Long before there was a Katie Taylor and an Amanda Serrano, there was Christy Martin. While Martin may not have been the first female boxer, she was the first to gain widespread exposure. Her siege of knockouts and high-octane fights caught the eyes of legendary promoter Don King, and then heavyweight champ Mike Tyson.
King and Tyson added Martin to the undercard of a Tyson title fight, and Martin and Dana Gogerty all but stole the show, with a wildly entertaining, all-action close decision bout in favor of Martin. The next week, Christy Martin was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the first female boxer to earn the honor.
Behind the scenes though, Martin’s life was anything but grand. Her marriage of convenience to her trainer Jim Martin was sometimes physically abusive, and almost always emotionally abusive. She also stayed in the ring for longer than she should have (1989-2012). If you’ve seen the Netflix documentary on Martin’s life and championship boxing career Untold: Deal With the Devil, you may already know about the pressure she was under to please Jim, to stay safe, suppress her true sexuality, and hold up women’s boxing on her shoulders.
It’s been long in the making, but later this year, Martin’s life will be told in narrative form with newly-minted A-lister Sydney Sweeney playing Martin in a feature film. In our conversation, Christy and I discuss her past, the documentary (which is currently available on Netflix), and her hopes for Sweeney and the film to reach a large audience.
FightsATW: This is going to be a big year for “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” with Sydney Sweeney playing you in a biopic before the year’s end.
Christy Martin: I just saw in Variety’s online magazine their list of fifty most anticipated movies for 2025. We were number six. Sydney Sweeney is getting Oscar talk ahead of some really well-known people, including Julia Roberts.
FightsATW: As someone who has followed boxing for a long time, I was aware of your rise, and I saw you fight on TV many times, but when I watched the documentary about you on Netflix, Untold: Deal With the Devil, I thought it was a good documentary, but I also felt like there was so much more to tell. Untold is only 78 minutes long. Your life has been more than dramatic enough to earn a full-length narrative feature.
Christy Martin: Yes. A lot of crazy sh*t. (Laughs).
FightsATW: On one hand, you essentially held up the credibility of women’s boxing almost entirely by yourself for a long time. And that is a burden of its own. But underneath that, you also had the situation with your husband, Jim, who was your trainer and was abusive to you. You both were abusing drugs, and I’m sure, for you, in part, to tolerate what you were going through. You were also suppressing your sexuality. That is a lot to carry, to say the least. What was it like for you day-by-day, dealing with the abuse and also pretending to be someone you weren’t?
Christy Martin: Christy Martin and Christy Salters (maiden name) are two different people for sure. We hear athletes talk in the third person, and that drives me crazy, but the truth is, I do think, as an athlete, you create this persona that is not really who you are. That was Christy Martin—a very arrogant asshole athlete, and me—Christy Salters is very shy, very insecure. I don’t believe in me. So it was like the extreme opposite. Even today, I’m like, oh my God, I need to be a little more like her. I need to be like Christy Martin and be more confident to get this done. I have drive. I work my butt off. But, believing that I’m going to be successful and believing in myself, I have a hard time. There were a lot of struggles. There was the struggle with Jim. It wasn’t physical many times, but it was very controlling, very isolating. Any time something positive happened, and I was full of myself and excited, he would find some way to bring me down.
Being on the cover of Sports Illustrated is an awesome feat for most athletes. Just getting on the cover once.. There are not many Michael Jordans or Muhammad Alis that are on the covers of magazines time and time again. Jim tried to tell me how he had made that happen. He had created that. He had pulled strings. Look, Jim Martin didn’t have enough power to pull any strings to get me on the cover of Sports Illustrated. I got on the cover of Sports Illustrated because Dierdre Gogarty and I put on a hell of a fight, and the fight fans went nuts. They were there to see Mike Tyson. We just got a blessing from being part of that Mike Tyson/Don King show. There were so many different battles. Like with my sexuality, if I stepped out of Jim’s line, he would threaten to tell people that I had girlfriends. There were a lot of things. As I always say, in front of the camera, I had a big smile and seemed as if I was on top of the world. Behind the camera, I felt like the world was on top of me.
FightsATW: Muhammad Ali, if we think of when he fought George Foreman and Joe Frazier, he used their appearance and their race against them, even though he was a black man and they were black men. And you, even though you were and are a lesbian, would sometimes use another woman’s lack of feminine appearance against them. Do you look back on that with regret?
Christy Martin: Jim told me you have to say this. We would argue and argue, and then finally, you pick your battles, and it was a lesser battle for me just to go out there and say whatever he was telling me that I had to say than to go back and battle with him, especially when it’s fight time. I don’t want to be in a battle with him. I need my mind focused on what I need to do. So I would tell him that this is going to come back and bite you or me in the butt, because somebody is going to hear me say something. Next thing, there’s going to be a picture, there’s going to be something, someone’s going to make a statement, there’s going to be something that comes out. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. After being shot, I had people reach out to me and say we could have said something, but we didn’t. Absolutely, you could have, and you know what, you probably should have, but I appreciate the fact that you didn’t. It would’ve made it much harder on me.
FightsATW: It was a much different time then. I remember when Martina Navratilova was playing tennis. Her girlfriend would be in the stands, and the announcer would always refer to that person as her “friend.” I recall thinking, “That’s more than her friend.” Even for somebody at the peak of their sport, to be out at that time would be perilous.
Christy Martin: And he would always remind me that if the boxing world finds out that you’re a lesbian, they’re going to all turn against you. I believed him, and you know what, maybe in the nineties they would have. After 2010, I’m sure when I leave the room, there are people saying things, but that’s just how people are, unfortunately, but I have felt very welcome in conversations. It doesn’t seem like my sexuality is even a thought in most people’s minds.
FightsATW: We’ve just seen that change over time, and I imagine it makes you feel more free.
Christy Martin: It’s much better to be me. Again, whether that’s saying what I feel or acting how I feel, I’m 56 now and more comfortable in my own skin all the way around.
FightsATW: You mentioned that you were fighting on the Mike Tyson undercard promoted by Don King. You and Gogarty were the first women to fight on such a big card. What in the world is Don King really like?
Christy Martin: Don King is Don King. In front of the camera, it’s the big smile and being very loud, but when it’s time to sit across the table and negotiate or talk over a deal, it’s a whole different Don King. It’s a normal voice, but very authoritative, very strong. The worst place to be is on his playing field when he wants to see you in his office. You’re like “Oh sh*t”. But it was a great fit for me to be with Don King because he did create Christy Martin. He would continually tell me to go out there and tell them how you’re going to knock them out, Christy. Go tell them what you’re going to do to them, and so I did. And it became part of me. It was fun to me. I liked the whole smack and the shit talk and all that. I liked it. I’ve always been an athlete and a competitor. I liked letting them know what was coming.
FightsATW: For everything people can say about Don King, no one can ever say he didn’t know how to put on a show. Mike Tyson also took an interest in you. You see that in Untold, which shows that he had some sway with Don. Did you spend much time around Mike? He was at his pinnacle at that time.
Christy Martin: At any time, Mike Tyson could have told Don King, I don’t want her on my shows. Because after the first fight with Gogarty, people said, “Ah, Mike, Christy stole the show from you.” He was fine with it, and that was great because there are so many guys with such big egos that there’s no way they would ever want somebody on their undercard that would get more attention or even a little bit of attention, 10 percent to their 90. But he didn’t care. He was very supportive and gave a great interview for the Netflix documentary. It’s cool to run into him sometimes at the fights. It’s fun that he appreciated my help on the shows, and I appreciated him giving me the opportunity. As I always tell everybody, people came in to see him; I just got them warmed up.
FightsATW: I want to switch gears to the film now. When were you approached about doing it? Has this film been in the works for a long time?
Christy Martin: I signed the original movie deal in 2011. And it’s been one thing after another, up and down. You get really excited, you think something’s going to happen, and then nothing. I had gotten to the place where I wasn’t thinking about it anymore, believing it would never happen. When I got a call that Sydney Sweeney might play me, I was like, wow. But again, because it had gone up and down so many times and not materialized, I thought, alright, this is another one of those ups. But it happened. It’s done. She kicked ass. She went to the gym. She learned how to box. She actually had some MMA experience that I don’t think people know about from when she was younger. It’s exciting that it’s finally going to happen with someone as big as Sydney Sweeney portraying me, somebody who cared so much about the role.
FightsATW: One of the things that would be very important about this role is being able to sell the physicality. She is a person who looks like they could add muscle and be physically strong enough on screen. She could be tiny for all I know, but filmmakers have ways of fooling us about size. She looks like she could be convincing as a boxer.
Christy Martin: She’s tiny. So she did some eating, and she added some weight. She went to the gym, hit the weight room hard, and put on some muscle. I told her she was going to hate me when it was over because now she was going to be stuck with this weight. You’ve seen pictures, I’m sure, of her recently, and the weight came right off. I don’t think she ever really put as much weight on as she was hoping to, but she worked hard in all aspects, the boxing aspect and understanding the domestic violence part. I haven’t seen any of the screenings or anything yet, but it’s going to reach a lot of people, a lot of groups of people. This isn’t a boxing movie, number one. That’s the most important thing. I consider myself the ultimate underdog. And look, if I can make it through boxing, then anybody out there can make it through whatever might come into their life.
FightsATW: The best boxing movies are those that aren’t about boxing. They’re about a person who happens to be a boxer. If we think of Raging Bull, and there was a great movie from last year called The Day of the Fight–the boxing is essential, but it’s the character that carries the film, so for you to say that this isn’t a boxing movie excites me even more because that means it’s about you.
Christy Martin: 100%. And I will tell you, Ben Foster, who played Jim Martin. Amazing. Amazing job. I could not speak to him or be too close to him throughout the entire filming. He was Jim Martin. And it was a little too much for me. Once it was over, I gave him the biggest hug in the world. He did a great job.
FightsATW: He is an actor known for going “all in.” He becomes the person, which I can see why that would be uncomfortable for you. You had a lot of access to the film, then. I talked to Vinnie Paz about Bleed For This, the movie that was made about his life, and he felt like he was separated from the film. The longer it shot, the less involvement he had, the less access he had. It doesn’t sound like that’s happening for you; you’re right there in the trenches.
Christy Martin: I was very fortunate with the entire group. David Michôd is a fantastic director. Mirrah Foulkes was the writer, so we were on board with her. Kerry Roberts was the producer. Everybody was very welcoming. Even the actors would come and talk to me about specific events and how this person acted or how they felt, so it was cool. It was great to be involved and to be part of it.
FightsATW: I’m sure there’s a lot that you can’t say about the film. I was wondering if you could talk about the film’s time frame. Is there a younger person playing you as a child, or does the film mostly stick with your boxing career?
Christy Martin: It’s more of the Christy that everybody knows—those years.
FightsATW: You say something in the documentary that reminded me of a scene in The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke, where at the end of the movie he’s about to go into the ring and it’s a risk to his health to do so and he says, I don’t get hurt in there. And you said in the documentary that you felt safer in the ring than anywhere else, and that was a powerful statement.
Christy Martin: In the ring, there are rules. They’re going to hit you with their fists. They’re not going to kick you. They can’t hit you behind the head. Out there in the real world, there are no rules. We like to think there are rules, but there are no rules.
FightsATW: You’re clearly feeling good about the movie. What is it like to be Christy Martin on the edge of people learning, or being reminded, of who you are and why you matter?
Christy Martin: I really haven’t thought about it. I hope that the movie takes off. I hope that in 20 years, some father sitting down with his daughter will watch this movie because this is what can happen to you. That’s what my hope for the movie is, that it reaches all these groups. That it is promoted so that people will look for it, and it will open up conversations. With the Netflix documentary, the group that I never thought I would hear from, and I had several messages from around the world—fathers. Fathers telling me thank you for this documentary, because I was able to sit down with my daughters and open up a discussion with them about domestic violence, about sexuality, about all these things. That’s what I’m hoping this movie does on the largest scale possible. And with somebody like Sydney Sweeney behind it, I think we have a real shot at it.
FightsATW: Women’s boxing has gone to a new level. It’s seen as credible now. The fact that there’s an amateur organization for women’s boxing has created more quality female boxers. If you hadn’t come along, maybe all those things would have happened, but they would have taken longer to happen, the creation of the amateur ranks, and the sport’s growth. I thought the Katie Taylor/Amanda Serrano fight was the fight of the year two years ago. It was a blast to watch. Do you feel like you get the credit you deserve for what you did in women’s boxing?
Christy Martin: I don’t know what credit I deserve because who says what you deserve? That’s a great example. Until that first fight with Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano in The Garden, Gogarty and I were the reason for women’s boxing. When that fight ended, I texted my friend Deirdre Gogarty and said we had just lost our place. (Laughs). That fight is now the most significant in women’s boxing history. Does one happen without the other? Do they ever think about “Oh, we can do this?” Will promoters give them a chance? Don King gave me a chance. Had it been some small time promoter, would women be getting a chance now?
There are still very few women getting these opportunities on big stages with big paychecks. Amanda and Katie Taylor are getting paid. I don’t know what the rest are making, but I know those two are getting paid. Taylor and Serrano always give me props. Not every fighter out there today does that. You should always think about who helped open the door for you and who helped make it a little bit easier for you to get by and do it. It wouldn’t have been so easy had you been the first one, ‘cause it wasn’t easy being the first one. And I wasn’t the first one. There were women that came before me. I was lucky enough to be the first one promoted by Don King and then get this huge exposure. But I felt like I was ready to take advantage of the opportunity, and it helped women’s boxing. It helped women’s boxing start to get established.
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