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WOMEN IN A MAN’S WORLD
Meg Ryan as Jackie Kallen, with Omar Epps as the contender.
against the ropes
MEG RYAN AND OMAR EPPS CO-STAR IN AGAINST THE ROPES, A FILM BASED ON THE TRUE STORY OF JACKIE KALLEN, ONE OF THE VERY FEW WOMEN TO MAKE IT IN THE TESTOSTERONE-HEAVY WORLD OF BOXING. HAL HAYES GOES RINGSIDE TO FIND OUT MORE.
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Watch any fight, in the flesh or on television, and you’ll probably come to three conclusions about boxing. One, it’s about a guy doing his level best to knock another one senseless. Two, there are an awful lot of rules and rituals involved, and everyone is convinced it is ‘the noble art’. Three, it attracts some pretty dodgy people.
“It’s an interesting sport,” notes actor Tim Daly, who made his screen debut in Barry Levinson’s seminal 1982 movie, Diner, and who plays sports journalist Gavin Reese in Against the Ropes, which tells a distinctly offbeat boxing story. “There’s an audience full of pretty tough individuals watching two guys duke it out, and yet everybody is wearing a tux. Go figure!” says Daly.
The next thing you are likely to notice is so obvious that few people would even bother to mention it. Notwithstanding the considerable progress made in women’s boxing over the past decade, the world of big-purse, professional title-fighting is so male-dominated that women are generally reduced to the role of eye-candy. You can see them in the front two rows, on the arms of the large men with the cigars. And they’re up there on the other side of the ropes, too, wearing a swimsuit and carrying a big number round the ring between rounds, in case the big men with cigars are having difficulty counting.
Jackie Kallen - who is played by Meg Ryan in Against the Ropes - is the exception in the world of boxing, although it’s not clear if she’s an exception that proves any rule. Kallen is an educated middle-class Jewish woman from the suburbs who took on the male-dominated boxing world of Detroit in the late eighties. Not content with simply writing about boxing - an unusual enough job for a woman (and one which would have made The Odd Couple’s Oscar choke on his cigar) - Kallen decided to manage her own fighters.
Ryan and the real-life Kallen.
“No one could figure out why a woman would want to be around all these big, sweaty, sometimes angry, sometimes prison-bound men,” recalls the real-life Kallen, who took Ryan round gyms and boxing matches to introduce the actress to the world in which she would soon have to feel at home. “What I was doing wasn’t what was expected from a white Jewish woman. But I loved my fighters; I loved the sport; and I loved the challenge of helping young men realise their dream.”
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