In or out of the ring, get used to seeing Melissa Hernandez The Glassjaw Chronicles Thomas Gerbasi (Sept 2, 2008) Send this page to friend Give us your feedback 11 pro fights…Bouts against five current or former world champions…Two world championships. As Melissa Hernandez has been told more than once, if she was a man, she would be a millionaire. But she’s not. Instead, she makes her real money training other pros as well as white collar boxers, and takes the train from the Bronx to Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn every day to perfect her craft in a game she loves but that hasn’t started loving her back yet. “Every morning when I’m on the train, I think ‘no one here around me knows that I’m a two-time world champion, and they don’t care.’ To them I’m just a short little Spanish woman taking up a seat.” She laughs at her predicament, and if she’s harboring any doom and gloom about being a world champion still making $5,000 for a title fight and having to be buried on a card where she may very well be the most talented fighter, you don’t hear it in her voice or get a sense of it in her personality. Like any New Yorker worth his or her salt, she talks a million miles an hour, has no filter on that mouth, and in the end, is instantly likeable. And she has to be, considering that she has triple duty to pull this week before her Friday bout in Primm, Nevada against Ela Nunez (8-3, 2 KOs). Not only is she fighting for her third world title belt (the vacant WIBA super featherweight crown), but she is managing herself and doing publicity as well. “The worst part’s the week before the fight,” she said of her all-encompassing fight career. “I don’t really want to snap at anyone – I’m hungry, I’m training, but I still have to be a businesswoman, so it’s pretty difficult.” Hernandez isn’t the first fighter – male or female – to be forced into such a predicament, but when you run into someone as marketable and talented as this 28-year old, it still makes you shake your head and realize why boxing is where it’s at today. She’s no babe in the woods when it comes to the fight game though, getting a crash course in reality from the moment she met former world champion Ada Velez and longtime standout Belinda Laracuente at the 2003 National Amateur Championships. “I met Belinda at the USA Nationals,” Hernandez recalled. “I had only one fight and that was when I fought Jill Emery at the (NY) Golden Gloves and I lost. Her and Ada Velez took me and said ‘we’ll teach you how to box, but we’ll tell you one thing – keep your day job.’ And Belinda’s always told me ‘don’t think you’re gonna make money. Do this because you love it.’ She does it because she loves it, and she doesn’t care if she loses because she loves being in the ring. She passed that on to me where it became a love for the sport. It’s like when people go running – they’re not gonna make money or find $20 running across the bridge, but they do it because they love it.” If anyone would be a cautionary tale for Hernandez, it would be Laracuente, who first burst on the scene in 2000 with a controversial loss to Christy Martin on the Felix Trinidad-David Reid pay-per-view card. The bout against female boxing’s reigning queen should have been the start of something big. It wasn’t. There would be no rematch with Martin, and while Laracuente has consistently fought the best in the game over the ensuing eight years, she has lost most of those fights and now does it – as Hernandez – simply for the love of the game. So when Hernandez returned to New York after the 2003 Nationals and went on to take the 2004 PAL Nationals as well as the 2004 and 2005 New York Golden Gloves, she wasn’t expecting to follow on the road that her fellow Glovers – Jaidon Codrington, Joe Greene, Danny Jacobs, and Jorge Teron – were taking. But she did hope for some interest. “It’s the most frustrating part of being a boxer, and just being me in general,” she said. “After I had won the Golden Gloves I had thought ‘oh, Lou DiBella’s sitting in the audience, Main Events is there;’ everybody is there, but they’re not paying attention to the women’s fights. Everybody was paying attention to Hilary Swank going up to Maureen Shea, so that didn’t make sense to me.” There were no promotional offers, and any management offers came from folks she terms “a bunch of slimeballs,” so Hernandez dusted herself off and went into business for herself, making her pro debut in October of 2006 with a four round win over Zhang Mao Mao. “I pretty much did everything by myself,” she concedes. “Before I boxed, I was the manager of a retail store, had done a couple of things with film and video, so I knew how to talk to people and get connections.” Since that debut, to say Hernandez has been on the fast track would be an understatement. In fact, her managerial style brings to mind that exchange in 1970 when former heavyweight champion Sonny Liston was asked if Chuck Wepner was the bravest man he ever met after he stopped the ‘Bayonne Bleeder’ in the tenth round. ‘No,’ replied Liston, ‘his manager is.’ And Hernandez the manager is giving no cupcakes to Hernandez the fighter. Only two of her fights have been against boxers with losing records, her fourth fight was a ten round draw with 42 fight vet Kelsey Jeffries, and from the time of her 2006 win over Lisa Brown to her June stoppage of Missy Fiorentino, she has fought five straight bouts against world champions (winning all but one of those fights). Ask the average boxing fan who Hernandez is though, and you may get a blank stare. Then again, ask them about any female fighter these days and you’ll probably get the same look. “We don’t have any real heroes anymore,” said Hernandez, 8-1-2 with 3 KOs. “Our hero right now is Holly Holm, and to me, she’s not marketable in the boxing sense. She’s tall, she’s beautiful, and she’s an aerobic instructor – that’s all I see her as. In the ring, she kinda lets everyone down. That’s what happened when she fought (Mary Jo) Sanders (in June). I already knew it was gonna be a snoozer because you had two hyped-up women that fought everybody at three weight classes below them. So what I’m trying to do is bring something new to this to say not only can the guys do this, but the women can do it too.” And Hernandez has the tools to get people excited about women’s boxing again. Think of a pre-Edwin Rosario Hector Camacho, and you’ve got an idea of what she can do in the ring. Plus, she’s not afraid to throw down if she has to, and when it comes to selling a fight, she can do it with the best of them. But for all her positives, none of it matters if no one will take a chance to put her on a big card or on television. And when it comes to the financial end of things, how can any fighter dedicate their lives to the sport when the pay is so low? “I think women need to start getting paid a little bit more, because right now, $5,000 seems to be what everyone thinks women should get paid for title fights,” said Hernandez. “That is our limit. It’s like any promoter you speak to, they’re like ‘oh yeah, title fight, we’ll give ‘em five grand.’ And it’s not the 90’s anymore. The women need money and I think it will bring a lot of women back into caring about this, because right now you’ve got them just fighting from check to check. Layla McCarter is fighting every month, and I just got called out by her, and I’m just like ‘you’re probably just pissed off because you can’t pay your rent this month.’ If I was just in this to pay my rent, I wouldn’t be in there with Chevelle (Hallback) or Layla. I would be taking the tomato cans like Maureen (Shea) does; I’d take that route. I just believe we need more purse money and more TV exposure. Any man I speak to says ‘I love when the women come on. It’s so exciting.’ The men are becoming a little too prancy, and every guy wants to be Floyd Mayweather at this point. Talent is being left out the door – it’s all about marketing – and this is probably the reason why MMA is taking over, because boxing is forgetting about the general audience. Not everybody reads MaxBoxing, Fightnews, or the WBAN; the regular population wants to see two people go at it, and they’re the people who buy the tickets.” So with fighting full-time becoming an increasingly frustrating endeavor for Hernandez, she has flirted with the idea of walking away from it. “I’ve been considering retiring for about a year now because I’ve just put so much more effort into training people,” she said. “I just made Ann-Marie (Saccurato) a WBC champion again, and there’s so much satisfaction sitting outside because I can actually give more. But these fights come up, people call me a punk, and I’m still young. (Laughs) I was born in Puerto Rico and I come from the South Bronx – you can’t call me a punk and walk away from it. I have to hit you.” Just like that, all the frustration falls to the side and Hernandez has the love for the game back, and she realizes all over again why she does it. “You know how when you’re six, seven years old, and your teacher asks you ‘what do you want to do for the rest of your life?’” she asks. “And all the kids go pizza maker and toy maker? One day, I turned 25, and realized that I loved what I did, and I decided to turn pro. I know I’m not gonna make money, but I can get up every day and say ‘I love my job.’” “I have to be realistic about it,” she continues, “because when I was doing film and video and I was editing and doing all this cool stuff, I knew I wasn’t going to make any money as an artist, so I got used to it. (Laughs) I said I’m going to make money at my night job, which was being a retail manager. But I still got up every morning and I edited my videos, and painted and did everything that I love.” And she still does it, hopping on the train every day to gear up and fight or to teach others to fight. On Friday, she’ll look for a third world title and then see where boxing will take her. Again, if she was a man, a third world title would most likely mean millions; but she refuses to be brought down by those types of negative thoughts. She’s in this game for the long haul – whether it’s in or out of the ring. “Hopefully all the experience I’m getting now and all the networking I’m doing will maybe get me a job working for Gary Shaw or Lou DiBella, doing matchmaking, production, or working behind the scenes,” said Hernandez. “I know the game, and that’s one thing that makes a lot of male promoters not want to mess with me. They look at me and say ‘she’s not dumb; she’s not one of these regular old, fat white guys who manage boxers. They know what she’s talking about because she’s in there.’ Boxing is something I want to do, and I see myself in this for a long time.” Now available, Thomas Gerbasi’s latest boxing compilation: Fightin’ to Writin’ – More Ring Ramblings. For more information, click here http://www.amazon.com/Fightin-Writin-More-Ring-Ramblings/dp/0595486665/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF 8&s=books&qid=1202272469&sr=8-12 Discuss this Topic - Go to the forums E-Mail Thomas Gerbasi at tgerbasi@mindspring.com or visit www.myspace.com/gerbasi