Alexander: Boxing changed Alicia Doyle’s life
“The only way out,” Alicia Doyle likes to say, “is through.”
In other words, straight ahead. No looking for an out or a side door. No evasive action to avoid your problems or issues or insecurities, but instead attacking them head-on.
When Doyle wrote about a boxing gym for at-risk youths in Simi Valley for the Ventura County Star in 1998, it started a journey that led her to put on the gloves herself. She fought for the better part of two years as an amateur, won Golden Gloves tournaments as a featherweight in 1999 and 2000, and turned pro for one fight in September of 2000 – an all-out battle with Lisa Valencia – before hanging them up.
But boxing was about more than winning trophies or training to get or stay in shape. It was a journey of self-examination, a process that helped her deal with other issues in her life.
Doyle, who turns 50 in May, has written and published a book about that process of discovery: “Fighting Chance,” which came out in February. Yes, it’s about boxing, and it’s about life, and maybe the words at the very top of this column sum up the relationship between the two.
If you’re dealing with demons, you eventually have to face them down, in much the same way you’ve ultimately got to stand up to that opponent in the ring whose job it is to do damage to you.
“When I was boxing I really believed that I had found a cure for all my insecurities, my anxiety, my regrets, my issues with my forgiveness or my inability to forgive,” Doyle said in a recent phone conversation. “I really thought I found a cure for all those things because I was so happy when I was competing.
“But when I retired and walked away from the ring and stopped training as well, stopped going to the boxing gym, all my issues came back in full force. And I remember it being quite heartbreaking.”
Writing the book – working off of journals she had kept while training and fighting for those two years from 1998 to 2000 – was cathartic, but it was only a step. And it was a lengthy process.
The first clue that there was a story worth telling was when Rod Holcomb, a TV and film producer who was then with Paramount, contacted Doyle shortly after her first pro fight about the possibility of making her story into a film. That planted the seed, she said, but the memories were still too fresh.
“I didn’t even realize the significance of it and what it meant to me and my life personally until all this attention was brought to me, and people were asking me questions,” she recalled.
“‘Why would a woman box? Why would a woman get involved in something so dangerous?’ You know, there are deep reasons behind it. And when they start asking me those questions, that’s when I started to really contemplate it. But it took years … years and years for me to decipher what it was all about.”
She said the early drafts were “pretty angry and forgiving,” and it took time to work through those emotions and vulnerabilities and essentially turn from therapy to storytelling.
“I knew that I had to face these demons, the darkness in my head,” she said. “I had to face it head-on. And the only way out was through. I said that a lot … I had two choices. I could just live with it and be miserable, or I could figure out a way to transcend it.”
The beginning of her boxing journey, in 1998, came at a time when Doyle was dealing directly with some of those demons – yes, they are detailed in the book – even as things looked OK from the outside. She trained and boxed while continuing to work as a reporter for the Star, and with that workload there was little time for self-pity. (Or much else, really.)
Not that those feelings didn’t occasionally resurface. In the book, Doyle related the events following her first amateur loss, when she “slipped back into old bad habits” and stopped training for a while as she questioned her commitment. As she wrote:
“The depression I grew up with bubbled to the surface, and came to a boiling point, until the pain forced me to see the truth: I didn’t believe in myself, I possessed no self-love. This had nothing to do with anyone but me. I was my own worst enemy …”
What snapped her to attention: Getting on the scale and realizing she’d gained 10 pounds through those old bad habits. It got her back to training, back to fighting, back to pursuit of a hard, hard goal.
Dredging up those memories, nearly two decades later, and recording them for the world to see was similarly the pursuit of a hard, hard goal, even for an experienced journalist. It’s one thing to record other people’s stories. It’s quite another to record your own, warts, vulnerabilities and all.
“It did make me feel better after putting it down on paper because I felt that it would inspire other people, and that was important to me,” she said. “But I’m not going to lie and say that writing the book solved all my problems. It did not. I am still triggered by memories of the past, and when I’m triggered, I just sit with it and study it in my head and ask myself what triggered me until I get through to the other side. The only way out is through.
“So that’s what brought me to finally get it down and get it out, was just wanting to figure things out for myself and in the process hopefully help other people transcend whatever they’re going through as well.”
Boxing is hard. Not everyone can do it, and very few want to. There’s a reason why one of Doyle’s former trainers, Randy Shields, pointedly told her that it was “the hurt business.”
“You’re going toe-to-toe, you’re in battle with another human being,” she said. “You’re fully aware going in that you could come out with a permanent injury. You could potentially die. Boxers die in the ring, you know. And so you’re fighting this person. You’ve trained the best you can. You know she’s been training. You don’t know how hard she’s been training. I would trust that I was always training harder than these girls. And then we battle it out.“… I looked back on my previous fights and I was known for going forward, for never backing down. But that’s because that’s what my coaches taught me. You always move forward, because it’s also a mental game as well. Somebody socks you with a five-punch combination and you’re still coming at them. It affects them mentally.”
The only way out … well, you know the rest.
Spoiler alert: She loses her last fight, her only professional bout. But there is a positive ending.
She remains a journalist to this day, writing on a freelance basis for several different publications. She also has remained involved with boxing, and before the coronavirus outbreak, she was instructing youngsters at the same Kid Gloves club where trainer Robert Ortiz started working with her 22 years ago, as well as doing personal training sessions.
And, yes, she’s working on another couple of books. Odds are that those won’t take two decades to finish.
The interview with Alicia Doyle:
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