by Naomi Fein

Her ring moniker, "The Zion Lion," tells you much: Jill Matthews is a boxer and a Jew.

Saturday night, March 21. On this stormy night in Atlantic City, the Tropicana Hotel marquee proclaims the main event, Matthews v. Zamarron, a world championship boxing rematch. The whole scene swells like a movie drama. Here's its background:

Matthews and Zamarron have fought twice before. The first bout, in 1995, was Jill's debut professional fight. She had no thought then of making a career of boxing. She had gotten into it because she loved watching the sport and sensed it would be a healthy outlet for her fierce energy. She'd won the first women's Golden Gloves earlier that year, had been snapped up by a pro manager and was figuring on one professional fight, just to say she had done it. A kick.

Everything went wrong. "I hadn't really trained as a boxer; I had a schlock trainer," Jill says. "You name it - disaster. I got all freaked out, got cut in the first round; they said my eye was cut open." She says she started thinking, "What does that mean? Is my eyeball hanging out?"

"The first thing as a female, maybe more than a male, is you want to look in a mirror to see how bad you're cut," she says. It was somewhat distracting. She lost.

Jill was ready to quit. "It was disgusting," she thought. "I had had enough." But then she overheard Zamarron's trainer brag, "You're going to see a lot of Zamarron, she's world class." This bothered Jill. She hadn't been so impressed with Zamarron; it was she herself who just hadn't been adequate. "I was inexperienced," she says now, analytically, "not a boxer."

That was Saturday night. On Monday, Jill Matthews went back to the gym and said, "Now I'm really going to take this seriously."

Enter Lennox Blackmoore, a boxing champion in his native Guyana and now a top trainer at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. He was willing to take on Jill, his sole woman boxer. The crew formed: Jill's husband David Turetsky as manager, Darnell Green as sparring partner, Reggie Ford as cut man.

In January 1998 Jill Matthews faced Anissa "The Assassin" Zamarron for the second time. They fought to a draw.

Jill lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a sunlit apartment with sensational views of the Hudson River. In the front hallway you pass a hairdresser's chair, tool of one of her numerous professions. "Everybody thinks all these chotchkes are my idea," she laughs, waving her hand over the books and funky statue collections on the shelves, "but this is all David." Here, at home, Jill Matthews, New York street kid, is generous, funny, utterly open.

Her daily schedule is organized to the minute: meticulously nutritional breakfast, four-mile run in the park, shower, more food, subway to gym, training, subway home, bath, food, private hairdressing either at home or at clients' homes, home by 9 p.m. So much energy sparks from her, she's like a motion picture special effect, exhilarating to be around. If you have a thousand questions, she has ten thousand answers.

She was born Jill Herman, and spent her earliest years a few blocks from her current home. When she was 4, the family moved to Chelsea. Her parents divorced and her mother remarried a hairdresser, a good man who really raised Jill. Matthews is her stepfather's name but "With Matthews, no one would know I was Jewish," Jill explains, "so that's why I use 'The ZionLion.'"

It is important to Jill that she be known as Jewish. "I think a problem with Jews today is that they don't realize the degree of anti-Semitism. You know how I know? Because no one ever thinks I'm Jewish. I'm the fly on the wall. I constantly get, 'You know how those Jews are.' And I say, 'Yeah, I know, I'm one of them.'" A common reaction is, "You don't look like a Jew." Jill's response? "Oh really? Well, I wear this hat to cover my horns."