In this age of unusual boxing matches involving celebrities and retired Hall of Famers, there was a novelty bout (of sorts) that took place roughly a year ago that, had it streamed live on Netflix, might have attracted as many eyeballs as Jake Paul-Mike Tyson.
Sure, the reasons some people would have tuned in would have been impure — but that was true of Paul-Tyson too.
In any case, you’d better believe a sizeable audience would have been parked in front of the TV if there had been proper publicity around the very real sparring session between Christy Martin and Sydney Sweeney.
To quote the most iconic Hollywood-adjacent sparring session prior to this one: Ding. Ding.
“We can’t give you all the details,” Sweeney said coyly, with Martin by her side, on a call last weekend.
The exchange of leather, “a light sparring session,” in Sweeney’s words, between Martin, now 57, and Sweeney, not quite half her age at 28, took place on the North Carolina set of the movie Christy, set for wide theatrical release on November 7. In case you haven’t heard, Sweeney portrays the one-time women’s boxing sensation and International Boxing Hall of Famer in the biopic directed by David Michod.
So when the film crew stood on all sides of the ring, cheering and hollering as Martin and Sweeney went at it, they were in a sense watching Christy Martin-Christy Martin.
“I was getting hit with my own combinations,” Martin reflected, crediting Sweeney with doing a convincing job learning to fight like her.
“I was like, ‘Christy, these are your techniques’,” Sweeney replied.
There’s an obvious affection between the two of them — Sweeney in awe of the brave woman whose story she gets to tell, Martin honored to have her story brought to life through such a committed performance.
That commitment began well before filming started. Sweeney’s physical transformation has been the most reported-upon story surrounding this movie, especially since set photos leaked. She says she put on 35lbs for the role – no small feat on a 5ft3ins frame.
“For about two-and-a-half months [before filming began], I would weight train in the morning for an hour, box three hours in the middle of the day, and then another hour of weight training at night,” said Sweeney, who worked with Grant Roberts (who trained Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby) to shape her body and Matt Baiamonte to hone her boxing technique. “Putting on the weight was hard, especially once I added in the boxing, because it’s such a high cardio workout. I started losing the weight once I started upping my boxing time. I had to find that balance and just continually pound more and more protein shakes.”
When the word first got out that Sweeney — sex symbol star of Euphoria, among other roles — was going to play Martin, it was met with much head-scratching. To boxing fans who know what “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” looked like in her fighting prime, the physical resemblance was just about nonexistent.
But sure enough, Sweeney pulled it off. Not to a Val-Kilmer-in-The-Doors degree, where you have to pause when looking at a still frame to determine whether it’s Jim Morrison or the actor. But she became Martin enough that, as the movie wore on, I forgot I was looking at Sweeney and began thinking of her as the famous fighter she was portraying.
For point of comparison, that was not the case with the last biopic I saw before this, in which Jeremy Allen White played Bruce Springsteen. No knock on White’s acting, but never was my mind tricked into thinking I was looking at Bruce.
“I dive into my characters,” Sweeney said, “and having Christy as a real person who was with me by my side during all of it changes the entire process, and helps immensely, and was a gift. When I have that kind of access, but then also just a plethora of material to study as well, I feel like when I go into it I lose myself completely and I don’t even remember half the time what I’m doing… I feel free and I become somebody else.”
As for the boxing side of the performance, Sweeney had a bit of a head start, in that at age 12 she began learning kickboxing and MMA.
“Of course boxing is different than MMA – I had to relearn stances and technique,” Sweeney pointed out. “And then Christy has her own unique way of fighting as well. So I completely studied and analyzed all of her fights. Every fight in the movie is an exact replica of her real fight, so it’s not like we completely made up choreography. We actually took from her real fights and took all the combinations and inserted them into the [movie] fights.”
Sweeney, who revealed in another recent press appearance that she got bloody noses and even a concussion shooting the fight scenes, noted that she worked especially hard on her left hook, Martin’s signature punch.
When the cameras rolled, Martin was impressed.
“She’s done [other] combat sports, but she only did boxing for, like she said, two-and-a-half, three months,” Martin said. “That’s a short amount of time. I did it for my whole life and it took me that long to learn to throw those punches.”
As hard as she trained and as credible as she became firing off hooks and crosses, one presumes Sweeney will never actually jeopardize her assorted moneymakers by stepping into the ring for real. But if by some chance she chose to …
“I told her,” said Martin, the chief executive of Christy Martin Promotions, “I have a promotional contract in my back pocket at all times. So when she decides to crawl in the ring, I got it.”
Boxing fans of a certain age surely remember the fight that made Martin famous – her bloody win over Deirdre Gogarty on the Tyson-Frank Bruno II undercard in March 1996. And boxing fans of that certain age will feel quite old when they are told that Sweeney was not born until 18 months after that fight.
With that in mind, it’s not terribly surprising to hear Sweeney say she’d never heard of the boxing icon before reading the movie script.
“I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know who she was,” Sweeney said. “When I first read it, I was like, how do I not know Christy’s story? And I knew that I had to be a part of it, in some capacity, of making sure that the world knew who Christy Martin was.
“I was inspired [by her story] every single day. I was inspired the moment I read the script and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I think that Christy’s story is going to unlock so much for so many people. I mean, she touches on so many different challenges in life and she overcame so much and she’s an amazing role model and advocate.”
The following sentence serves as a plot spoiler of a sort, but can there really be spoilers when it’s based on the true story of a public figure? In any case, the film tells the tale of the closeted Christy’s marriage to her 25-years-older trainer Jim Martin (played by Ben Foster), her emergence as the first bona fide women’s boxing star and her near-murder at the hands (or more accurately, the knife and gun) of her abusive husband.
It's a sports movie, of course. But it’s also a dark depiction of domestic violence, drug addiction and the pain of living a lie.
Martin said for some of the more serious scenes, she stayed away from the set because “I couldn’t let my heavy energy affect [Sweeney’s] work”.
I asked her what scene had the most emotional impact on her when she saw the final cut of the movie, and she singled out something uplifting rather than something traumatic.
“The scene that affects me the most is not the attack, or even with my mother, which, that affects me pretty seriously,” she said, referring to a heartbreaking scene in which Christy tells her mom of Jim’s abuses and is given no support. “[It’s] the scene where I leave the hospital and I come back to my gym and all of my team come back, and we come back to a hug… that’s the scene that I feel the most.”
It is indeed a powerful moment near the end of the film. All in all, Christy is an entertaining biopic, if one that suffers slightly from women’s boxing movies not being as novel anymore as they once were — leaving Christy feeling cliched in spots as it tries to tell a story that would feel like far-fetched fiction if you didn’t know it was true.
A couple of other random notes on the movie: first, it features some truly exquisite mullets and combovers, one of which caused me to laugh out loud. And second, Chad Coleman – yes, boxing-inclined “Cutty” from The Wire – perfectly captures Don King’s charm and ruthlessness.
Martin was the subject of a Netflix documentary in 2021, and in 2022 she turned her story into a book, written with Ron Borges, but she seems to appreciate that a feature film about her life takes it to a different level.
“It’s just now starting to really sink in to me,” Martin said, “and I think that I have a weight on my shoulders to continue to change people’s lives. I mean, I have to live up to it now… A lot of people are sending me positive, ‘You’re inspiring me’ messages. I can’t go backwards.”
“She's absolutely incredible,” Sweeney added of Martin, “and knowing how special of a human being she is, every single day I felt that. And every single day I felt the importance of telling her story.”
Every single day, that is, except maybe the one when she was preoccupied with trying to land Christy Martin’s left hooks on Christy Martin herself.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
