Ann Wolfe: “James is beatable—and everybody else is. (Great Article)

“It’s not that I have a love-hate relationship for boxing. I just hate the way other people treat something that is near and dear to me that changed my life…” “When I finish with you, you’re going to be a ****ing fighting machine.”—Jack Blackburn to Joe Louis Before I spoke with Ann Wolfe, I was bracing myself for the Big Bad Wolfe that HBO plays to the hilt, the volcanic trainer, the anger management candidate, the ticking time bomb who is ready to blow at a moment’s notice. Yet that was not the case. I found Wolfe to be gracious, thoughtful, attentive and considerate, both easy to talk to and understand. And the way she uses language is almost Faulknerian, full of southern cadences, oblique asides, and resonant homespun truths. The former eight-time women’s boxing champion and present-day trainer was born on Jan. 17, 1971 (the same birthday as Muhammad Ali). Wolfe was raised in Overlin, Louisiana, which is located about 35 miles from St. Charles. Her family was poor, dirt poor. There was no electricity or running water in the house she grew up in, and she was one six kids, three boys and three girls. “I never drunk a pop or soda water until I was almost 18,” Wolfe told me. “I never ain’t even had my own candy bar. If we got a candy bar, that was like most spectacular.” Because life was hardscrabble from day one, everybody had to work and work hard, whether it was clearing land, cutting wood, doing weed work, hauling water, hauling pinecones, or peeling crawfish. “We used to get 80 cent a pound,” recalled Wolfe. “For years and years and years I peeled crawfish to make extra money. That’s how I began to learn how to work. After attending elementary school from the first through sixth grades, Wolfe dropped out in the seventh grade. It wasn’t that she didn’t wanted to learn, she values education and pushes all the kids in her gym to finish high school and go college, but her mother was sick and they didn’t have any food. She had no choice but to quit school, to earn money and take care of her mom. Those who have met her in person know that Ann Wolfe is larger than life: “In my family, everybody grows big early. When I was 13, 14 years old, I was five-nine and I wore about size 14 girl’s shoe. Everybody thought I was going to be some kind of giant. In our family, some of the boys were six-seven, six-eight. But I didn’t grow no more.” Despite the aching poverty, maybe because of the aching poverty, Ann’s mother made sure she raised her children right. She saw to it that they went to church every day, and four-letter words weren’t permitted in her house. “I had a good, caring, loving mother,” Wolfe said. “My mother believed if you don’t work, if you spare the rod, you spoil the child. So that’s how I grew up, in a loving home that was strict, and you had morals and values that you didn’t break regardless. You didn’t talk back to your parents. You don’t talk back to older people. Point blank. You’d probably think you’d die if you talked back to those people. I never talked back to my mother one time. My mother never abused me. I never seen her curse, or even put on a pair of pants. “On the other hand, my daddy was hell raiser who did all kinds of crazy ****.” Wolfe’s mother died of cancer when Ann was 18. It devastated the household, no less than it devastated Ann Wolfe. “And you know what, the messed up part about the whole situation? My mama died because we didn’t have insurance. When she got sick, they were like it had to be an emergency in order for us to see you. But the time it got to be an emergency, she was Stage 4 cancer.” Wolfe paused. “That’s just the way life is,” she said philosophically or with resignation. “I wasn’t raised like that,” she said, alluding to the medical establishment’s indifference to her mother’s plight. “I was raised where you had to get your ass up and get to work. There wasn’t no place. There wasn’t no this or that. You had a family. You had pride in yourself. You didn’t ask for nothing, you didn’t take nothing. We didn’t bring something home. We brung other people home. We tried to help people. My mother would help other people in the community when we hardly had nothing at all for ourselves. But she taught us how to work so you’re gonna get more, you’re gonna accomplish more. Have your hand open to give and on to receive. That’s what I put back in the gym, because I think every kid, every individual, has an opportunity to make something out of their lives.” Despite being raised right, her mother’s death and her daddy’s DNA conspired with the lure of the street to snag Ann Wolfe. People in desperate straits often do desperate things. It sometimes seems as though it’s fated, preordained, a master plan concocted by the masters of the universe. “I was like a loose cannon. I was in the streets and looking for a fight. I was selling crack and marijuana,” Wolfe admitted, but pointed out that despite some of what has been written, “I never used drugs in my life.” Predictably, she got caught and busted. The year was 1990. After being booked, jailed and hauled before a judge, Ann Wolfe pleaded no contest and served nine months in a Florida prison. “Once my mom died, I went to jail. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. I could write my name, but I couldn’t read at all. So what y’all could I do? When I got out of jail I started selling drugs once again. And this lady came and she was gonna give me her baby. She said, ‘If you give me a piece of rock cocaine, I’ll let you take my baby and hold my baby until I get back.’ I was like, this got be some pretty powerful **** if that’s gonna make you leave your kid here, and that’s when I decided I would never sell drugs ever again in my life, and that’s when I stopped.” There’s something incredibly decent and inherently principled about Ann Wolfe. She may have broken the law, people do it all the time, rich and poor alike, and she did what she felt she needed to do to in order to survive. “And then I was like, how am I gonna work? And then like a month after I got out of jail, my daddy got shot 13 times. And I still went about my life. Then my oldest brother my mom raised got killed. He tried to rob a store in Texas and got shot.” At 22 Wolfe was homeless with two kids. She needed a fresh start, needed to turn the page, and moved to Austin, Texas. “When I first came to Austin, because I was homeless, I started working there jobs where you work that all day and then get paid. I used to work those jobs where they give me a sledgehammer to tear down some buildings. I was so angry, and I worked so hard because I just felt that whatever like I did to get some money to get paid, I would give a 100 percent. I didn’t slack. I tore down a whole building with a sledgehammer in one night and people forgot about that’s a woman. They forgot about it. They was like, that person over there is gonna work, she’ll put in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. And after that first day, I was just a bad something else. That’s just how I was.” Backbreaking hard work is a theme that runs through Wolfe’s life. There was no boxing, at least not yet, but that no pain/no gain ethos was about to be put to the test. Wolfe and her two kids often took refuge in the emergency room at University Medical Center Brockenridge in Austin. The waiting room was open through the night, and while her children slept, Ann passed the time watching TV. One night she saw two women on TV boxing. She asked an old woman sitting next to her if they got paid for doing that. The woman turned to Ann and said, “Baby, if it’s on TV, they getting paid for it.”