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Letter to the editor

Swing it, sister

Go on, call her a lightweight. She's actually lighter, a featherweight, but she still could kick your rear end. Other than a third world title, she really only wants one thing.

By JAY CRIDLIN
Published May 6, 2005

TEMPLE TERRACE - Let's start at the top. With the hair. Long, bulky strands of chocolate yarn dangling past her shoulders, looping into a loose pretzel the size of a child's fist just above the nape.

It's important to start at the top, because most fans of Chevelle Hallback don't always look that high. They might notice her four-year-old dreadlocks before she enters the ring, but their eyes always drift south, toward the area where her neck fans into a rolling landscape of musculature engulfing the rest of her body.

Shoulders like coconuts. Biceps like mangoes. These are the qualities people notice when you're a world champion female boxer, when you're 5 feet 5 and not that far from petite, if it weren't for that tank of a torso.

Hallback owns two championship belts, the Women's International Boxing Association's Junior Featherweight and its Super Featherweight, which she obtained in March with a 10-round decision over Emiko Raika in Tokyo.

She's 24-4-1, with 11 knockouts in the past eight years. That's the bottom line, the stat that tops her bio. There is her record, this is her gender, those are her muscles, and that is that.

But off the mat, she is most certainly a 33-year-old woman, an Army brat who hails from Plant City and trains in Ybor City. Boxing, her life's focus since age 24, enhances her character but doesn't define it.

"You do your thing inside that ring, but when you're outside that ring, you're still a woman, regardless," she says. "Even inside that ring, you're still a woman. It doesn't have anything to do with sex appeal, or being feminine, or anything like that. Yes, you do have a lot of women that are very tomboyish who box. And then you have a lot of women who are very feminine who box."

She leans in when she speaks, as she would in the ring. Her walk is distinct, part swagger, part shuffle, part dance. She's a tomboy, she says. But she'd prefer her mother not know she curses.

Hallback's tight forearms are wrapped in a web of bulging veins, but her hands are smooth and brown, her fingernails bright pink. Her fists pack a fury, but she has to protect those fingers.

"I'm very peculiar about my hands, my feet," she says. "I've got to make sure my hair's done. I'm a tomboy, but I'm still female."

She's a keyboardist. In high school, she was first-chair trumpet in both the marching and jazz bands, though she also tried drums, clarinet and alto sax. Now she owns a keyboard with all the effect buttons, dabbling in R&B or gospel when she's down in the dumps.

She has a 2-inch scar near the small of her back. She was ironing, and she left the room for just a minute and forgot to unplug the iron. Then she ran back in, and, well . . . these things happen when your walk is part swagger, part shuffle, part dance.

Her arms bear twin tattoos reading "Fists of Steel," her nickname. Her lower lip is pierced with a small silver stud. Go on, ask her why.

"What, you don't think I look sexy?"

She's messing with you. Kind of.

She loves to examine herself in the mirror, and she loves to have her picture taken. She knows how this sounds. She does not care. Her best feature? "My stomach is ripped." Two hundred crunches per workout will do that.

Her sense of style? T-shirts and active wear, mostly. Ecco. Enyce. Phat Farm. If you pin her down for a size, she'd have to guess medium, but she prefers to rock 'em large and loose. Labels don't design clothes to fit bodies like hers.

Fashion rule No. 1: Shirt's gotta match the shoes. Today it's white on white, a Scarface T-shirt with matching jeans and sneaks. That's her movie, right there. Gladiator, Alexander, Rocky I and II - all good, but they're no Scarface.

And for the record, not all female boxers love Million Dollar Baby.

"Were they giving a message that, if you're a female boxer, this is what would happen to you?" she said? "It just went off the deep end. The last fighting scene, that was garbage. That doesn't happen in real life boxing."

She knows whereof she speaks. Her second professional fight came in 1997 against Lucia Rijker, who played the Blue Bear, Million Dollar Baby's villain, and is a feared boxer in real life. She KO'd Hallback in five rounds.

Hallback is not a million-dollar baby. She might earn $30,000 for a prime-time bout. They're not all prime-time bouts.

She drives a green Honda Civic with a yellow air freshener, and during the day she makes sales calls to north Texas for Coca-Cola from her home near Temple Terrace. She'll box for three, maybe four more years, then find a job counseling disturbed and disabled kids. She'd love to be a psychiatrist, to have people lie on her couch and spill their problems. Just be yourself, she'd tell them.

She's laid a few guys on their backs during sparring rounds. Her punches feel like tight spiral passes from 5 yards out, even through 2-inch-thick training mitts. You can hear her fists whish by, but you can't see them coming.

"And that's a tap," says her publicist, Jeannette Smith.

Chevelle wants another belt, a third to round out her wardrobe. But here's what she really wants.

"I've been fighting since 1997, and I have never fought at home yet," she says. "I'm not even asking for a lot of money to fight at home. I just want to fight at home one time."

She'd take an undercard slot before a men's fight. But she allows herself to dream. She wants to be the main event, defending her two belts - as well as the one she has yet to win - at the USF SunDome or St. Pete Times Forum.

Her friends and family would be there. She'd see them in the stands before the fight, and they'd cheer as she pummeled her opponent, her dreadlocks bobbing.

Christy Martin. Laila Ali. Heck, even Lucia Rijker. Doesn't matter whom she'd face, so long as the other name on the marquee is hers.

Oh, right. That name. Chevelle. Yes, it came from a car, that revved-up, testosterone-fueled classic from the '60s and '70s. Her aunt owned and loved one, and her parents didn't object to the suggestion.

Chevelle was 10 before she knew she was named for a muscle car marketed mostly to men.

Cool, she thought.

- Jay Cridlin can be reached at 727 893-9866 or cridlin@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 5, 2005, 01:31:12]