Sweeney, to her credit score, seems to have taken all of this on the chin (you guys can all decide her if you would like, however she doesn’t care, she has by no means, ever been happier!!!!). Her Reel, you see, cuts all of the sudden to Joey Valence & Brae-backed clips of her in a Rocky-Balboa-style coaching montage. The solely gymnasiums I’ve ever spent prolonged intervals of time in are those in Pompeii and Ephesus, so I can not describe the coaching routine she’s doing for you in a lot element; suffice to say, the vibe may be very a lot “the Grinch lifting a sleigh over his head meets Million Dollar Baby.” At one level, she flips over a tire so giant I can solely assume it was ripped from a US Army car left over from Desert Storm. In one other, she hangs the wrong way up on a machine I’m 72% positive Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele shagged on in Fifty Shades Darker.
To be clear, this isn’t pure, sweaty masochism on Sweeney’s half; it’s some type of technique performing (not that the 2 are mutually unique). Sweeney is because of play Christy Martin—whose triumphant matches had been largely answerable for taking feminine boxing mainstream—in David Michôd’s biopic of the Women’s International Boxing Federation champion subsequent yr. A coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who started doing Toughwoman contests within the ’80s, Christy was the primary girl to signal with Don King (the promoter behind Muhammad Ali’s Rumble within the Jungle), defeating Deirdre Gogarty in a pay-per-view match that overshadowed Mike Tyson v. Bruno II on the MGM Grand. When she fronted Sports Illustrated in 1996 with the duvet line “The Lady is a Champ,” the difficulty offered out all over the world.
This being a your-body-my-choice world, although, her repute right now is irrevocably certain up with the abuse she suffered by the hands of her former accomplice. In 2010, Christy almost died when her then husband and coach, Jim Martin, stabbed her repeatedly earlier than capturing her within the chest together with her personal pink-handled nine-millimeter Glock. Jim had married Christy twenty years earlier regardless of realizing, from the bounce, that she recognized as a lesbian. As she writes in her memoir, Fighting for Survival, Jim—who was 25 years her senior—incessantly used her homosexuality to manage her, threatening to “expose” her “actual” id to the general public, earlier than turning homicidal when she determined to depart him for one more girl in her 40s. Christy miraculously survived his assault—regardless of having a punctured lung and a bullet lodged in her coronary heart—with Jim sentenced to 25 years in jail for tried second-degree homicide. She’s now married to fellow skilled boxer Lisa Holewyne, having retired in 2012 earlier than being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
