The Australian Commonwealth Games team could do with a good lawyer at the moment, but one of its best legal minds is too busy getting into fights. Legal ones, that is.
In the physical combat sports, it was a black Wednesday for Australia. Its wrestlers were flung and its boxers punched out of their respective competitions, until late in the afternoon the remarkable Shelley Watts burrowed into the ring, into her opponent, and into the semi-finals of the women’s lightweight division.
A final-year law student at Southern Cross University, Watts deferred her degree to try for the Commonwealth Games team. Not only has she made it, but she has defeated the lightweight favourite, England’s Natasha Jonas, and, in Wednesday’s quarter final, made short work of Isabelle Ratna from Mauritius.
The stocky, power-packed Watts is a different shape from the mostly rangy, loose-limbed female boxers. She propelled that compactness into a fierce, aggressive inside attack on Ratna, stunning her to two standing counts in the first round and forcing a TKO in the second. With a television camera in the Australian corner, Watt’s coach Kevin Smith asked her if she wanted to tell Australia what she was going to do. Watts eyed the lens and said, ‘I’m going to bring the gold medal back for everyone in Australia, and for me too. I love you.’
She certainly believes she will win, and not many could be prepared to argue. ‘I’m buzzing at the moment,’ she said after her win. ‘I knew [fighting Jonas] was going to be hard, and it was hard to bring myself down from that win. Each boxer’s different, that’s what I love about boxing. It doesn’t matter about world rankings, it’s only what you do on that day.’
A cult figure in the women’s boxing community, fighting in a specially-made skirt rather than shorts because ‘it’s comfier for me’, Watts has had to ‘stop checking my Facebook because it’s got overwhelming’. She has only been boxing for four years, since the sport has been legal in Australia. Originally from Laurieton near Port Macquarie on the NSW mid-north coast, she was studying law and exercise science at SCU in Lismore when she hurt her knee playing touch football and soccer. While recuperating, she went to the gym to help a friend, who introduced her to Arthur Maloney, the Goonellabah boxing legend and veteran of Les McNabb’s travelling north coast tent-boxing circus. Coincidentally, it was the year women’s boxing was legalised in NSW. Maloney recognised Watts’ talent and she developed rapidly, soon gaining extra attention from the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra.
Australian head coach Don Abnett was emotional after Watts’s quarter-final win. ‘It’s pretty special for me, because Arthur Maloney was also my first coach. I was from Casino and travelled to Lismore three nights a week. So we go back a long way.’
Watts’s gift, Abnett said, was her ‘ability to change her range to all heights and sizes, depending on her opponent’. She used to have ‘more of a crouch-down style’, he said, ‘but is more upright now’, to counteract what is often a height disadvantage. She is set to become the poster girl of Australian women’s boxing.
‘I don’t think women’s boxing is a novelty anymore,’ Watts said. ‘When I started four years ago, the numbers were a lot smaller …but now every single state and country I’ve fought in, they’ve been more than welcoming of women boxing. I hope I’m a motivation for young girls who want to do it.’
She could have motivated her teammates on a poor day that started with welterweight Daniel Lewis being ruled out after his face was cut by an opponent’s elbow in his earlier round, and soon got worse. Wrestlers Deon Swart, Rupinder Kaur and Carissa Holland were out of their events before lunch, and heavyweight boxer Jai Opetaia showed more zest running out of the stadium than he had shown during a listless defeat by Nigeria’s Efetobor Apochi. Women’s flyweight Kristy Harris went out to Canadian Mandy Bujold, perhaps mercifully being spared the prospect of a semi-final against England’s favourite Nicola Adams.
It was ‘disheartening’ hearing the other results while she was warming up, Watts said, ‘but I was preparing for myself. As sad as I felt for the others, I had to think about my own performance. The entire team set a goal to bring some medals back for Australia.’ Now it is down to her.
Success will not lead to her turning professional, she said. ‘One day I’ll be 70 years old and a criminal barrister in Sydney and I’ll love my life then. While I’m young, I’ll enjoy this ride and take it as far as I can take it.’ She decided she wanted to be a lawyer when she was 11 – a decade before she had even heard of women’s boxing. Initially, she said, her legal ambitions were ‘all about prosecution. I didn’t want to defend naughty people. But I’ve changed my mind a little’.
Which might come in just as handy, in Glasgow, as her boxing.
