “The Destroyer” Webber, Eva “Black Magic” Young and Vienna “The Stalker” Williams.

Now, her Dee Lee Promotions has 16 fighters under contract--14 men and two women. Though she mainly promotes men, she includes at least one women’s bout on every card.

She turns the tables on convention whenever she gets a chance. Instead of hiring young female models to do the job, Fischer’s fights have “round card guys.”

Last weekend, she used Carlo Maiorano, the muscle-bound 29-year-old son of a friend, as the round card guy for a 10-round featherweight fight between Kelsey Jeffries and Alisa Ashley.

Wearing camouflage pants, combat boots, a baseball cap turned backward, no shirt and a temporary Dee Lee Boxing tattoo on his back, he strutted around the ring, eliciting boos from the crowd in the Bally’s Atlantic City ballroom.

The night’s first two bouts were solid, well-matched fights, prompting a fan to yell out to Fischer from his seat. “Hey that’s some pretty fancy matchmaking, Diane,” the man said.

She is increasingly gaining respect.

“It’s been tough for her,” said Larry Hazzard, New Jersey’s boxing commissioner. “There have been obstacles put in her way, intentionally. Doors have been opened to other promoters that have been closed to her. But with all she’s had to endure, she’s starting to come around. Now, she’s got the connections. Fighters are beginning to look her way.”

Philadelphia boxing promoter Russell Peltz said Fischer won’t make it big until she signs big-name fighters, which in turn will lead to TV coverage of her events.

“She’s scrappy,” he said. “She doesn’t let hard times deter her. I told her years ago it would really be tough for her, not because she’s a woman but because it’s so tough to get TV dates. But she’s persevered. She’s hung in there.”

Fischer doesn’t blame her struggles on sexism.

“You can only put on the fights you can put on. I can’t offer Tyson or Lennox Lewis,” she said. “But the guys I put on are good fighters. I hear my fans walking out saying, ‘That was a good fight.’

“You can’t tell me I’m not going to put shows on. I may not make any money at it, but my fighters are fighting. I’ve never once thought about giving it up,” she said. The 81-year-old father who inspired her now sits in the seats at her fights, thrilled at what she has become.

“You ain’t kidding, I’m proud of her,” Jack Trevethan said. “I can’t brag about her, but she’s done pretty good.”