These boxers show they can fight by men’s rules

NEW YORK – When Amanda Serrano trains for a championship fight, she often spars with men for at least a dozen three-minute rounds, using the standard male regulation format to push her athleticism to the edge.

But when she gets into the ring for real, the fight goes for only 10 two-minute rounds, the standard for women’s boxing.

On Friday, she competed in the first women’s title fight in 15 years that has been sanctioned under men’s rules, and only the second one ever. It was also the biggest, as title belts from three of the four major boxing sanctioning organisations were up for grabs at Caribe Royale in Orlando, Florida.

Serrano, 35, a seven-division boxing world champion and undisputed featherweight champion from Carolina, Puerto Rico beat Danila Ramos, 38, from Sao Paulo, Brazil by unanimous decision. Serrano retained her titles from the World Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Association and the International Boxing Federation.

She was quoted by ESPN as saying she “really couldn’t feel the difference”.

“In the sixth round, I was like, is it really three minutes or did they go back to two minutes?” she said.

“I felt good. I was in really good shape. I trained really hard for this fight knowing I had to go out there and prove to everybody, prove people right or prove people wrong, that women can do whatever they put their minds to.”

For Serrano, the bout was about more than stats and titles. She is seeking to change a sport that has long struggled with equity.

Male and female athletes have competed under different rules for generations. In professional basketball, women play 10-minute quarters while men play 12 minutes. In tennis, women compete in a best-of-three format during Grand Slam tournaments, while men play best-of-five sets. In boxing, 16 minutes separate the men from the women.

Serrano and other boxers say an equal playing field has been a long time coming, especially when it comes to pay.

A 12-round fight might attract a bigger audience, said Nakisa Bidarian, a co-founder of Most Valuable Productions, which promotes Serrano.

“If you put on a more exciting product,” he said. “You will get paid more.”

The Friday fight was sanctioned by the Florida Athletic Commission and three of the major boxing bodies. Bidarian said the World Boxing Commission, the fourth major agency, would never sanction a 12-round fight for women. The commission, which has cited a study that suggests women are more susceptible to concussions than men, did not respond to a request for comment.

Bidarian said he recognised longer fights increase the risk of injury, but that “this is about two professional athletes having the right to compete how they want to”.

The fight was promoted with the slogan “Our Choice”. Two dozen current and former female fighters signed a letter arguing that women should have the option to compete at 10 or 12 rounds.

Among them was Laila Ali, a former super middleweight and light heavyweight champion and daughter of Muhammad Ali. She said she always believed women should fight three-minute rounds, including during her fighting years.

“Two minutes go by really quickly,” she said. “There have been times where you’re just about to get it done and then the bell rings and you’re like, dang, if I had had another minute.”

Until men and women fight under the same rules, Laila said, real equality will be out of reach.

“As professional fighters, you want to get to a point where you no longer have to be thought of as a female fighter, you just want to be a boxer,” she said. “It really shouldn’t matter when it comes to athleticism.”

Bonnie Morris, a women’s history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that as women became more active in athletics, there were concerns about their “fragility and vulnerability to injury”, leading to the segregation of some sports by sex. That was especially true when it came to women being hit in the face, she said, “because your face is your fortune”.

But that did not stop women from entering the ring.

Women have fought three-minute rounds across the arc of boxing, said Malissa Smith, the author of A History Of Women’s Boxing. But it was not until the 2000s, as boxers like Laila and Christy Martin brought more legitimacy to the sport, that state boxing commissions began to enforce a longstanding rule calling for two-minute rounds in sanctioned women’s bouts.

They also set minimum standards for money, “which were pathetically low because they didn’t equate them to men’s fights”, Smith said.

Serrano has helped change that.

In 2022, she faced off against Katie Taylor in the first boxing match headlined by women at Madison Square Garden.

Both were guaranteed at least US$1 million (S$1.37 million), among the highest purses in women’s boxing. Serrano lost in a split decision, but she used the moment to step into the role of change-maker. NYTIMES