THE REPORTER
Summer 1998

The "Zion Lion" Roars
Meet Boxing Champ Jill Matthews

by Naomi Fein

The surprise is that she's a glamourpuss. A honey-blonde, perfectly coifed mane of hair, eyes lined lightly in black. The face is strong: great cheekbones, Roman nose, curvy mouth, full lower lip. She is 34, small (5' 3") and lean. A young PR woman describes her, in bubbly amazement, as "a tiny little thing." Maybe she didn't notice that the tiny little thing has a pugnacious jaw, and muscles so well defined that gym rats would call her "ultra ripped." "I was never a girl," Jill Matthews explains in her husky-voiced, non-stopNew York-speak. "I've had people say I'm a freak - I mean, I could go chin-up to chin-up with any guy."
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."

Jill is hardly the first Jew to throw a professional punch. While few
people remember Daniel Mendoza, Abe Belasco and Dutch Sam, outstanding Jewish boxers in early 19th century England, the early 1900s could be called a "Golden Age of Jewish Boxing" in America, with such legends as Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, Max Baer and "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom dominating the square ring. Twenty-six Jews held world championships in boxing from 1910 to 1940, and it was even Jew v. Jew for a world title 10 times from 1905 to 1934. According to Allen Bodner, author of When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport, fully one third of all fighters boxing in the 1920s and '30s were Jewish, and there were at least as many rabid fans among our people to match.

These men boxed their way out of immigrant poverty and Depression. "They could fight and make 40 bucks while their fathers worked four weeks for $40," Bodner has said. "For Jews, like other [second-generation
immigrants], it was a way to make very good money." Though the heyday of Jewish boxing passed as other educational and economic opportunities came along, Jill Matthews is well aware of this legacy. She is its next chapter.

Jill and her older brother were hyperactive, difficult kids. A doctor
recommended medication years before it was the hip Rx. "I'm not putting
them on medication," Jill quotes her mother as saying. "They're impossible, they fight, but I'm not putting them on medication."

Instead, Mrs. Matthews put Jill into gymnastics. Just as boxing is now the
crucible for her ferocious energy, from the age of 10 through her teen
years, Jill's entire focus was gymnastics.

She went to local public schools and graduated from the High School of Art & Design with an education in art but "virtually illiterate" academically,
she says. Still, she received a gymnastics scholarship to Southern
Connecticut State College, so off she went - the first member of her family
to go to college. Midway through her freshman year, Jill quit gymnastics.
And lost her whole world. She became bulimic.

Jill called her mother and said, "I'm really sick." Her mother said, "Come
home, take a hairdressing course." Jill wasn't thrilled by the suggestion:
"Hair? Hair?" Jill says. "I mean, I had these dreams and ... hair?" She
returned home to a hairdressing course and an otherwise nightmarish
existence.

"Then I started to think, I'm up every single night, eating and puking.
I've got seven extra hours that nobody has, that extra time that you always
pray for, right? I could learn something." She took guitar lessons.
Eventually, encouraged by her boyfriend, a punk bass guitarist, she got a
job in a band. She was shy then, playing hunched up in a corner. After a
while, she stopped being so shy, and began to write her own tunes. When she had about a dozen, Jill Matthews started her own band.

But Jill does not rest easy with unfinished business. A psychotherapist she was seeing realized that Jill really wanted to finish college and urged her on. Donna Shalala, then head of Hunter College and a client of her
stepfather's, gave her a leg-up. Jill Matthews, academically "illiterate,"
enrolled at Hunter.

Her bulimia had run its course. At Hunter, she began to turn food from a
negative force into a positive body of knowledge, and headed, logically,
for a degree in nutrition. Step by small step, taking elemental work in
science and only a couple of courses a semester, Jill got her degree in 15
years. She intends someday to apply this educational training to sports,
particularly to the special nutritional needs of women athletes.

She met David, a punk rock drummer, in a scummy East Village bar, "the kind of place your mother says you'll never meet a nice Jewish boy." After a few minutes of initial flirtation, a man she knew took her aside: "In case
you're going to get serious about him, his real last name's Turetsky and
his father's a rabbi."

Five years ago, David's father married them at Temple Israel in White
Plains, N.Y. David went on to law school at Cardozo and is now a labor
lawyer, as well as the drummer ("My husband is the best drummer ever") in Jill's punk band, Times Square. (Her ex-boyfriend is the bass player: "It's just like a family on stage.") David is also Jill's boxing manager. He does not wear his earring to his law office.

Back in Atlantic City, the showroom at the Tropicana is full of smoke,
sweat and flashy clothes and jewelry on bulging male bodies. Jill's mother, who supports her unconventional daughter (but thought it would also be okay for Jill to quit after the Golden Gloves), may be here in the crowd, but if she is, Jill doesn't know, doesn't want to know. Under the show lights, the blue ring is the center of her universe.

Downstairs in the dressing room before the fight, Jill is surrounded by her
crew. Their arms encircle her; they say a prayer. Until now, until this
group formed, she never really had people she, as a professional, could
look up to, trust. Lennox took her from nowhere, motivated her, brought her here. She is hugely, emotionally grateful.

Upstairs, now, to the 10-round fight. Jill's energy is a rocket. At the
bell, she charges into the ring pumping her red gloves, punching fast,
constantly, for the full two minutes. This isn't like male fighting at all,
where the violence can be repulsive. These women, these athletes, are
faster, more resilient than men and absolutely riveting.

David stays outside the ring, just under Jill's corner. He won't worry when
she's hit, except maybe to think, "Woo, she might be cut." David
understands the animal in her. Even if she gets knocked down, she'll just
rest on a knee for a few seconds and get back up. It's part of the rhythm
of a round.

At the bell, she looks pounded and exhausted but does a strut to her corner chair. Her face is scary, distorted by a mouth protector, glistening with sweat and water, blooming with marks that will become bruises, cuts that bleed until Reggie stanches them. You're not sure she'll make it through. But in the corner, she says, "They pour water on you" - you can see the steam coming off her body - "they yell at you, they save you. 'Get it together!'" Green, her sparring partner, screams at her so loudly he'll have laryngitis after this fight. Jill has an exquisite grasp of her own stamina, knows that after 40 seconds, she'll be okay. After a minute, she charges out again to fight. The audience is yelling, "ZI-ON! ZI-ON!" and "ASSASSIN!"

Jill and Anissa go the full 10 rounds, embrace. Suddenly there's a crowd inthe ring, photographers circling, a lot of hugging. Tense time passes
before the decision is announced.

It is the ultimate movie moment: Jill Matthews wins. A burst of ecstasy,
screaming. She hops onto her corner chair, her arms lifted to the lights,
the fans. And then, in witty bravura, she pounds her chest with her gloves.
Back in the ring, she is bedecked in the heavy, gilded, mirrored
championship belts of two boxing federations. She is so small and lean, the belts cover her entire torso.

Down in the dressing room, Jill is super high, bouncing all over the place,
yammering, hugging her crew over and over. "I'm so happy for you," she
tells them. "I wanted to win for you; I didn't want to waste your time."
Jill "The Zion Lion" Matthews never wastes anybody's time.

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Naomi Fein lives in New York and writes frequently about sports.

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