By Phil Rogers
OF all the battles Michele Aboro has faced in life, only some have been conducted inside a boxing ring. Now fifty-six years old and residing in Shanghai, China, the undefeated former world champion and trailblazer for the women’s sport has had to conquer sexism, bigotry and cancer to get where she is today. Her key to victory? Refusing to accept “no” for an answer.
“I was able to achieve things that, if I’d said it at the time, people would’ve said I was off my rocker,” she tells Boxing News. “Totally crazy. But they actually happened. And I did have to hustle and go to all these different countries to be able to make it happen. But I think girls back in the day, you had to. You couldn’t rely on just what was happening in front of you. You needed to make things happen.”
A proud South Londoner, Aboro grew up surrounded by amateur boxing clubs and naturally gravitated towards the mischievous mayhem of her male peers. Despite money being tight, it was an environment she cherishes when looking back, convinced the area’s warmth and camaraderie helped shaped her worldview to this day.
“I come from a big family. There’s six of us. My mum brought us up alone. It wasn’t all silver spoons, you know? I remember it was always very community orientated. There was always people around. We could always knock on the neighbour’s door if mum wasn’t around and my big sister, and it was always that really close community feeling that I really have a thing about, even today,” she recalls.
A self-described “naughty kid” with “ants in my pants”, she soon discovered her heroes via fights recounted from family and on the television screen every Sunday. Joe Louis, Ali, and Jack Johnson were all studied and revered, proud black men who the young Aboro idolised long before a glove had even been laced up. But putting her passion into practice meant facing her first major barrier. Boxing, even training, was banned for women in England right up until 1996. Aboro’s compulsion to fight, however, would not be discouraged.
“I think it was this feeling of being bigger than myself. That’s what fighting, when I looked at it, what it gave me. And it wasn’t fighting, in retrospect. I saw it as these individuals levitating to a place that maybe they could never have got to if they wasn’t able to hone such a skill. And it is a skill, at the end of the day. It is such a mental game. These individuals just put themselves in a place where, the good ones that is, were untouchable. That’s really what mesmerised me with boxing.”
Refusing to be dissuaded, Aboro was offered the chance to take up kickboxing by friends, Andre and Julian Howell (Dillian Whyte’s first trainer as a kickboxer). It was a move that led to huge success on a personal and professional level, whilst also feeding her devotion to her community.
“I wasn’t bad at the kickboxing. I retired having won five world titles as a kickboxer,” she says bashfully. “I fought some of the best kickboxers in the world, and in a very short period of time because while I was in England I was fighting for around about five or six years. It was just this whole nice affair going on where it wasn’t just about me. Actually, being in there I was fighting, I felt, for everybody. For my gym, for the people on my estate, to show who we were, where we came from.”
Still, the lure of the noble art remained. Aboro’s multiple successes as a kickboxer had taken her all over Europe and her reputation had filtered out into countries where women’s boxing was not only condoned, but celebrated. With England’s archaic attitude towards the women’s code remaining, a more welcoming environment awaited overseas.
“I used to have to lie because sometimes as a woman you couldn’t go into these boxing gyms. A lot of them didn’t want women to go in there. I was okay and I could box quite well. They didn’t ask me if I was a boy or a girl because I had long dreadlocks. I would just go in a big baggy top and just start training, pay my couple of pounds. So they didn’t question or ask and I would spar with the guys and I could hold my own with the guys. So I wasn’t seen, so to speak,” she recalls.
“I picked myself up and moved to Holland. I was at Sports Hall Jan Voss, which is one of the best kickboxing gyms in the world. They had some amazing kickboxing champions. I was training there when I got a call to go to Germany and become a sparring partner for Regina Halmich. So that’s how my boxing started to get picked up on a professional level.
“Up until then I’d had two or three boxing matches via me kickboxing and then going and having a boxing match. This is how women done it in the early days, so that they could actually be able to keep the momentum of fighting. So I went out there and I sparred with Regina, and I gave her a hell of a time. And so they said, “Do you want to have a contract?” That was with Universum Box Promotion.”
Finally, Aboro had arrived as a professional boxer, and with a promoter who had a stable of hungry young women eager for success. Yet banding together, cultivating a sense of camaraderie in a fight for gender equality, was never the goal for Peckham prospect. This wasn’t a protest movement for Aboro. She was there on her own terms to realise her potential and earn the respect of the boxing public. She was there to reach the top.
“For me, I was there to improve my boxing ability. It wasn’t a thing that we were, like, “Women together! We should push forward!” In our minds we were trying to be boxers and not female boxers. That was the main thing, to get rid of that ‘female’ thing in the front of it and just be a boxer. That was my trip. That was where I was going. This is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a professional boxer. And I wanted to show that in the ring that I could box, that I was a boxer and that I was a puncher too. And I wanted to show that side of myself.”
Just as she did with kickboxing, Aboro settled instantly into the noble art of prizefighting, travelling from her home in Holland to cities in Germany and Hungary as she built up an unbeaten record and an impressive record of stoppages. By the time she earned herself a shot at the vacant WIBF Super Bantamweight title in February 2000, she was 13-0, 9KOs.
In the opposing corner was Eva Jones Young, herself an impressive young fighter and a tricky southpaw. Aboro would need to be at her best if victory was to be hers, and she responded to the challenge with a punch perfect performance, commanding the ring over 10 rounds to reach the sport’s zenith.
“It was in Dusseldorf where I won my world championship in 2000. It was an amazing feeling because I fought a good girl. She was a former two-time world champion from the States, who’d been inducted into quite a few Hall of Fames. I think I shocked her, how strong I was for the weight and I was a good technical boxer. And it was a beautiful fight. I was training then with a Croatian trainer, a guy called Leonardo Pijetraj (now trainer and manager of Filip Hrgović). He trained Željko Mavrović (whose final opponent was Lennox Lewis). For me, it was a flawless performance. It was a really good fight.”
Yet where other fighters may have left the ring to a flurry of media appearances, sponsorship deals and celebrity endorsements, Aboro was to come up against another barrier. She had realised her dream, and had continued to successfully defend her world title, but she’d also dared to do it as an unapologetically working class, mixed race, openly gay woman. In doing so, she’d rattled the sensibilities of some bigoted-but-powerful people in the business. Another fight was brewing, this time in the messy world of tribunals and lawyers. It was one which would eventually take her out of the sport.
“I finished a fight and then went back to Holland. I was living in Holland but training in Germany, in Hamburg and Berlin, at the time. I was talking about my fight with my promoter and they got back to me and they said that the television company, ZDF, found me “not promotable”. I was openly gay, open about my sexuality, and they said that they didn’t find me promotable. I still had a contract with them so I started a court case against Universum Box Promotion which lasted seven years.”
The lengthy legal wranglings resulted in an unfamiliar defeat for Aboro, and left her career at a crossroads. Unclear as to where life would take her next she began working on the door of a concert hall in Amsterdam called The Paradiso. It was there, through a mixture of circumstance and good fortune, that an entirely new path emerged.
“I started doing stagehand work, first of all, and then I started to really get into live sound and bands and music. So, I went back to school and then I started studying it. And while I was studying it there was a band that was playing there. I’d done stage sound for them this night and I really got along with them. They were called Joan As Police Woman. And so she [lead singer, Joan Wasser] said to me, “Come and tour with us!” And I said, “But I’m a boxer! I’ve only been doing this a couple of months! You know, I’m really a boxer!” I actually toured with Joan for about eight years non-stop and toured with bands like Anthony & The Johnsons, Rufus Wainwright. Really great bands.”
Alongside this newfound career, Aboro had also found love. Her friendship with a fine art photographer in Holland, Masca Yuen, had blossomed into a relationship (they subsequently married). Offered a chance to travel together to China to work on a book looking at women in Asian culture, Aboro jumped at the chance. It was a decision that was to transform both their lives.
“I’ve arrived in the centre (of Shanghai) and it’s just a different metropolis. These people are amazing and the way they look at life and how they live life, I just fell in love with the place. I said to Masca, “Why don’t we open a gym over here?” Because, while I was there, I needed somewhere to train. I couldn’t find any way to train, or there would just be shabby places. I said to her: ‘There’s a great opening there. Maybe we could do some business. Open a gym and see what happens’.”
It took a year for Aboro to convince her wife to make the move but finally they committed everything to the move and took the plunge. “We kind of burned all of our bridges, sold everything so we couldn’t go back,” she says.
Just as this latest adventure was getting started, however, life was to throw another challenge her way, this time in the form of a stage three diagnosis of breast cancer. Already in a strange land, trying to learn a new language and set up another career in a country less familiar with the noble art, Aboro faced the diagnosis in typically defiant fashion.
“I just keep moving forward like a boxing match. You wanna go the 10 rounds and you wanna make sure you win at the end of it. I think my life philosophy is a bit like that,” she says.
“I found out in 2012 that I had breast cancer. So I was here and I was figuring out, should I stay or should I go back? How is it going to be out here if I’m going through chemo? You know, all this stuff. But luckily enough, I was in contact with some people and a friend of mine’s cousin had just opened the Cancer Centre here in Shanghai so I was able to get amazing care.”
After the all clear, she moved forward with her plans for the Aboro Academy in Shanghai. Initial moves to make it a pro gym had proved troublesome and difficult to make work financially. Instead, inspired by the community in South London that had sparked her initial love for the sport, she turned her gym into a hub to welcome people from all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, the Aboro Academy has become as much a philanthropic venture as a sporting one and a critical part of the local landscape.
“People can come in and we can spread the beauty of boxing,” Aboro says proudly.
“We have an amazing community here. We do a lot of fundraising, we work with a lot of charities, for kids with cancer charities, for kids that have heart problems, raising money, giving them heart operations. So, we do a lot of a lot of stuff here. I don’t know if we were a pro gym, would we actually be doing all of this.”
This is where Aboro remains today. Her days are long and remain arduous; training eager young fighters, running marathons for charity, educating local teenagers through boxing to keep them on the right track, and building the business for her family. It’s been a journey that’s required defiance, discipline and courage, all of which have led to a sense of deep serenity in this latest chapter of her life.
“People talk about destiny and everything’s written. Hell, no, they’re not written! You’re in charge of your destiny and your journey and you can make it what you want. There are some hard times, definitely, and not everything is easy. There’s been many times when I’ve wanted to quit. But I think what makes it sweeter is that you’re able to push through. Not for anybody else, as an inspiration or whatever, but just for yourself so that at the end of the day you can live with yourself.”