Sweeney, to her credit, appears to have taken all of this on the chin (you guys can all judge her if you want, but she doesn’t care, she has never, ever been happier!!!!). Her Reel, you see, cuts suddenly to Joey Valence & Brae-backed clips of her in a Rocky-Balboa-style training montage. The only gymnasiums I’ve ever spent extended periods of time in are the ones in Pompeii and Ephesus, so I cannot describe the training routine she’s doing for you in much detail; suffice to say, the vibe is very much “the Grinch lifting a sleigh over his head meets Million Dollar Baby.” At one point, she flips over a tire so large I can only assume it was ripped from a US Army vehicle left over from Desert Storm. In another, she hangs upside down on a machine I’m 72% sure Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele shagged on in Fifty Shades Darker.
To be clear, this isn’t pure, sweaty masochism on Sweeney’s part; it’s some form of method acting (not that the two are mutually exclusive). Sweeney is due to play Christy Martin—whose triumphant matches were largely responsible for taking female boxing mainstream—in David Michôd’s biopic of the Women’s International Boxing Federation champion next year. A coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who began doing Toughwoman contests in the ’80s, Christy was the first woman to sign with Don King (the promoter behind Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle), defeating Deirdre Gogarty in a pay-per-view match that overshadowed Mike Tyson v. Bruno II at the MGM Grand. When she fronted Sports Illustrated in 1996 with the cover line “The Lady is a Champ,” the issue sold out around the world.
This being a your-body-my-choice world, though, her reputation today is irrevocably bound up with the abuse she suffered at the hands of her former partner. In 2010, Christy nearly died when her then husband and trainer, Jim Martin, stabbed her repeatedly before shooting her in the chest with her own pink-handled nine-millimeter Glock. Jim had married Christy two decades earlier despite knowing, from the jump, that she identified as a lesbian. As she writes in her memoir, Fighting for Survival, Jim—who was 25 years her senior—frequently used her homosexuality to control her, threatening to “expose” her “real” identity to the public, before turning homicidal when she decided to leave him for another woman in her 40s. Christy miraculously survived his attack—despite having a punctured lung and a bullet lodged in her heart—with Jim sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted second-degree murder. She’s now married to fellow professional boxer Lisa Holewyne, having retired in 2012 before being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
