The most successful female boxer in history was trapped in a violent, abusive marriage with her trainer and manager for 20 years
On November 23rd, 2010, Christy Martin lay on the floor of her bedroom in Apopka, Florida, feeling the blood drain from her body. Then 42 years old, she was the most successful female fighter in boxing history, widely credited with putting the women’s sport on the map. But she was no match for a man armed with both a knife and a gun. Her husband and trainer, Jim Martin, had stabbed her four times in the chest and hacked her left leg to the bone before leaving a bullet lodged three inches from her heart. Then he left her to die while he went to wash off her blood.
In Christy, the compelling new film about her extraordinary life, Sydney Sweeney gives a gut-wrenching performance as the felled champion in that moment. Audiences feel the full force of the shock, fear, isolation, and determination Martin experienced in that moment, staring up at the ceiling fan, summoning the strength to push herself up from the carpet.
“When I heard him turn the shower on, I knew: NOW is the time to get out,” Martin recalls. “But every time I tried to raise myself up, blood started squirting out of all these holes. I could feel the blood coming out of my body. So I lay back down and grabbed a shirt that was lying on the floor, tried to do compression to the bullet hole. Then I got up,” She grabbed what she thought were her car keys and staggered out into the dark.
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“But I’d picked up the wrong keys,” says the now 57-year-old. “So then I had to decide: go back in the house for the right keys or head to the road.” Choosing the road was the right call. Although the first car she attempted to flag down didn’t stop, the second did.
Talking today from her wood-panelled office in Florida, the coal miner’s daughter is a softer presence than older sports fans will remember. The permed and highlighted 80s mullet is now a delicately feathered silver. The trash-talking braggadocio has mellowed to a thoughtful drawl, which still carries the cadence of her small town upbringing in West Virginia. I can see why some of the male boxers she now promotes call her “mom”.
Her voice stays remarkably level as she relives the night of the attack, for which her now-ex husband was sentenced to 25 years in jail. But she admits she cannot keep sitting through screenings of the “very accurate” Christy. “It’s heavy,” she says. For Martin, the violence stretches back through 20 years of domestic abuse and coercive control: “far beyond what you’re seeing on the screen.”
Now 57, Martin campaigns for victims of domestic violence. Some of the male boxers Martin now promotes affectionately call her ‘mom’ (Photo: Black Bear)
Almost as appalling as the scene in which Jim Martin attempts to murder his wife are the scenes in which Christy’s mother makes it clear she would rather see her daughter trapped in an abusive marriage to a man than to come out as a lesbian. “After Jim Martin shot and stabbed me,” she tells me, “I thought my mother would change. I thought she would say that whatever makes me happy would be OK… But no. When I told her I was going to marry [former boxing rival] Lisa Holewyne, she said: ‘No you’re not.’ I said: ‘I spent 20 years trying to make you happy. Now I’m going to try and make myself happy!’”
Born Christy Salters in 1968, Martin was sexually abused by a family friend at the age of six. She knew she was a lesbian by the time she was 12. “But we’re talking about the early 80s,” she says. “No way anybody from a small town like mine was going to come out as openly gay in 1981, 1982. So I had boyfriends. I truly loved my first serious boyfriend, Chris. But then Sherry Lusk [her teammate on the high school basketball team] came along and I truly loved her more.” Salters and Lusk hid their relationship through high school.
Martin won a basketball scholarship to Concord College in Athens, West Virginia, where she studied education and began competing in Toughwoman contests, winning three consecutive titles. “I don’t think I realised it at the time, but a lot of crazy s**t had happened in my life, and boxing was my way of letting out all the anger and frustration,” she says. As a shy person, she found a power and a truth in the boxing ring that she couldn’t access in her real life. “I loved the performance of it.”
Sydney Sweeney (right) plays Martin, the first female boxer to sign with legendary promoter Don King, in ‘Christy’ (Photo: Jed Jacobsohn/AllSport)
Although Jim Martin was no believer in women’s boxing, he knew raw talent when he saw it, and he knew how to cash in on the vulnerable young woman. He dressed her in pale pink (“That wouldn’t have been my first choice of colour”) and helped her to become the first female boxer to sign with legendary promoter Don King in 1989. Martin went undefeated for nearly a decade, won the WBC world junior welterweight championship, and became the first female fighter to box on US national television.
“But Jim Martin was 25 years older than me, he was older than my dad,” sighs Martin. “He was a puppet master, a narcissist. He was able to convince everybody that he loved me, that he would protect me, that he was gonna do great things for me.” He told her if people found out she was gay, she’d have no chance of a public career. He encouraged her to trash-talk her opponents, using homophobic slurs. He regularly threatened to out her and ruin her if she left him – and that he would kill her.
When Martin married her trainer and manager Jim Martin, she was 25 years younger than him (Photo: Art SEITZ/Gamma-Rapho/Getty)
“He started saying that before I married him [when she was 22 and he was 47], but I thought it was a joke. I thought it was some stupid way of saying how much he loved me. But as time went on, I started to think it might be true, and in the end, I knew it was true.” Although this isn’t shown in the film, towards the end of their marriage, Jim Martin got his wife hooked on cocaine and would use the addiction as both carrot and stick – an extra line for an extra workout would leave her too scared to leave the house in case people noticed she was high.
After she got clean, Martin wrote and printed out a contract listing what she was prepared to offer him for her freedom. “I said: Just divorce me, I will take all these expenses, just leave me, just leave, get out of my life… that wasn’t received very well.”
Martin says the film ‘Christy’ is a ‘very accurate’ portrayal of her life (Photo: Eddy Chen)
Does she think Jim Martin – who died in prison last year – found it more acceptable, on some level, to get physical with her because she was a boxer? “No. I was wife number four.” And he had been violent with the others? “Yes. I didn’t know that until I was already married to him.”
I watched Christy with my 16-year-old son, who told me he spent much of the film “wanting to yell at her to hit Jim back, because she was so strong”. Martin shakes her head ruefully when I tell her this. “But women… we’re just not as strong as guys. Jim was a professional fighter. Even though he was 25 years older, he was pretty fit right up until the end.” She explains that: “Once it gets physical, you might get one good punch back. But they’re going to come back at you even harder for it, so it escalates into something worse than it would have been.”
Martin had been in touch with her high school girlfriend before deciding to leave her husband. She went home to tell him she was leaving, even though she knew this might get her killed. Why? “I just couldn’t run the rest of my life. I also didn’t want to put anyone else in danger.”
She closes her eyes as she recalls Jim Martin’s final, violent assault on her, which lasted over an hour. “First, he stabbed me. Then beat my head into the chest of drawers. Then he pistol-whipped me, beat the s**t out of me. At first, I didn’t care if I lived or died. Then a switch flipped and I thought: ‘not today.’ I told him, ‘Motherf**ker, you cannot kill me.’”
Amazingly, she returned to boxing within weeks of leaving the hospital. Although Jim Martin had convinced her that the boxing world would turn against her because of her sexuality, she received “a huge outpouring of support”. She married Lisa Holewyne in 2017.
These days, Martin campaigns for victims of domestic violence. “I think the one thing my story shows is that it can happen to anyone. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor; brown, black, white. It doesn’t matter what religion, race, or education you have. It doesn’t matter how strong you seem to be.” She credits watching stories on domestic violence on TV with prompting her to try and live with Jim Martin and hopes that Christy “helps people living in those situations – and the people around them – to mark the urgency. To just get out.” She hopes that watching this movie will “give people the strength to come out as their true selves, be honest with their friends, and feel comfortable in their own skin.”
‘Christy’ is out in cinemas today
