One in a Million

She scares me.

She’s cuddled up against the wall of a quaint Fairfax bakery, eating chicken salad, staring up with eyes like chocolate croissants, and it’s completely embarrassing but absolutely true.

Lucia Rijker scares me.

“I do what?” she says softly.

Oh, but she knows. She has to know.

This is the woman who knocked Hilary Swank into an Academy Award, who slugged Clint Eastwood into immortality, who punched stunned moviegoers into shouting invectives scattered across theaters like old popcorn.

In “Million Dollar Baby,” she was the two-cent thug.

In the movie of the year, the bad guy was this girl.

“Watching the film for the first time, I was sitting in the back and cheering for myself, then I stopped,” she says. “Because all around me, everyone was pointing at the screen shouting, ‘You bleep!’ ”

Maybe it was her endless dark stare. Maybe it was the sweat glistening off her cornrows, dripping into her scowl.

Or maybe it was just those three stinking sucker punches.

Billie the Blue Bear, dropping Maggie Fitzgerald’s head across a stool, paralyzing her, freezing us, and how can anyone ever forgive that?

“At first, during the filming, I tried to hold back,” she says. “But then, you know, I didn’t.”

Whatever we saw, it was more real than anyone imagined. Rijker is actually a fighter, one of the three best in the world, unbeaten in 17 bouts and fighting renowned Christy Martin on July 30 in Las Vegas for a true million bucks.

The wiseacre promoters are calling it the “Million Dollar Lady” fight.

But, no joke, it will be the richest hour in the history of women’s athletics.

And I’m not kidding when I tell Lucia Rijker that she will enter the ring as the most feared woman in the land.

“Oh, really?” she says, and gives me this stare.

It’s the same stares she gives later when, in an attempt to avoid an unwarranted kidney shot, I compliment her chicken salad.

She holds up a crispy, sauce-stained noodle.

“I’ll give you this,” she says plainly, “if you don’t tell the gym story.”

I say nothing. She gives me the noodle anyway.

She says she hates this story, but, down deep, she loves it, and I must tell it.

*

A couple of months ago, in a local L.A. hotbox, Rijker walks inside to train.

She’s 37, she’s 5 feet 6, 140 pounds, her hair is knotted to her scalp. She could be just another funky fighter.

But she’s a champion in some circles, and it’s her turn to spar, so she drops her music into the CD player.

It’s Brooke Valentine singing, “Girlfight:”

“We bout to throw dem bows. “We bout to swang dem thangs.

“There’s about to be a what? Girlfight!”

Two male boxers ask her to turn the music down. She does.

Then they ask her to turn it lower. She doesn’t.

They approach her, she refuses to budge, and here comes Billie the Blue Bear.

“This is my hour!” she screams at them. “This is not right! If I were a male champion, you would never do this!”

Then, as if to prove her right, they grab her.

The two men hold one arm each while a third man steps in front and punches her in the head.

“Then,” she recalls softly, “I lost it.”

She breaks free and jumps on the attacker and knocks him to the canvas and whales away with dem bows and dem thangs and whatever.

And today she trains at another gym.

“In the world of animality, only the strong survive,” she says. “It’s the same with women as it is with men. That’s what I’m about.”

I tell her I don’t think “animality” is a word.

“Yes it is,” she says, eyes narrowing.

I promise to check a dictionary and expose her as a female Don King.

“Go ahead,” she says.

So I do, and she’s right. It’s a word, a noun, used perfectly, and now I’m really scared.

*

Without the cameras, without the makeup, without Clint, can Lucia Rijker really fight?

“Put it this way,” boxing historian Bert Sugar says. “She’s better than any of the male heavyweights.”

Sugar doesn’t like women’s boxing.

“To me, most women fighters look like they’re going down in quicksand while swinging pots and pans,” he says.

But Rijker, he admits, is no circus act.

“She can fight as we know it ... and as John Ruiz does not know it,” he says.

Of course, he wouldn’t want to say otherwise to her face.

“The whole thesis of this fight is that they have Hollywood-ized Lucia into a very scary person,” he says.

See?

Rijker still claims she doesn’t understand.

“Women have always sold out, given in to intimidation, ‘It’s OK, I’m OK, I’ll be OK,’ ” she says. “My only message is, you don’t have to be that way.”

But do you have to spar with your boyfriend on Christmas and wind up eating dinner with two black eyes?

“Yeah, try explaining that to your mom,” she says.

Do you have to punch the entertainment reporter on the red carpet of an awards show after he playfully puts his fist to your chin?

“It was just instinct, you know?” she says. “I cracked him full in the stomach. I could feel my fist go all the way to his spine.”

And what about Christy Martin, long regarded as one of the three best female fighters in the world, with Rijker and Laila Ali?

Couldn’t you have waited until the end of this month to officially slug her?

“That’s another story I don’t like to tell,” she says, but she does.

Several years ago, Martin was at a local gym, speaking at a news conference promoting her appearance on the undercard of a King bout.

Rijker had heard that Martin was ripping her in the media, so she showed up and stepped in front of Martin as she was crossing the room.

“I wanted her to say those things to me, person to person,” she says. “I think that’s reasonable.”

Martin began cursing Rijker, then tried to choke her, and here came the Million-Dollar Crazy, knocking Martin to the floor and pounding her and two bodyguards before she was finally pulled away.

It was the sort of rage she once felt as a young kickboxer from a cramped neighborhood in the Netherlands.

It was the rage built up in years of dressing in storage rooms and washing in sinks and fighting for pennies in front of guys who just wanted her to take off her shirt.

When she and Martin were finally separated, the news conference having been disrupted beyond repair, King angrily approached her.

“You knew what you were doing,” he said.

“You’re right,” she replied.

And so the two women meet again, this time for more than sport, for $250,000 guaranteed each, with $750,000 going to the winner, a knockout night that should rise above novelty.

It will sell, not because the women are centerfolds.

It will sell, not because the women are freaks.

It will sell because the women are not afraid to be boxers, and these boxers are not afraid to be themselves.

It will sell because, during some of the most excruciating moments of last year’s most celebrated film, Lucia Rijker was not acting.

I tell her again that she scares me.

For the first time in the interview, she smiles.

“I know.”

*

* Undefeated in 17 professional bouts, 14 by knockout in a nine-year career.

* Was 36-0 (25 by knockout) as a kick boxer, and won four world titles before boxing.

* Played “Billie the Blue Bear” in Academy Award-winning movie “Million Dollar Baby.”

* Fighting Christy Martin on July 30 in Las Vegas for a $1-million purse.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.