The Rise and Fall of the Kwan Dynasty
It takes grit to become a champion. She conquered the amateur world, but will she become a force as a professional boxer?
Christina Kwan came out of the womb with closed fists. The way she tells it she has a lifelong habit of locking a target and charging forward with blinding ambition.
Duck. Turn. Keep your feet moving. Swing.
She likes to turn on an angle to confuse her opponents, who are usually surprised by the power of the blows behind her tiny frame. As an amateur, she jabbed her way to a world amateur and a U.S. national amateur championship in the 95-pound division in 2004. The belt for the latter award didn’t even fit around her waist. She has to wear it around her shoulders, said Christina, 25, through giggles from her home base of Las Vegas.
She was getting her hair braided for one of the most important fights of her life — her June 3 professional debut against Florida’s Valerie Rix (4-0) who she met for the first time at a press conference and, in the tradition of the sport, sized up.
“I say she is a worthy opponent,” said Christina with confidence radiating through the phone. A lot of boxers choose opponents who are lesser fighters to start their professional career, she said, but she’s never been one to take the easy way out.
“We’re going to bring credibility to women’s boxing,” said Christina before hanging up the phone to charge into the ring.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Two days later, the conversation took on a more somber mood.
“I was dropped with a left hook in the first round,” Christina said. “I got dropped with a left hook to my head.”
Pressing the Fight
Call it freshman jitters, but this has happened before. The other time Christina was dropped was during her first ever fight in 2002, but she was off balance.
This time Christina attributes the loss to a weight disparity. Her previous opponent dropped
out of the match forcing Christina’s management team to find a replacement in Rix, who is three weight classes apart from Christina.
“It didn’t go in my favor. I tried to punch with a much bigger girl.
“Her skills are not better than me had our weights been equal,” she added. “I went right after the girl. As soon as the bell rang I ran across. People told me later, ‘Christina, it looked like you wanted to kill her!’”
The first round is usually the time to feel out your opponent, notice quirks and weaknesses, but the clang of the bell set something off in Christina who immediately decided to press the fight.
Trainers say pressing the fight is like playing Russian roulette — sometimes it’s okay, sometimes you get shot.
“I’m a smart person, I understand what happened,” said Christina before announcing plans to spend time in California riding her bike on the beach to nurse some spiritual wounds.
Usually undercard fights don’t even make a blip on the media radar, but Christina’s debut caught the attention of many of the sports pundits mainly because of her relations with another Kwan.
“Michelle is my distant cousin,” she said about the ice skating champion. In college at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, someone asked Christina if the two were related. After mapping out her genealogy, she discovered determination and competitiveness indeed runs in the family.
“It turns out our families are from the same village,” said Christina who has only spoken to Michelle a few times.
But some boxing news sites find irony in the familial ties.
“So much for the Kwans taking over women’s boxing,” said doghouseboxing.com.
The loss, no matter how heartbreaking, didn’t stop fans from loving the boxer from Vancouver, including one champion.
“Roberto Duran came to see me after the fight. He said, ‘Christina, don’t cry. You’re a smarter fighter than that.’”
The School Girl Always Comes Through
Smarter is an understatement. In a sport where athletes usually eschew education for a chance to get pummeled, Christina graduated from UNLV cum laude with a degree in marketing which she parlayed into a masters in the same subject because “marketing is the key to life; everything is marketing.”
“I loved going to school, it’s not a chore for me,” she said about the smarts that earned her the nickname the “School Girl.” She packs her schedule with speaking engagements at local schools where she talks about the importance of education, winning over her youngest fans.
“Even the boys say, ‘Wow, this girl is kicking butt in the ring!’”
On the Top Rank, Inc. Web site, Christina’s coy smile is the sole representation of women and Asian Pacific Americans for the promotions company — and perhaps the sport at large.
And she’s more than happy to wear her ethnicity on her sleeve.
“More than being a female boxer, I consider myself a Chinese boxer,” said Christina, who works with the Chinese clientele as a marketing executive at Wynn Las Vegas. “I always thought I had to compete in the corporate world with my ethnicity against me. Now it’s lucrative to be Chinese.
“A lot of Asian kids today are pressured to be American, but I really want to go back to my roots and embrace being Chinese.”
Her dream a few years ago was to compete for the U.S. in the Beijing Olympics, but the sport didn’t make the cut, so she made the decision to go pro.
Then came that dreaded left hook.
“Hopefully [Christina] does not get discouraged by such a disappointing pro debut and will be able to learn from this first fight she had as a pro,” said Sue “TL” Fox, a former boxer turned Oregon police officer who also runs womenboxing.com.
“It’s added to my character,” Christina said gamely giving credit to family and team members who have supported her, especially trainer Vinny Perozzi who Christina has been married to for seven and one-half years.
“He’s my rock,” she said softly. “My whole team is there for me regardless of what happens. Regardless.”
Her next turn at the ring is set for Aug. 12 in the undercard match of the Hasim Rahman-Oleg Maskaev main event where the “School Girl” will return with a vengeance to do what she does best — set the curve.
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