Behind her made-in-Taiwan shades, Ested's eyes look as if they're at the bottom of a deep, muddy pool. She seems robotic, almost zombielike - just as Lucia must be in her hotel room - though Ested listens to gospel music rather than Buddhist chants. I ask her how much she's making on the fight, and she says $4,000. "You know how much Lucia's making?" Melton demands suddenly, a greedy look on his face. "I don't know," I say, which is almost true, since I only just found out. (She's making $35,000.) Lucia refused to tell me, as did Stan Hoffman, her manager. I finally got the information from WIBF chairman Dennis Diaz.
"Yeah, you don't know," Melton says, giving me a look of disgust. Now I too am part of the conspiracy.
Shortly after 9 o'clock in the evening, Lucia enters the ring for the fourth fight on a card that will end with Lou Savarese's two-minute destruction of James "Buster" Douglas. The fight takes place in a giant bingo hall that, until yesterday, was filled with retirees. Now, with a ring at the center of it, bleachers along the sides, an American flag or two, "TVKO" banners and a fight crowd bused in from New York, it's got everything needed for a boxing match save genuine atmosphere. But then, as so often at contemporary sporting events, the live viewer is apt to feel like a second-class citizen. The important part of the audience is watching at home on pay-per-view.
Except for a brief glimpse of her at the weigh-in the day before, this is the first time I've seen Lucia in over a week. Then she was polite, charming and pleasant to be with. The Lucia Rijker who walks out of her dressing room in a strikingly sinister hooded black velvet robe is a different person altogether. Greased and impassive, her face looks flattened out, broadened into an assassin's mask. Inside her head, you feel, are nothing but voices, chants, instructions, orders, commands. In what is perhaps a bit of image-building gimmickry, a TVKO reporter tries to talk to her, but Lucia stares right past him. Roach answers the questions for her.
Ested is already in the ring, looking suddenly slight next to Lucia, who has now taken off her robe and is strutting around in front of Ested, staring her down, psyching her out, taking control of the ring before the fight's even started. Her mood is so powerfully somber it's almost religious, and given the amount of meditation she's been doing, it probably is. She casts a spell of astonishing gloom. Next to Ested's, her arms look swollen and massive; with her mouthpiece in, her upper lip protrudes like an ape's. This is Lucia the fighter, Lucia the stalker, Lucia the killer, and it's not a pretty sight. Joyce Carol Oates once described boxing as the negation of the feminine in man; what the audience is confronted with now is the negation of the feminine in woman. continue
