Christy Martin had already taken care of business the night of June 28, 1997, at the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas, stopping Andrea DeShong in seven rounds.
The female boxing pioneer had become the opening act for Mike Tyson, capturing the attention of the media and the public with her dramatic win over Deidre Gogarty on the pay-per-view undercard of the second Tyson-Frank Bruno fight on March 16, 1996.
The performance overshadowed Tyson’s third-round knockout of Bruno and landed Martin on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
“After the fight I went back up to my hotel room and had all these calls from the Leno Show, Good Morning America,” Martin said. “I thought someone was playing a joke on me. Someone from Showtime told me that my fight was the only one anyone was talking about.
I knew about Christy Martin. I saw her land what seemed to be the hardest punch I had ever witnessed in a first-round knockout of Erica Schmidlin on the Tyson-Buster Mathis undercard.
